“Forget Falwell – All’s Well With American Tolerance.”  This was the headline of an (8/29/85) op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal.  The author noted that the overnight visitations to Nebraska’s governor by an actress caused disapproval among only one of eight workers in a statewide poll, that Rock Hudson’s avowal of his AIDS affliction seems to be making the public less critical of homosexuality, and that millions of people read Playboy and Hustler and use mind-altering drugs despite the efforts of The Moral Majority and others whom the editorialist called “hyperthyroid Puritans.”  Toleration, he rejoices, is winning the battle against repression.

The social trajectory which he described has continued for almost two decades and Toleration is nearing total victory over – WHAT?  If repression were, in fact, the only loser in this contention, Americans should rejoice.  But it isn’t, and they shouldn’t.

What is taking place is the suppression of the standards of conduct essential to the civil order.  A person who celebrates the widespread use of illegal drugs seems oblivious of, or has no concern for, the common well-being.  What happened at Woodstock was not just a crowd of youth enjoying a rock music jamboree.  It was also, in effect, an insurrection of 400,000 people openly and intentionally defying the legal prohibition of marijuana and other drugs.  The Federal Government’s failure to intervene and terminate those festivities was a lapse of judgment which probably foreclosed the possibility of ever controlling by law the wide-spread use of mind-altering drugs.

Before long, the prevalence of marijuana smokers became a shoulder shrug for most Americans, lowering by several notches the venerable assumption that Americans are, and should be, a lawful people.  During the three decades since Woodstock, lawlessness has increased to the point that many churches must keep their doors locked night and day to protect their property and personnel.  Two generations ago, those doors had never been locked.

A second fundamental norm of American life which the op/ed piece reported to be on the wane was sexual morality.  Today’s enthusiasts for abolishing restraints on sexual activity are now joined in a full-court press to legalize and normalize same-sex marriage.  In most cases, their arguments evidence no recognition that such a thing as the common good even exists or has any bearing on the goal they pursue.  The collateral consequences of same-sex marriage need to be enumerated and evaluated.

Some years ago, Senator Daniel Moynihan made a shocking prediction that the continuing disintegration of the African-American family would prove disastrous for the nation.  He was tragically correct.  America’s cruelest social pathology is surely the large cohort of babies born to inner-city unwed mothers (who, all too often, were themselves born to unwed mothers), socially, psychologically and economically incompetent to nurture, acculturate and sustain their offspring.  The provision of sex education, birth-control devices and abortion services has been of no avail in diminishing this endless delivery of babies into a twilight zone of sub-human existence – gangs, drugs, crime, husbandless motherhood, fatherless children, and permanent irresponsible adolescence!

These unfortunate mothers, and the fathers of their children, have had no opportunity to learn what a family is, or to observe the satisfactions husband and wife derive from helping their children mature and succeed in worthy activities.  They have no knowledge of the fact that sexual morality constitutes the dues one pays for membership in a solid and loving family.  They have been grievously short-changed by society’s default in its primary obligation to the young.

Every new generation must be taught about the nature of their society and its institutions and how to live responsibly in that society.  There is nothing inherent in human nature that inclines an individual to be honest and cooperative and to subdue the natural tendencies to be aggressive, vengeful and destructive.  Schools and churches and literature contribute to this process of acculturation, but the members of the family – father, mother, grandparents and siblings – provide the natural, and by far the most effective, teachers for the young to learn social and moral maturity.  This function is so vital to the perpetuation of the free society that it is surprising that Americans have not been more concerned about reversing the deteriorating condition and the declining status of the family.

Just as Woodstock was the watershed event after which American lawfulness began its decline toward insignificance, so the enactment of no-fault divorce laws turned out to be the agent which blasted the family’s status as America’s central, most valued and most cherished institution.  For most Americans marriage had been an act of the highest significance and solemnity, a lifelong covenant undertaken in a house of worship in the presence of God, with family members and friends as witnesses to the commitment made by the couple.  “Holy Matrimony” it was called.

Suddenly, no-fault divorce snatched one generation from the family context.  Either husband or wife was enabled to demolish the family household if he or she found someone else more alluring then the spouse, or decided that marriage was too burdensome, or too anything else.  The children and grandparents instantly became second class citizens whose well-being was of no consequence whatever in the legal process of familial dissolution.  The institution of marriage was by a single act of law degraded to the insignificance of an auto insurance policy.  If a spouse terminates a family, don’t worry about it, no blame is attached.  The other family members simply have to do the best they can to rise above the wreckage and get on with their lives.

There was also collateral damage caused by these laws.  The sexual restraint required to sustain a good marriage had still been widely respected in America.  The no-fault laws which devalued marriage also attenuated both the individual conscience concerning marital fidelity and the public disapproval of philandering.  The decreased respect for marriage and for sexual morality seemed to feed on each other, further diminishing the family’s viability and its uniquely beneficial role in society.

The judgment to initiate no-fault divorce and the discussion of enacting same-sex marriage need to be viewed in a larger context.  Among the profound insights Robert Nisbet enunciated in Twilight of Authority, the one he stressed most strongly in his chapter on “The New Science of Despotism” was “The New Equality.”

I think it would be hard to exaggerate the potential spiritual dynamic that lies in the idea of equality at the present time… Once equality becomes a cornerstone of national policy…it resembles some of the religious ideals or passions which offer almost unlimited potentialities for continuous onslaught against institutions…

It is the nature of providential ideas like equality that they are stayed by neither fact nor logic.

The arguments for same-sex marriage are cast primarily in terms of the unfairness of legally prohibiting individuals, disinclined toward heterosexual marriage, from enjoying with their partners the emotional, psychological, legal and social satisfactions and privileges which are now available only within heterosexual marriages.  The question that must be probed and analyzed is whether the benefits to the whole society derived from granting equal marriage status to homosexuals outweigh the further erosion of the institutions of marriage and the family which that extension of equality will cause.  There is, I believe, a predominant judgment among family sociologists and psychologists that the family and sexual liberation are mutually exclusive.  The one cannot become more prevalent and publicly approved without a comparable decline in the status of the other.  The impact of no-fault divorce laws illustrates that maxim.

Certainly, no civilized person would want to sustain a situation that makes life more difficult for anyone, especially members of a minority group, but to make a national judgment in favor of same-sex marriage solely on the basis of sympathy for a minority group would be irrational and unwise.  Should the society pay the price of further weakening and destabilizing the family?