Red Eye on Marriage

Steve Farrell
Thursday, July 17, 2003

As a child growing up in New York, I was attracted to the opposite sex. When I saw a pretty little girl flash a smile, my heart fluttered, my cheeks blushed, I shuffled my feet and shyly looked the other away.

I always liked girls. No one had to tell me that I should. I just did.

When I became a teen, little changed. I still adored them – though when I thought of females, I began to think of marriage. Holy Matrimony seemed like a prerequisite to happiness and completeness. Don't ask me why. It was instinct. I knew I was born to be married; and fortunately, no miscreant stepped in to pervert nature´s instincts.

Schools, you see, and even television, defended traditional values.

Ben Franklin, a man from a value-laden era and a man who was not the philanderer anti-American historical revisionists make him out to be (he firmly believed in the law of chastity), expressed long ago what I by nature felt as a teen. In an attempt to persuade a young friend to reject the idea of a mistress and embrace the institution of marriage, Franklin wrote:

Marriage is the proper remedy. It is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness. Your reasons against entering into it at present appear to me not well founded. The circumstantial advantages you have in view by postponing it are not only uncertain, but they are small in comparison with that of the thing itself, the being married and settled.

“It is the man and woman united that make the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility, and acute discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the world. A single man has not nearly the value he would have in that state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors. If you get a prudent, healthy wife, your industry in your profession, with her good economy, will be a fortune sufficient.

He might have added, for it fit, "Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord," and God´s command to our first parents, to become "one flesh."

Franklin and the revelations are right. There really is something about this marriage thing – an extraordinary opportunity ordained by God and Nature to become something we cannot be alone.

Two people, man and woman, mutually bound by love and sacred covenants, become one flesh in the natural unity of sexual intercourse; they become one flesh through children, who literally possess their combined genetic code; they become one heart and mind through the common endeavor of raising these children; and hopefully, through their common devotion to God, His laws and their duty to serve their fellow man, they become one forever.

But this is not all. They also become one, as Franklin noted, because of natural differences between man and woman, which interlock and complement each other in a wonderful symphony achieved through a lifetime of give and take, sacrifice and patience, struggle and mutual reform.

It is an ingenious and inspired plan devised to stretch man, refine him, teach him to love others more than he loves himself – a plan which, besides being religiously sanctioned, has met with the approval and sanction of every great civilization.

And here´s why: All societies have learned that the family is basic and fundamental to national stability and happiness. When families fall apart, so do nations.

French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville knew that a collective animosity or negligence toward the family was the sort of destabilizing force that fomented revolutions, while strong families prop up and prosper free government, as was the case in early 19th century America. In his classic work, “Democracy in America,” he observed:

There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected than in America, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated. In Europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasure of home is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and fluctuating desires. Agitated by the tumultuous passions that frequently disturb his dwelling, the European is galled by the obedience which the legislative powers of the state exact.

“But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace. There his pleasures are simple and natural, his joys are innocent and calm; and as he finds that an orderly life is the surest path to happiness, he accustoms himself easily to moderate his opinion as well as his tastes. While the European endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society, the American derives from his won home that love of order which he afterwards carries with him into public affairs."

America rose, Europe fell. No wonder.

Unfortunately, the cultural differences between Europe and the United States are now dimming. We still have stronger families than they, and thus more stability, strength and freedom.

But simultaneously, the anti-family values that brought the terror and instability of the French Revolution have gained a considerable and militant foothold here in the United States, and may, if left unchecked, beckon our downfall.

It was the ideology of communism founder Karl Marx that led the charge against marriage and the family that unsettles us today. In language fuming with hatred, loaded to the hilt in reckless, sweeping generalizations and on fire with revolution, he decried Western Civilization's belief in the "hallowed co-relation" of husband to wife and parent to child as a "bourgeois claptrap (artifice)" which is "disgusting."

To him and his cohorts, capitalist children are thought of by their parents as nothing more than "articles of commerce and instruments of labor," whereas wives and daughters are thought of by their capitalist husbands and fathers as nothing more than "common prostitutes"; and bourgeois marriage is thought of by men in general as nothing more than “a system of wives in common," for, according to Marx´s dark view of the capitalist Christian culture, every capitalist, like every Christian, cheats on his wife and abuses his children.

Such a world!

But he didn´t stop there, no. Since the family stinks, then why not a free-sex society where anything goes? It sounds all too familiar. Marx has won the day. He teaches in our schools, writes the scripts in Hollywood and sends down edicts from the Bench.

And lest his beneficiaries – the women´s lib lobby, the lavender lobby, the children´s rights lobby and their liberal and libertarian supporters – get all snooty about it, it´s time they wise up to the fact that they are still being exploited, this time by the master of all exploiters – opportunists who look upon their weak-minded “victims,” under their deterministic paradigm, as dumb cattle who need to be but pointed in the right direction and, in the end, discarded or enslaved like all the rest.

A Red Eye, wickedly, haughtily, destructively peers down on Marriage and the Family – and yet marriage between a man and woman, and children raised by mother and father, are still Divine institutions. The nation that makes war on them will rue the day as surely as the sun rises tomorrow. The nation that rises up and defends them will save itself.

To which will we cleave?

NewsMax.com pundit Steve Farrell is the author of "Dark Rose," an inspirational novel critics are calling "a modern classic." Read the reviews and purchase your copy today .

Contact Steve at farrell@newsmax.com.