Sex education? No, we’re witnessing the pursuit of ignorance on matters of sexuality
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| A symbolic marriage cake in favor of allowing gay marriages in Italy not only to heterosexual couples but to lesbian and gay ones as well. Picture by Giovanni Dall'Orto, January 26 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
If you can trace your family tree back far enough, you'll
probably encounter people who had no formal education, owned no books, perhaps
couldn't read and write. But your uneducated ancestors knew what
"marriage" meant-- which is more than you can say for the typical Ivy
League professor today. Your "benighted" ancestors would be both
absolutely astonished that the literati of the early 21st century cannot figure
out what was so obvious to them, centuries ago, and utterly appalled by the
bogus unions that our contemporaries accept as marriages.
(By the way, I am not just thinking only of same-sex
unions. I also have in mind the "open" marriages and the deliberately
barren unions, the Hollywood-style serial marriages, the Kardashian couplings.)
The point is not that your ancestors would disagree with today's
opinion leaders about the definition of marriage. No; the point is that your
ancestors recognized an institution-- the lifelong union of a man and a
woman-- which the fashionable elite no longer recognizes today. You could call
that venerable insitution by a different name, but you would not change
its nature. Nor can you change the nature of a shack-up, or a sodomite union,
or an adulterous affair, by calling it a "marriage." You
can call a square a "circle," if you like, but that won't make it
round. It will only make you look foolish-- as our generation must look foolish
to our saner ancestors.
And now the same sophomoric educators and politicians who
redefined marriage are working to redefine "man" and
"woman" as well. Just imagine the puzzlement of our ancestors,
learning that although we can identify the sex of a fruitfly by examining its
DNA, we say that we cannot identify the gender of an adult human by looking at
his body! This is willful ignorance, of course. We know whether someone is a
man or a woman, but we are asked to pretend that we don't know, until he or she
has informed us, and if he says he is "she," or vice versa, we are
expected to accept that nonsense as fact.
Notice that this deliberate stupidity applies only to matters
involving sexuality. If I say that a I am very tall, or very young, you will
laugh at me, and rightly so. I am what I am: a man of (slightly less than)
average height and (somewhat more than) middle age. I'd like to be taller; I'd
like to be younger. But wishing won't make it so. You know that; I know that;
our illiterate ancestors knew that. But on questions of marriage, sex, and
gender, those ignorant ancestors knew more than we know now.
