I found this article in US World Report. Personally i am very disturbed by the content of this article and the degree that we have allowed a small few to rule our lives, our beliefs our very existance. How is it that our voices are unheard while those so depraved can be heard over the voices of the rest? Have we lost our ability for vigilance, our ability to fight for what is right?
US WORLD REPOST
Culture & Ideas 12/16/02
BY JOHN LEO
Marriage on the rocks
In modern journalism, radical change is often announced by a yawn-inducing headline. For instance, "Legal Group Urges States to Update Their Family Law" (New York Times, November 29). The headline, one step up from "Don't Bother to Read This," refers to a ponderous 1,200-page commentary and set of recommendations by the American Law Institute, a group of prominent judges and lawyers. The proposals, "Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution," may seem like dry, technical suggestions about custody, alimony, and property distribution. But what this "update" really amounts to is a devastating legal assault on marriage.
The institute report says that in many important ways, domestic partnerships should be legally treated like marriage. It defines domestic partners as "two persons of the same or opposite sex, not married to one another, who for a significant period of time share a primary residence and a life together as a couple." When breaking up, the report says, cohabitants are entitled to a division of property and alimonylike payments, just like married people who divorce. And after a relationship ends, the cohabiting partner of a legal parent may share custody and decision-making responsibility for the legal parent's child.
The report validates homosexual relationships and gives them a status comparable to that of marriage. If accepted, this idea would lead immediately to the next legal argument: If homosexual and straight commitments have the same status in state law, isn't it picky and discriminatory to withhold the word marriage from the homosexual version? Heterosexual couples who live together would also get the same status as husbands and wives, blurring or eliminating another line between marriage and serial affairs.
War on tradition. The most drastic notion embedded in the suggestions is that marriage is just one arrangement among many. Marriage is being deconstructed here, downgraded and privatized. It is no longer the crucial building block of the social order and makes no special contribution to civil society that justifies any distinctive honor or status. This report, says Lynn Wardle, professor of law at Brigham Young University, "continues the war on the traditional family and traditional sexual morality that has been waged for over three decades."
Wardle has a point. Marriage is in trouble for a lot of reasons, but surely one important factor is the relentless hostility unleashed by the 1960s counterculture, which portrayed marriage as oppressive, patriarchal, outmoded, and destructive to children. The attitudes of today's elites reflect that never-ending campaign. Now we have lots of "marriage" counselors who never use the word marriage and textbooks on families bristling with hostility to the nuclear family. As I wrote in this space several years ago, "One of the problems in trying to shore up the institution of marriage is that so many of the professionals who teach and write about it