Freedom From the Old Ball & Chain
September/October 2008 Issue | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith&Culture
By Rebecca Ryskind Teti
Most of us practice the traditional American virtue of minding our own business. But in the defense of marriage against those who want to redefine it — whether they be polygamists in Texas or homosexual activists in California — we should make an exception.
After all, one-man, one-woman mo nogamous marriage is more than an anomaly of religion. It is the foundation of the political principle that all men are created equal. Let me explain.
The Church has long taught that the family is the building block of society, but this isn’t divine revelation, it’s a historically observable fact. We humans extrapolate our government arrangements from our domestic ones. That’s why anyone who’s ever wanted to understand — or radically change — a political culture has always started from the family. Plato and Aristotle started there. So did Rousseau and Marx.
No polygamous society has ever had any notion of the equal dignity of each human person, because the dynamic of polygamy is like that of a pride of lions. With multiple “wives” available, no man ever goes off the market. He sees all women as his potential lovers and all men as his sexual rivals. A winner-take-all atmosphere prevails, with weaker men (and teenage sons) driven off, much as an alpha lion drives off other males, keeping the harem to himself.
The wives in such an arrangement are supremely vulnerable because they’re interchangeable and replaceable. Disappoint me, Woman, and I’ll favor another “wife.”
Doubt this? Find a photo of the women from that polygamous compound in Texas. They were all “bent to the contour of apology,” to paraphrase a favorite novelist.
Monogamous marriage stabilizes sexual competition, making the mutual trust on which civic life is built possible.
Heterosexual marriage also extends the principle of equality to women.
Behind the apparently arbitrary “rule” that a man must marry a woman before bedding her lies the deeper message that a woman is precious. She is a person worth a lifetime commitment of love and service, not an object to be used. A young woman hearing that she must “save herself” for one man learns simultaneously that a man is a person whose heart isn’t to be toyed with.
The lived experience of marriage teaches each spouse — and the children who grow up in their home — in a practical way to respect the gifts and talents of the other sex. In an unspoken way, the interior logic of traditional marriage transmits to its children a set of powerfully embedded assumptions: that all persons have equal dignity, that both sexes have unique gifts to be treasured, and that individuals often must sacrifice their own desires for the common good. Marriage’s bottom line: “We are each precious. We don’t treat people like anything less.”
This is the culture created by marriage. It happens to be the only one strong enough on which to build a republic — one where the people govern themselves. And it’s strong enough to absorb exceptions from the norm (those who never marry, widows, even the pregnant out of wedlock and sexual rebels), so long as the norm persists.
Does it seem hysterical to suggest that the erosion of marriage will eventually erode the respect for individual liberty that makes self-government possible? History is laden with free peoples who became so corrupt that tyranny became the only means of restoring order.
The effects of the destruction of marriage may not be immediate. A healthy culture can withstand upheavals when they’re short-lived, but we permanently change the interior logic of marriage at our peril.
If marriage is nothing more than an expression of desire and affection, then people are not persons, but objects of desire. Go ahead and treat them as you like. Which, pursued to its utmost, is another way of saying, “Might makes right.”
The equal dignity of each human person is the internal logic of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. It’s a pre-condition for self-government, and no society has ever been free without it.
Who are we to judge what marriage is? Free people who intend to remain so.
Rebecca Ryskind Teti is
Faith & Family’s contributing editor.
What We’re Watching
The Fighting Sullivans : The family that captured the hearts of America during World War II.
Oklahoma! : Real men protect their purity, with song and dance numbers.
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