There are always things that need to be said by somebody . . .

I wrote recently about how there were some 400 barring orders in Dundalk in the mid-1990s, the number likely to be exponentially higher by this time.  Now these would probably be described in general as family breakdowns.  But the question is how likely are they to involve real families and not the temporary ramshackle arrangements of convenience that seem so often to exist nowadays.  Indeed, the standard pattern in modern cases of infanticide, if you watch the news, would seem to involve mothers of various numbers of children by various numbers of fathers and their current live-in boyfriends.

Now the main argument in the run-up to the referendum on ‘gay marriage’ was along the lines of everyone’s right to ‘express their love and have it officially recognised and celebrated’.  All of which suggests that love is the sole and real basis of marriage, which of course it’s not.  There are thousands of people in love who’ve never been married and thousands of people married who have never been in love.  Love is at best an ancillary of marriage; indeed, in terms of the long-term survival of marriages, compatibility is a much more important factor than ‘love’.  There may be love, too, but it is likely to be more a gradual thing developed through shared joys and trials and effort than anything else.

Based on observable instances, it is the people who set out wrapped up in ‘love’, looking at each other with moon faces—each with an idealised image of the other—who are the more likely to run into trouble in the short run.  Being merely in love with ‘love’, the realities of life post-romance and post-celebration are likely to come as a cold sharp shock to them.

The fact is that marriage is an institution primarily for rearing children and social stability.  Its very survival through the centuries points to its evolutionary value.  It’s not perfect, it can’t be perfect, but it is the best we’ve got.  Anything less is the equivalent of deckchairs sliding on the Titanic as it pivots towards destruction.

In a world where every random or accidental entanglement is likely to be described on the airwaves as family, the real definition of family is refreshingly basic.  It is a man and a woman, ideally plus children, joined together in matrimony, whether religious or secular.  And it is the duty of the state, if it has any sense, not just to place it on a level shelf with all other sorts of competing arrangements, but to be actually prejudiced in favour of it. 

Of course, there will always be attempts to pick holes in any standard definition of family.  What about the widowed . . . the abandoned and separated etc. etc?  A flat wheel is still a wheel; a block of wood supporting the axle, even though it fulfils part of the function of a wheel, is still a block of wood.  It is not the accidents or happenstances of life that define family but rather the intention setting out.

We live in a world where a faux egalitarianism demands a literal equality in all sorts of things, a world where everything is constantly being redefined, even if only by reiteration: we have the ‘new Irish’ and the ‘new family’ and the ’new marriage’—the list is potentially endless.

The process—and also the purpose—of such reinvention is in the long and short term destructive—even if the useful idiots who make up its cheerleaders are generally too dim to recognise the fact.