- Do not be deceived. Apparently, homosexuals are the only Americans left who want to get married.Makena G / Love Photos / CC BY-NC-ND
It’s funny, in a way, that we are wasting so much psychic energy debating gay marriage.
For a first thing, marriage is falling apart. The welfare state has made unmarried child-rearing financially attractive to women at the same time that feminism (the other red meat) has made marriage and fatherhood completely unattractive to marriage-age men. Apparently, homosexuals are the only Americans left who want to get married.
And for a second thing, gay marriage is not the problem, not at all. As I said last December and echoed yesterday, the immediate push for gay marriage is simply rent-seeking, while the long-run objective — as with Big Red Feminism — is to undermine the family as a redoubt against the über-state. The true problem with marriage is that the long-run is here: The family has been all but completely destroyed.
Here’s some good news: This won’t last. The family as a private social structure is universal to human civilizations.
Here’s some bad news: The most likely impetus to the formation of new family structures will be the collapse of the welfare state.
Here’s the best news: Absolutely none of this can be regulated by thugs in black robes.
The welfare state will fail in due course. When it does, there are a great many full-time dependents now living on the kleptocracy’s largesse who will be left high and dry. Many of those people will starve to death — expressing in their deaths the inestimable mercy of Marxism — and the survivors will form social structures — voluntarily, privately, spontaneously — to serve as survival machines.
And this is what the family is, at its essence. Man and woman? Okay. Love and sex? Yes, please. Kids? Without ’em, a traditional marriage is more like a long date. But what matters is the survival machine — the shared investment in the family, taking shared risks in the pursuit of shared rewards. This is why it’s still a family when both parents are the same sex, when the only adult is a grey-haired abuelita in a black shawl, when the family is composed of the two older kids doing their best to raise the young ones. The family is the fundamental survival machine of human civilization, and it finds ways of expressing itself.
The other source of comedy in the gay marriage debate is the opposition, whose arguments consist of: 1. Tradition, 2. Fashion, and 3. Ew! The hysterical slippery slopes always lead to polygamy and bestiality. I’m pretty sure cows won’t have standing to sue for spousal maintenance, so bestiality seems a stretch. But what rational objection can you offer against plural marriage? The participants might be hurt — which subjunctive quibble presents no distinction from traditional marriage — but in what way are uninvolved third parties able to declare themselves to be injured?
They can’t, can they? In fact, there are many underground plural marriages in the United States right now, with zero reports of spontaneous injuries to dirty-minded busy-bodies. Above-ground polygamous marriages are in our future, if only because more-traditional marriages will not be practical for many survivors of the collapse of the welfare state.
Here’s one big group of winners, though: Hard-working but socially-awkward guys who can hold onto a job, save money and fix things will be in huge demand — by all those single-mothers left slurping at the empty air when Big Mother’s fat teats dry up. This will be nothing more than a reversion to the norm — the welfare system exists to supplant fathers and family court exists to make sure they stay supplanted — but it will be an overnight inversion of sexual market value for both men and women: The kind of guy who can’t even get laughed at now will be loved, valued, respected and admired when he is all that stands between his family and the harsh, cruel world.
I expect groups of single-mother-headed families to merge into amalgamated clans. Sadly, the farm-subsidy component of the welfare state has gifted way too many unmarried mothers with way too much food. If there will be a shortage of marriageable middle-class men, after the deluge, there is likely to be a huge surplus to way-too-marriageable moms. I expect some of these ladies to marry each other — not for sex and love, necessarily or primarily, but to create a better survival machine for their children. In a family with three mothers, two can work outside the home while the third maintains the household and attends to all of the kids.
I could see that kind of structure working the other way, too: Five or six hard-working guys married to one knock-out queen bee. Men who are born with the need to dominate other people could never live with a family like this, but guys who are at home in their own skins might be able to work out the jealousy issues. The upside for her? Six providers are better than one. The upside for her husbands: A lifelong — even if shared — relationship with a woman far more attractive than any one of them might appeal to on his own.
Would marriages like these be legal? Not as a matter of family law. But omitting the rent-seeking benefits married people get by robbing their unmarried neighbors, there is nothing about social structures like these that could not be created by contract.
We don’t draft marriage contracts now — both because the state has hijacked this business and because we are all too fucking stupid to READ THE FINE PRINT! — but there is nothing that would prevent you and your adult friends from going down to a lawyer’s office to have him compose a contract outlining each spouse’s rights and obligations, with disposition of assets and custody of children upon dissolution spelled out in advance. If traditional marriages were handled this way now, there would be half as many weddings and almost no divorces — which just by itself is an excellent argument for getting the state out of the marriage and family business.
The traditional family as a survival machine for mom, dad and the kids is all but destroyed. The taxes needed to pay welfare moms to sit at home eating sugar-coated white flour require wealthier moms to work outside the home, paying other, less-wealthy working moms to raise their children. The insane female-centric balance of power imposed by the family court system assures that no normal man can ever recover from divorce, with the result that fewer and fewer men are willing to take the chance on marriage. Children grow up without fathers, without manners, without an education and without the values they will need to succeed in the free market.
The state is the worst possible determinant of what is and is not a family. Even assuming the best of motivations on the part of statists — an assumption I do not make — the absence of a shared interest in the future consequences of present choices assures that family structures imposed from the top down must fail — as the traditional family is now doing. The best thing that could happen, when the welfare state’s Wall Street house of cards comes crashing down, would be for the family court system to go down with it. The state cannot do anything to families but wreck them. We will all be better off when it stops.
When will all this come to be? Hide and watch. But here is the best news I have to bring you: No matter how things work out, almost nothing that happens will be controlled by elderly thugs hiding a vast arsenal of deadly weapons under their priestly black robes.
Thugs bellow. Thugs sputter. Thugs rage. But thugs are impotent. They are powerless without the potency they vampire from you. The family will endure. Human beings cannot live together without it. But happy, productive, well-functioning families are already quite a bit weirder than the ruling class dares to contemplate — and the strangeness is but barely begun…
