B.P. Terpstra
Chris Berg of the Institute of Public Affairs (“the world’s oldest free market think tank”) is politically-correct enough to write for Fairfax and our wasteful taxpayer-funded ABC.
Impressive? Berg is so politically-correct that he supports redefining traditional marriage for a small, but loud minority (the communist-friendly Greens’ position). Or as he sniffs under the Orwellian headline, “If marriage is so good, why not invite everyone in?”
It’s an adults-first libertarian argument, though, often influenced by social network considerations, and groupthink activist studies.
Preaches Berg, however:
Marriage is a private form of social welfare. Spouses insure each other against sudden loss of income. Married couples are less vulnerable to financial stress than single people.
The benefits of marriage on mental health and wellbeing, income and happiness are widely acknowledged. Married people tend to lead more stable lives. Their relationships are more durable.
True, but these findings only apply to heterosexuals, when one is looking for meaty evidence (both sociological and historical) over thousands of years. Even some pro-gay marriage activist academics acknowledge the experimental nature of their cause.
But I digress. Let’s open the Institute of Public Affairs and invite everyone in. From green communists to social conservatives, why not? Fair’s fair!
Still and yet, where gay marriage or gay marriage-like unions have been blessed by Big Government, Christian adoption agencies have been maliciously targeted, under the state’s Orwellian faith of selective equality.
As well, should the let’s-invite-everyone-in mantra apply to children and polygamists?
David Hume
Perhaps Chris Berg an alleged David Hume sycophant jumped on the politically-correct bandwagon, without much thought. But in the process, he’s divorced himself from Hume’s pro-traditional marriage stand.
But Hume is no cultural relativist and rejects the view that all marriage customs are equally good at producing desirable results. Much of his essay is devoted to showing the many harms and disadvantages of two of the most common types of marriage arrangements outside the Christian West: polygamy in which men have multiple wives, and monogamous marriages in which the spouses are permitted to dissolve their marriage and marry someone else.
And:
Hume clearly believed, as did almost all the English of his day (and almost all Americans until quite recently), that children generally thrive best when brought up in a two-parent, husband-wife household, where the children are the biological offspring of both parents. Both reason and common experience justified such a judgment. Divorce and the breakup of the marital household were viewed as harmful to children, since, even if the divorced parents remarry, step-parents usually don’t have the same warmth or commitment in rearing other people’s children as in rearing their own. This for Hume—and most of his contemporaries—was a simple fact of everyday experience that needed no proof. Stereotypes of wicked or cold stepmothers existed precisely because the stereotypes contained a good deal of easily observable statistical truth.
Invite everyone in? How Fairfax.