The US Supreme Court’s decision that homomarriage is a constitutional right strikes a blow against aesthetics, morality, millennia of both religious and secular history, demographics – and the very idea of a written constitution.
This ruling was predictably greeted, in the US and elsewhere, by a celebration of degeneracy sickening even by the normally abysmal standards of Gay Pride parades.
Hairy buttocks everywhere, S&M-thonged men with little boys sitting on their shoulders, tattooed women French-kissing, women looking like men because they are men, simulated sex acts turning out not to be a simulation… There’s something wrong with a state that condones that sort of thing.
A little decadence here and there is no bad thing – virtue has to co-exist dialectically with vice. If nothing else, decadence has been known to produce some good art.
But there’s a difference between decadence and degeneracy, although one could argue that the former may lead to the latter. Indeed it may. In a society with a death wish, it will. And in a West stripped of its founding tenets, it has.
In my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick I take issue with the whole constitutional arrangement in the US. As is my wont, I cite my favourite constitutional thinker Joseph de Maistre, who argued that a constitution ought to be written not on paper but in people’s hearts.
If it is, a written document is redundant. If it’s not, a written document is useless. In a way, it’s like a prenuptial agreement stipulating the frequency of sex: if you have to write it down, you might as well not bother.
Neither politicians nor judges can inscribe a constitution in people’s hearts. This can only be done by millennia of tradition going back to the founding of our civilisation. And it was founded predominantly on Christianity and Judaeo-Christian morality.
The American 1789 attempt to go against the grain of this fact has been more successful than most others, but the Supreme Court’s ruling on homomarriage shows how flawed it nevertheless is.
Even the mostly agnostic or deist Founders would have called for the men in white coats had anyone suggested that homomarriage was a right to be enshrined in the constitution.
But they drafted that Lockean document so as to make it possible for future generations to treat any kind of degeneracy as a constitutional right. Thus the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
This was an admission that no written document could possibly encompass every constitutional provision – it has to leave room for expansion, reduction and consequently invalidation.
A successful commonwealth can only be propped up by the three pillars on which, according to Burke, government should rest: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.
Burke and the entire previous Western history acknowledged that these were animated by the divine spirit, but the Founders had no time for such outdated superstitions. Trying to improve on transcendence, they only replaced it with transience, leaving the door ajar for future social destruction.
All modern states seek to build a new social model. The specifics of what they wish to build vary, but they all agree on what they wish to destroy: all vestiges of the traditional state of Christendom.
The most important of these is the family. Therefore the modern state correctly identifies it as its competitor, and annihilation is the only way in which modernity treats competition. It’s in this context that the legalisation of homomarriage can be properly understood.
The true founding document of our civilisation, the Bible, is unequivocal on marriage as a union of one man and one woman. Genesis 2:24 was the first to lay down this commandment, which was then repeated, practically verbatim, in Matthew 19:5, Mark 10:7 and Ephesians 5:31.
No civilisation either before or after the Judaeo-Christian one has ever attached as much significance to marriage and family. That’s partly why no other civilisation has even approached its greatness.
Descending from that lofty plane, we can see how destructive homomarriage is even in purely secular terms. Such as demographics: if we all married people of the same sex, the human race would die out within one generation. Any approximation to that nightmare will work towards the same goal, more slowly but as surely.
Then there’s the slippery-slope argument: if homomarriage is a constitutional right, why not a polygamous, incestuous or interspecies one?
Marriage is all about luv, isn’t it? So what about the rights of a man who loves tucking a ewe’s rear legs into his Wellies? Or a libidinous chap who has enough love for more than one wife?
Indeed a Montana man, inspired by the Supreme Court decision, has already applied for a licence to marry a second wife – and he threatens to sue the state if rejected. He has a point.
Since the USA is widely accepted as the leader of the free world, American perversions invariably spread like the HIV. We’ve already legalised homomarriage, so let’s look forward to every possible combination of legal conjugal partners reducing what’s left of our civilisation to rubble.