Why Australia needs a renewed culture of natural marriage

Research has also shown that:

• the children of natural marriage are less likely to become expenses for the state, be it through drug rehabilitation programs or as prisoners;
• children issuing from natural marriage are more likely to do well in school, earn college degrees, be gainfully employed, and - in consequence - become taxpayers; and
• mothers who are married are much less likely to require welfare benefits. As with their children, they are a net plus, a fiscal boost, for all levels of government.

Well, I think you get the point. The children and the adults found in homes built on natural marriage are far more likely to be, or become, responsible citizens, wealth creators, and taxpayers; and less likely to become dependents, and a net drain on the public treasury. For this reason alone, the state has a compelling interest in natural, married couple homes.

However, there is another - profound - reason for seeking to renew a culture of natural marriage. The telling reality is that every modern totalitarian movement - every enemy of a free society - has moved early and aggressively to disrupt or destroy the institution of natural marriage. It happened in the French Revolution, and in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution; the Nazi’s did this as well as the leaders of Communist China.

Why this common hostility by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes to natural marriage? This was well-answered by the great English journalist G.K. Chesterton, who held that marriage stands for liberty. That it “is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state … [and] is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survive bad government”. (1920: The Superstition of Divorce.)

Chesterton, as usual, was an optimist about the future of marriage. In the end, he held the totalitarians - the social engineers - would always retreat before the inherent strength of the four-legged creature formed by natural marriage. And so it has been in the past: the French Revolutionaries failed; so did the Communists in Russia, the German National Socialists and the Maoists in China. In their time, each seemed to be unstoppable; each represented the inevitable future. Yet in every case, they collapsed or retreated, because they violated human nature.

Those who seek to deconstruct marriage today are cleverer than their predecessors. Using what might be called “the Swedish model”, their propaganda machine is much more effective. Their promises are more seductive. And they sometimes seem unstoppable. However, I am confident that they too will fail, in the end for the same reason: they misunderstand the nature of the human being.

So go forward with confidence as you work to rebuild a culture of natural marriage in Australia. Human nature, innate human longings, human biology, and human history are all on your side.