Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage [Paperback]

This is perhaps the most concise, grounded explanation I've seen of why marriage cannot be redefined to include any relationship other than one man and one woman. To do so threatens the check-and-balance on government power that resides in the family--and that's husband/wife/children family, not "we love each other ergo we are family." It illustrates that divorcing procreation from marriage leads inevitably to a government that is not only "big brother," but "mother and father" as well. Perhaps most importantly, it explains how the relentless characterization of personal liberty as "personal autonomy" leads to relentlessly expanded government regulation of every individual.

It is set in the context of Canada's wrong-headed judicial and legislative deconstruction of marriage, but the lessons are clearly understood without understanding Candada's politics.

Frankly, its frightening reading for anyone who loves liberty and hopes for a stable, just society--because we are catapaulting now down a greased slope. But perhaps a good read will motivate good men to do something now, while its not too late.

This slim collection of four essays offers a compelling critique of Canada's social experiment in same-sex marriage. It will be readable and intelligible even for those who know little about Canadian judicial and parliamentary actions, but who care about the future of marriage and democracy.

Farrow argues that by renouncing its commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (and the UN's Declaration on the Rights of the Child)- which recognizes the fundamental importance for society of the natural family and the right of children to be raised where possible by their own two natural parents - Canada has taken a path that threatens both marriage and children and the liberal state. By fundamentally redefining marriage, he says, the state has appropriated the institution of marriage and turned children, indeed all citizens, into wards of the state. Marriage and family have always existed in relative autonomy vis a vis the state, resting as they do on the nature of human beings and the natural human family.

In a liberal society, marriage and family mediate between individual and state. As such they are indispensable to liberal democracy. They may or may not be recognized and protected by the state, but marriage and family in any case are not created by it. They are, by their nature and not the state's fiat, the way in which one generation turns from its own concerns to those of the next, requiring a sacrifice and commitment of the autonomous ego to a relationship ordered to procreation, fidelity, and a covenantal relationship involving man, woman, and any children that result from their union.

In abandoning this traditional understanding, Farrow argues, the Canadian state has sacrificed the needs of children to the autonomy of adults, redefining marriage to include couples whose sexual activities by their very nature (and not just contingently) cannot be procreative. Marriage is now about feelings between two adults, not a commitment of a man and a woman to each other and the children, if any, that their sexual union produces.

In the process, the Canadian state, as Farrow describes it, has overturned the natural family, separating biological from legal parenthood to the point where the terms mother and father are replaced by parent 1 and parent 2. In a recent case, the Ontario Court of Appeals ruled that a child could have three parents - in which case it seems only a matter of time before the state decides that a child's three or more parents can all be married to each other.

Farrow mentions but does not discuss the large body of scientific literature showing the importance to children of being raised wherever possible by their own two married parents. His argument is rather that in deconstructing marriage, the state is defeating a key institution that offsets its power and domination over society. The real contrast is not the bogus one between civil and religious marriage as the Canadian courts described it, but the one they ignored, between state and civil society.

It is true that totalitarian states invariably seek to undermine and subordinate the family and all of civil society, dismantling them and slowly grinding them up, in Nietzsche's expression, "into a random collection of individuals, haphazardly bound together in the common pursuit of selfish ends." That sounds right for Nazi Germany or Communist Eastern Europe, where all civil society, everything that stands between individual and state, is weakened and destroyed.

But Canada? It sounds far-fetched, but if Farrow is right, we can expect to see, as in Europe today, the increasing control of the state over children's education and socialization (home-schooling was outlawed in Hitler's Germany and just recently parents have been arrested for defying the law). Parents cannot be trusted not to raise their children in their own faith, whose values may contradict those of the state; parents will have fewer and fewer rights to exempt their children from the state's version of sex education and instruction in the moral acceptability of fornication. Professionals, denied protections of conscience, will be fired, not for "imposing their moral views on their clients," but for failing to impose the state's.

It's already happening.

Farrow's is like a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness. Whether or not it has any effect in face of the ever-more intrusive Canadian Leviathan, the book is well written, erudite, cogently argued, and not easy to dismiss. It should be taken more seriously than it is likely to be.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  5.0 out of 5 stars