By David Solway, 8/17/18, American Thinker.
In its centuries-long efforts to dismantle the load-bearing
structures of traditional and classical liberal society, Marxist dogma in its various
forms – communism, socialism, neo-Marxism, Cultural Marxism – has embarked on a
sustained campaign to weaken and ultimately to abolish the institution of
marriage as it has been commonly understood since time
immemorial. The dissolution or misprision of marriage, as a contract
between a man and a woman committed to raising a family and recognizing its
attendant responsibilities, is a prerequisite for the revolutionary
socialist state in which the pivotal loyalty of the individual belongs to the
sovereign collective, not to the family.
Advocacy and legislation that sunder the intimate love between a
man and a woman, that deprive children of male and female parental role
models, that compromise the integrity of the family and that dissolve the
purpose of marriage as a guarantor of cultural longevity are indispensable
strategies essential to realizing the left's master plan. Dismissing
the nuclear family as an archaic and repressive arrangement whose time has
passed, the state would then operate in loco parentis.
The problem for the left is that the family is a traditional
dynamic that precedes and eclipses the tenure of the authoritarian state, not
only because it encourages a prior allegiance, but because it allows for the
retention of inheritance and property rights within the generational
unit. This is anathema to the Marxist vision of, in historian Jacob
Talmon's phrase from The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, the
"all-property-owning state," a function of "political
Messianism." The Marxist offensive against marriage may be
seen, in part, as the ideological version of a corporate takeover.
Marx himself married his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von
Westphalen, and remained married to her, although his political views did not
comport with his lifelong domesticity. In the Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology, he defined marriage as
legalized prostitution and a form of female slavery. The fact that
he was desperately improvident and ignorant of economics, as Mary Gabriel shows
in her fascinating study of the man, Love and Capital, did not prevent him from
constructing vast hypotheses grounded on neither his conduct nor his personal
experience.
Despite his internal contradictions, he was undoubtedly the most
instrumental figure in the campaign to demolish the scaffolding of customary
society, including marriage and the family. The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State, by Marx's collaborator and patron, Friedrich Engles, has made
the left's ultraist agenda absolutely clear, referring to "the pairing
family and inoculated monogamy" as a community of "leaden ennui"
and a modus
operandi for
the class- and masculine-oriented "bequeathment of
property." It had to be smashed.
An effective way to destroy marriage and the family was advanced
by communist theorist Georg Lukács, who introduced the concept
of "cultural terrorism," which involved the liquidation of religion,
monogamy, and the ostensibly male-dominated family. Lukács advocated
the introduction in the schools of – and as a minister in the 1919 Hungarian
Bolshevik government of Béla Kun actually installed – courses on free love,
sexual liberation, and Freud's notion of "polymorphous perversity," which he believed a
revolutionary necessity.
We see his pernicious influence at work today in the cultural
obsession with sex, the zeal for so-called sex re-assignment, and the insensate
proliferation of pronominal "genders" into a Heinz 57
omnium-gatherum. (Canada's Supreme Court whiffling on bestiality is another variant of
this rubbish.) It is also a cardinal value in the education
establishment, for example in my home province of Ontario, where, under the
direction of former premier Kathleen Wynne, an avowed lesbian, sex ed classes exposed young children to
varieties of sexual practices far beyond their level of emotional development.
Leftism attempts to dismantle conventional society by unleashing a
multi-pronged assault against it, including rewriting history, undermining
religious observance and subverting traditional morality, a program sedulously
advanced by the pseudo-discipline of "Critical
Theory." This
pedantic and ostentatious schematism was promoted by clique of salon
provocateurs known as the Frankfurt School in their effort to
develop what they called "social emancipatory
strategies." They were the answer to the rhetorical question
Lukács asked in his 1916 study "The Theory of the Novel": "Who will save
us from Western civilization?"
Thus, Frankfurt maven Theodore Adorno's influential
(co-authored) The Authoritarian Personality denounced standard sex
roles and sexual mores as "social prejudice," psychological
dysfunction, and a catalyst for fascism. Popular Frankfurter Herbert
Marcuse's Eros and Civilization privileged
unrestrained sexuality and all forms of deviancy over traditional codes of
sexual and family propriety. Wilhelm Reich, who is said to have
coined the phrase "the sexual revolution," invented the orgone box as
an all-purpose therapy machine and radiant "accumulator" to revive
and stimulate sexual energy. Other eminent names associated with the
school and peddling its ruinous ideology are Max Horkheimer, a director of the
institute, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, sociologist Jürgen Habermas, and
philosopher Agnes Heller. The combined intellectual power is
formidable, but it is totally devoid of wisdom and practical good sense.
Admittedly, we know, as PJ Media columnist Sarah
Hoyt points out, that "[o]nce in
power, every leftist regime is sexually repressive" – but that is for
later, after the revolution has succeeded or a national despotism has been
established. One may also note the apparent contradiction in leftist
sexual politics, which hypes the nonsensical campus rape meme and launches a
vendetta against men, especially straight white males, while at the same time
teaching grade-schoolers about sexual variations and instructing co-eds in the use of dental
dams, latex accessories, and sex toys. The contradiction is apparent
only since the mandate of the left is to disrupt the bond between men and
women. Men grow reluctant to marry, and women increasingly fail to
make good wives and mothers. Same-sex relationships become more and
more common, and the state goes along with same-sex couples calling themselves
married in 26 countries.
The putatively enlightened Eric Anderson, an academic who teaches
Sport, Masculinities and Sexualities at the University of Winchester, U.K and
is a former student of prominent Stony Brook feminist Michael Kimmel, considers this development a manifestation of "inclusive
masculinity" and an evolution in cultural sensitivity. He is
particularly proud of the supposed "cuddling" phenomenon among male Millennials who like kissing men
and has marshaled a salmagundi of dodgy statistics to prove his
contestation. Anderson and Kimmel are illustrations of how the erotic
fraternity surreptitiously advances its cause under the sign of presumably
open-minded sophistication. In the last analysis, these soi-disant cultivated visionaries
happily serve the left's agenda.
As noted, the left has many weapons in its incendiary arsenal, but
perhaps its most piercing labret in its war against the traditional family is
the penetration of the institution of marriage and its replacement by an
indiscriminate caricature of its original purpose. Its advocacy for
pseudo-marriage is therefore not surprising. It is true that
communism may once have purged gays and, as Hoyt implies, will do so again, but
in its assault on the family structure, its socialist epigones have long jumped
on the redefining marriage bandwagon. As Paul Kengor writes in Takedown: From Communists to
Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, "[a]s long as the
traditional family is reversed, Marxism is advanced." Marriage
redefined, he continues, is "an ideal, handy device to destroy the
family."
Lest I be misunderstood, I do not endorse civil restrictions on or
repression of homosexuality. So long as common law remains in force (e.g., proscribing
pedophilia or polygamy), couples should be free to follow their passions and
desires. They are free to enjoy recreational sex or to love whomever
they wish. As the late Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau
famously said, "there's no place for the state in the
bedrooms of the nation." But when same-sex couples usurp the
fiscal, estate, and legal privileges of productive and nurturing procreant
families – truly an unearned increment – and certainly when the right to marry
can be claimed by any category of individuals and any cosplay group with no
relation to the traditional armature of Western civilization, the
disintegration of social norms and usages must inevitably follow. As
Engels and company knew, marriage and the family constitute the ground on which
the battle is most auspiciously fought.
Armed with both the theoretical and empirical power of sexual
license, the left now appears unassailable, cresting with
self-assurance. Its campaign against the institution of marriage
seems close to fulfillment. There can be little doubt that once the
traditional institution of marriage, or even binding common law (sui iuris) arrangements within
heterosexual couples, have been disabled, when forms of sexual deviance are
encouraged, when men embrace MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) and women are
regarded as victims of the so-called patriarchal family, and when marriage
distorted beyond its definition has been ordained and consecrated as normal,
the new dialectic of Marxist inversion may well have won the day.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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