Letter to the Editor: The great and shining tent

In a recent letter to the editor here I made a brief and unremarkable argument reaffirming the universal understanding of mankind that marriage is the union of the sexes as recognized by law. It was an argument based on common sense. I said that the effort of academic elites and their disciples to obscure this ancient understanding and to remove reference to the duality of the sexes from our laws concerning marriage represents a breathtaking abandonment of common sense. As if to prove me right on this score, in the most recent issue of the Provoc, 12 of Assumption's own academics have stepped out onto the stage to display for us their own reckless abandonment of common sense. Dr. Schultz, in a separate letter, suggests that I should just laugh it off over "a drink of really good scotch." Dr. Schultz teaches in the political science department here and so he ought to know better: this is no laughing matter.

Think. For all the higher life forms and for ourselves among them, individuals are incomplete. They are biologically incomplete. By themselves they cannot reproduce and, if left by themselves, they would go swiftly extinct.

This incompleteness is what we call "sex."

"Sexual union" brings the incomplete individuals together, and from them makes the complete whole. Like it says in the Bible, "Male and female he created them," and "it's not good for the man to be alone." So, "the two become one flesh." This sexual union is good in itself-it's good to be whole-and it's good also because it makes continued life itself possible.

All life comes from the union of the opposite sexes. Everything comes from this; the whole human world comes from this. From other sorts of sexual behavior there is no union and no life comes.

It's nature itself that makes this so.

Reasonable human laws and traditions concerning marriage only acknowledge what nature here has decreed. Laws don't set down the rule for nature. Human law is not absolute, and human government is not absolute, but is limited by the structure of human nature which law and government are to serve. Laws are good, right and just when they aim at what we call "natural right." Laws make sense and have value when they defend the "rights" we have because of our human nature, or, as our Founding Fathers put it, our rights as "endowed by our Creator."

Rights aren't endowed or invented by academics or lawyers. Rights are a given, already there, rooted in our nature. The order and structure of human nature, the continuation of life through the union of the opposite sexes, the rightful relations of man and woman so united, mother and father, son and daughter, brother and sister and the rightful order of political society itself, all that which is good and right and just- these things are intimately related to each other. Common sense is the deeply felt awareness of just this complex set of relations, an awareness that develops and matures slowly, with much effort over time and through the many generations. Common sense becomes our heritage.

The aim of a liberal arts education is to build on this common sense and heritage and so to learn more fully and articulately the rightful order of things, to learn what is good and right and just, to live it, and then to pass it on to the generations that follow.

But the 12 academics that have stepped onto the stage here do not represent liberal education and the arts and sciences concerned with the rightful order of things. What they represent is what they call "a vast body of research," "a large body of sober scholarly analysis" all of which constitutes the social and behavioral sciences. Their science is superior, they suggest, because it is empirical and based entirely on hard facts, methodologically removed from all contact with convictions concerning what is right or just or good by nature. The social and behavioral sciences regard all common sense judgments concerning what is good, right and just as mere prejudices, "value judgments" and not truths.

The subject matter of the social and behavioral sciences is not human nature or what is right by nature, but rather mere human "behavior."

"Behavior" is all the sorts of things human beings might do.

Human behavior includes much that does not achieve what is good by nature, but rather harms or distorts human nature. The Chinese once liked women with small feet so they bound the feet of infant girls, stunting and deforming them, causing great pain. That's a behavior. Some Africans stretched and distended their lips till they became as big as dinner plates. Some aboriginal Americans bound the heads of their infants to make them stylishly flat. Those are behaviors. Some contemporary Americans, aboriginals in their own way, funnel alcohol into their guts. That's a behavior. There are infinite forms of behavior. Researching and cataloging those forms of behavior with the methodology of the value-free social sciences can be an interesting pursuit.

But citizens, lawmakers, educators and heads of families are not engaged in value-free endeavors. Their whole work and duty concerns what is right and good and just, in truth. Citing odd human behaviors here and there does not overturn the order of human nature, says nothing whatever about what is right, and provides very little help to men and women engaged in the serious and permanent endeavors of life, family, citizenship and education.

Picture this: A research project for our twelve academics! We send them back to their youth and direct them to interview their own grandparents. They are to ask this question: Does marriage necessarily involve relations between the two sexes? Yes or no?

Each of our academics has four grandparents, so four times twelve is 48. Then let them continue their research and interview the grandparents of their grandparents. That brings us to 192. Go back still two more generations and the number is 768. Two more and it's 3072. Keep pushing back, and what we see is a very large survey, thousands and thousands of ancestors.