By DONALD DeMARCO
A high school principal, let us imagine, who is thoroughly devoted to political correctness, summoned the school’s chess coach into his office. In that venue the following conversation took place.
P: I think it is time to bring the game of chess into the 21st century.
C: But chess is a timeless game. It goes back to the sixth century. What are you talking about?
P: Chess no longer fits into modern-day standards. The king represents patriarchy and male dominance. The queen perpetuates a female stereotype. The bishops stand for clericalism, while the knights and castles are simply medieval. We want chess to be egalitarian as well as up-to-date, a game in which each piece starts out on an even playing field. Each piece should have exactly the same maneuverability as the pawn. Chess has needed a major facelift for some time. Now is the time to do it. I am counting on you.
C: Are you crazy? You don’t want to give chess a facelift. You want to destroy it. You are not, as you say, “bringing it into the 21st century.” You’re reducing it to checkers! If you are so enamored with egalitarianism, why don’t you and your faculty abandon your lofty positions and enroll as students? This, of course, would reduce education to gossip. I’m sure you would like that. You will excuse me. I am off to instruct my chess students on the Sicilian Defense (the door slams shut as the coach exits).
Now, let us return to a dismantling that is ongoing, one that requires only our powers of observation and not flights of our imagination. Can we modernize marriage, make it egalitarian, and bring it into the 21st century, without destroying it? Marriage, which was instituted much earlier than the sixth century, features five special properties that are currently being unraveled.
In its truest sense, marriage is intimate, indissoluble, integral, identifying, and invocatory. In the current assault on marriage, contraception, sterilization, and pornography violate its intimate nature. Divorce and infidelity contradict its indissoluble character. Assorted reproductive technologies, ranging from in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination to surrogacy, confuse the identities of mother and father, wife and husband. Abortion, by destroying the child conceived in marriage, is a rejection of its integrity.
Finally, the exclusion of God, so common in the contemporary world, removes the invocatory dimension of marriage. God is no longer invoked as Creator and as a source of abundant blessings.
These various assaults on the very nature of marriage do not modernize it, liberalize it, or bring it into the 21st century. They, in fact, destroy it. They reduce it to something that it is not, like reducing chess to checkers, in the example above. What is then left of marriage is but a shell. And as a shell, it is susceptible to being inhabited by something that is not marriage, the way the shell of a once-living organism is inhabited by some lonely hermit crab that has no other place in which to dwell.
The egalitarian ideal applies to marriage insofar as husband and wife are equally human and enjoy equal dignity. But, as in the game of chess, it has severe limitations. We are all equal in humanity, even though we are identical neither in ability, intelligence, talent, age, health, status, nor gender.
Complementarity is the great value that picks up where the egalitarian ideal leaves off. Complementarity allows us to share our lives with others. It permits one’s gift to compensate for another’s shortcoming, another’s skill to offset one’s lack of skill. The complementarity of man and woman, husband and wife allows for a deep, intimate union and a procreative potentiality that is not possible otherwise. It is a necessary requirement for marriage.
Marriage needs to be improved, not replaced. Its nature should be protected from assault. But if the prototype is lost, how can it be recovered? That it could be reduced to a shell and taken over by alien forces represents one of the great tragedies of the present era.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest work is How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum.)
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