By DONALD DeMARCO
On February 13, 2023, South Dakota’s House State of Affairs Committee voted 7-5 to defeat a bill to “update” the definition of marriage by removing references to man and woman and replacing them with “between two persons.”
Rep. Erin Healy, who voted for the update, was particularly aggrieved by the decision. She strongly criticized the Family Heritage Alliance group for stating, on the day of the vote, that the safest place for children is in families that have a married mom and dad. “What a dangerous and un-American belief,” she said.
Marriage between a man and a woman has been the center of virtually every society in history and is defined that way in the Bible. (In response to the Pharisees’ question, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife,” Christ answered, “Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female” — Matt. 19:3ff).
The South Dakota vote is evidence of a disturbing drift away from center that has been going on in the United States over the last few years. Healy’s charge that maintaining traditional marriage is “dangerous” is a pure invention that ignores the facts. Her charge that it is “un-American” is a pure fabrication that ignores history. It is one thing to encourage a drifting away from traditional marriage; it is another to bring about this drift through ignorance.
William Butler Yeats warned of this drift from the center in his celebrated poem, The Second Coming, with these words: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The center holds things together. Without a stabilizing center, things drift in various directions. By losing its center, marriage ceases to be marriage. Then, it no longer provides its appropriate blessings for the husband and wife as well as for children.
Sociologist George Gilder finds that the economic setbacks among divorced men are so great that divorce is a stronger correlate of poverty than race. Divorced men suffer emotionally as well as economically.
Sigmund Freud did not find marriage and the family particularly dangerous. He confessed that, “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.” He was also keenly aware of the importance of the mother: “If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.”
Barack Obama, before he became president, spoke glowingly of the role of father in a famous Father’s Day speech he delivered from the pulpit of a church: He lamented the fact that too many fathers are missing from too many homes and children’s lives, “and the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
We know the statistics, he went on to say, that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it. The then Senator Obama added, “But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception.”
President Bill Clinton stated in 1995: “I am firm in my belief that the future of our Republic depends on strong families and that committed fathers are essential to those families.” The following year President Clinton reinforced his points: “We must do all we can to encourage fathers as they strive to provide the fundamental emotional and economic support that helps ensure their families’ well-being.”
To assert that the traditional family is “un-American” is pure folly. If it were, it surely would have been brought to the attention of American presidents. Yet no American has ever entertained such a notion. Healy is the one who is both un-American and dangerous because she has little appreciation of the value to society that the traditional family provides and employs rhetoric that is clearly irresponsible.
The fact that Healy and four of her colleagues voted to erase man and woman from the definition of marriage is indeed worrisome. How much further will the true notion of marriage drift? Will it endorse polygamy? The family, as sociologists have stated, is the bedrock, the basic unit, the center of society. We should want to keep that center intact.
The home is the center of a person’s life. “To be happy at home,” wrote Samuel Johnson, “is the end of all human endeavor.” But marriage is not a boundary. It does not close us off from the world. Marriage provides a school of love for its offspring who bring their learning into the world.
Those who submit to the liberal tendency in America, in trying to accommodate as many people as possible, neglect the importance of the institution they are trying to expand. Adultery harms marriage, but so does adulteration. When marriage is diluted, it compromises both its identity and its strength. As a result, the meaning of marriage becomes less clear, and therefore, less effective. An elastic band can be stretched, but if stretched too far, it snaps. We should be more zealous in safeguarding marriage than in expanding it.
(Donald DeMarco, Ph. D., is a senior fellow of Human Life International and a professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario.)
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