Our constitutional government of limited powers, as John Adams wrote, requires a nation of individuals who are self-restrained by commonly accepted rules of religious morality. Without such self-restraint as a counter-balance to the political state, the government perforce expands its power to assume the role of Big Brother.
In Personal Freedom Without Political Liberty, R.R. Reno notes, with regard to legalizing same-sex marriage, that removal of the religious conception of family as a blood relationship in which one man and one woman produce children has unexpected legal consequences:
The result is the opposite of the libertarian dream of freedom. As Farrow observes, with gay marriage we are giving over the family to the state to define according to the needs of the moment. The upshot, he worries, will be a dangerous increase in the power of the state to define our lives in other realms once thought sacrosanct. “Remove religiously motivated restrictions on marriage,” he writes, “and it is much easier to remove religiously motivated restrictions on human behavior in general, and on the state’s power to order human society as it sees fit.” The libertarian dream turns into the totalitarian nightmare. Who can or cannot be a spouse? That’s for the state to decide. To whom do children belong? It’s up to the state to assign parents as its social workers and judges think best…
Liberals and self-styled progressives are often arrogantly and culpably blind to the importance of settled social mores for a liberal society. They are a counterweight to the political will, which has sought omnipotence in the modern era because it has fancied itself omni-competent.
...from Rousseau to the present, the left has sought to use the power of the state to destroy the influence of traditional norms for marriage and family. In so doing, the left imagines itself expanding the scope of freedom for all. It seems all gain and no loss. In California, homosexuals can get married, and nobody is prohibiting heterosexual marriage. Everybody seems to be getting what he or she wants. But what seems is not necessarily so. When the state can rise up to redefine marriage, then the counterweight of tradition is diminished, the political instruments of power are emboldened, and our collective liberty is at peril.
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