Subordinating The Normative To The Non-Normative
By HARLEY PRICE
In general, modern junk sociology is the off-gassing of liberal hatred of normalcy. As Chesterton noted, it is the mark of the modern to everywhere and always subordinate the normative to the nonnormative. But the newfangled arbitrariness with which same-sex “marriage” and fungible gender have been declared natural and normative tells us that they, in fact, are the flimsiest of social constructs. By contrast, the antiquity, stubborn longevity, and practical ubiquity of the institution of heterosexual marriage (not to mention the biological fact of male and female) should be proof enough that they are not.
Since Adam and Eve first hid their nakedness, everyone in the civilized world has agreed that marriage between a man and a woman, as an inference from the disposition of the race into two biological genders, is natural and normative — until a few years ago, that is, when governments throughout North America and western Europe enacted legislation to recognize same-sex unions, and sex-education curricula encouraged little Johnny to question whether he is really a Jennifer trapped in a male body.
In Canada, a year after the Civil Marriage Act was passed by the Liberals in 2005, the country’s newly elected soi-disant Conservative prime minister — having made his opposition to same-sex “marriage” a central plank of his campaign — declared the matter “settled,” because, as he said, opinion polls showed that a majority of Canadians had made their peace with “gay marriage.” If Stephen Harper’s opinion polls were accurate (though I suspect we are, here again, in the realm of junk science), this is a perfect example of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan described as “dumbing deviancy down”: the reflex of a bourgeois majority, whenever a nonnormative behavior reaches a certain threshold, to tranquillize its anxieties by declaring that behavior “normal.”
But neither legislation nor majority approval can “settle” the matter. Were they elected to the governing council of the PGA, an overwhelming majority of my golfing buddies would enact a law to make the winner in golf the person with the highest score. And that is why neither laws nor majorities tell us anything about justice or truth.
Popular opinion has always been less than Solomonic, and should hardly be the arbiter of such fundamental matters of human morality or biology as marriage, abortion, or gender.
This is a truism that the entire civilized world used to recognize — until, that is, it succumbed to our modern fetishistic reverence for electoral democracy. As Seneca observed, when moral questions are under consideration, it is no use to say, “‘This side seems to be in a majority.’ For that is just the reason it is the worst side.” Cicero was no less doubtful of revolutionary legal decisions, which he disdained as enactments of “the crowd’s definition of law.”
The morality and justice of written laws, according to Cicero, can only be judged by an eternal and immutable Law that is “rooted in Nature,” and “which had its origin ages before any written law existed or any State had been established.” Legislators can pass laws that are “heedless of Nature” if they choose, “but such a law can no more make justice out of injustice than it can make good out of bad.”
The progressive autocrats who rule over us have legislated the fiction of same-sex “marriage,” and are merchandising the fantasy of “self-identified” gender to our children, while the refusal to “affirm” it by teachers, psychotherapists, or even parents has been criminalized under novel non-discrimination protections for “gender expression and identity,” now written into the human rights codes of practically every nation in the West; but no law can make them just or true, not even if a majority of voters agree.