Western Reality?

Western civilisation is under threat, but not just from terrorism

• THE AUSTRALIAN
• NOVEMBER 21, 2015 12:00AM
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• Greg Sheridan

  Foreign Editor

  Melbourne

  https://plus.google.com/101372426793016687263

At the height of the Cold War, at the start of the fateful 1980s, Jean-Francois Revel wrote his classic How Democracies Perish, a bitter, bleak, trenchant book that saw the West losing the Cold War against Soviet communism.

Revel was wrong. Western democracy triumphed in the end. But for much of the Cold War it was a desperately close-run thing. Nation after nation in the Third World became communist. In the scathing assessment of Revel, democracies lacked the strength of will to prevail.

But then Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II emerged as the embodiment of Western will, leaders of moral authority and clarion conviction. But the West’s triumph grew out of much more than their leadership, indispensable though that was.

The West vanquished communism for two reasons. The economic and political model was so superior and this resulted in a massive disparity in economic growth and economic power between the West and the sclerotic communist bloc. Not unrelated to this, the communists themselves then suffered a system-wide crisis of conviction, made starkly evident when Polish soldiers refused to fire on Polish citizens to maintain a regime in power.

The Paris terror attacks indicate a new level of threat to Western democracies. Is it wrong to call this an existential threat, as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Attorney-General George Brandis have done?

There is a serious argument for seeing terrorism as just a kind of terrible criminality that can never prevail. The benefit of this analysis is that it is reassuring. And it doesn’t serve the terrorists’ propaganda by inflating their ­status.

But ultimately that analysis doesn’t hold water. It simply doesn’t correspond with reality.

The Paris attacks should be seen in the light of a multiplying and interlocking series of threats the West faces. At the same time, far from its model demonstrating superiority, the West is gripped by a double crisis of belief, and of governance.

The age of terror does, in fact, represent an existential threat to the West, but it does so in complex ways through its interaction with other threats.

Let’s enumerate them.

First, there is terrorism itself. This exists now in all Western societies and in all Muslim societies. This jihadist ideology is based on a coherent if extreme world view in which Islam is persecuted by the West and the drive is to achieve the implementation of a pure and fundamentalist Islam.

In Western societies, such as France or Britain or the US or Australia, most terrorists may represent pathology more than coherent belief, disturbed or alienated people preyed on by entrepreneurs of identity. But there is also a cohort of quite successful people who are drawn to the intensity of the Islamist ­belief.

In the Middle East and across North Africa there are tens of thousands of such people. This indicates the failure of the West since 9/11.

Western intelligence agencies have prevented terrorists from acquiring nuclear materials and have prevented a mass casualty attack in the West on the scale of 9/11. But the Islamists have been successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Like the communists before them, but more successfully than the communists, they have established a constituency for their basic paradigm amid a substantial number of people in Western societies and the Middle East.

More than that, they share in common with many non-violent Muslims a great deal of a common narrative that focuses on resentment and paranoia.

The Grand Mufti in Australia should not be demonised for his foolish comments in response to the Paris attacks. He is not remotely a supporter of justifier of terrorism. But when he nominates causes of the terror attacks as “racism, Islamophobia, curtailing freedoms through securitisation, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention”, he validates the paranoid and exaggerated sense of Muslim grievance on which the extremists thrive.

Everybody has their griev­ances. There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. Most of them are Hispanic. Many are Mexican. Mexicans could have a quite serious historical grievance about territory lost to Texas. Hispanics, legal and illegal, can well feel alienated in the US and picked upon in public debate. Yet there is no Mexican or Hispanic terrorist threat in the US.

Western Muslim leaders sometimes take refuge in arguing that because terrorism does not represent real Islam, it has nothing to do with Islam. Yet this ignores the obvious reality that this terrorism emerges from Islamic communities and, at least, from an interpretation of Islam.

So the first big threat to the West is the growing domestic terrorism threat. In time, the terrorists will become more sophisticated.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has talked of information suggesting terrorists in France have planned terror attacks with chemical weapons. If the terrorist movement continues to spread, the chances are that eventually it will acquire some nuclear or radioactive material. That may not happen for a long time but the terrorist intent to do this is ­evident.

This threat is subject to a massive force multiplier in the Middle East. Islamic State controls a big chunk of territory in Syria and Iraq. Calls for more assertive Western military action against Islamic State are mistaken. The calibrated air attacks were necessary to preserve the Iraqi state. But what is clear from the unfolding of the Syrian civil war is that the defeat of Islamic State is not the top priority of the Middle East’s resident powers, who see Iraq and Syria much more through the prism of the Sunni-Shia conflict than through the Western terrorism prism.

At the same time, the appalling human suffering of the Syrian civil war has sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from Syria and heading ultimately towards Europe.

Two critical books, The French Intifada, by Andrew Hussey, and Reflections on the Revolutionin Europe, by Christopher Caldwell, detail the overwhelming failure of integration of North African and Middle Eastern Muslim populations in France and in ­Europe generally.

The picture is, of course, complex. Most European Muslims are law-abiding. But Europe, unlike the US, Canada and Australia, has never had a successful ethos for ­integrating large numbers of ­immigrants from foreign cultures.

However, there is a deeper structural problem for the West here. All Western societies have become substantially post-industrial and services-oriented. The parts of their economies that are industrial are very hi-tech. Up until at least the middle of the past century, Western societies could provide masses of jobs for unskilled migrants, even if they did not speak the language of the new society. In Australia, migrants could work in the car plants, and the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and in the white goods industries, and many other places without much formal education and, indeed, even without much English.

Now such jobs simply do not exist. Unskilled immigrants with language problems typically spend years and years without a job. They are humanely supported by the welfare system. But this is a toxic recipe long term.

Even though the European welfare system itself is a massive attraction, and one of the reasons almost no Middle East refugees seek asylum in the Arab Gulf countries, over time welfare dependency breeds alienation and resentment. It feeds perfectly into the Islamist narrative of Western oppression.

The West cannot leave the Middle East to its own devices. The political culture of the Middle East generates hatred of the West routinely and finances Islamist extremism around the world.

More than that, when terrorists control territory, as Islamic State does, and as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, and possess even rudimentary tools of statehood, their ability to threaten the West is amplified. The conflict in Syria magnifies the terrorist threat in the West in an obvious fashion. Perhaps 30,000 foreign fighters have flocked to Syria to join Islamic State and similar groups. Thousands of these people come from the West. They will return to the West and conduct acts of terrorism, as we saw in Paris.

However, it is wrong to think that Islamist terrorism is the only, or perhaps even the main, strategic threat the West faces. But by entangling the West, especially the US, in the Middle East, to some extent exhausting US strategic resolve in the Middle East, and by making Americans loath to engage in security actions around the world, the total security order of the West is gravely weakened.

Opportunist states use American weakness to test the limits. Russia invades Ukraine. China claims and occupies disputed territories in the South China Sea. Iran fools Washington with a fake nuclear deal and powers on towards nuclear weapons. The system is beset with entropy. The centre cannot hold. The interaction of the terror threat with traditional geo-strategic issues makes both much more difficult for the West to ­manage. At the same time, the West is undergoing a genuine civilisational crisis of belief and of governance. This is the first generation in Western history that, substantially, is not sustained by any transcendent beliefs. The death of God is also in the West the death of purpose and, for many, the death of meaning.

Can a civilisation really sustain itself on the basis of an ideology of self-realisation and entitlement liberalism? If so, it will be the first time in history. Not only that, even if the model was internally sustainable, can it really produce a society vigorous enough to defend itself against these multiplying ­security challenges.

George Orwell once remarked that the English sleep easy in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do rough things on their behalf. Every soldier, every police officer, is ultimately prepared to sacrifice their life for an idea, a set of principles, a set of values, that they believe transcends their own experience and even their own mortality.

Western society is moving ever further away from the idea that anything beyond the individual can demand such sacrifice. The internal liberalism has never been more oppressive, while the ability to stand seriously against enemies is very much in question.

Straws in the wind even in Australia demonstrate grotesque elements to our civilisation. The Catholic Archbishop of Hobart is to be hauled before a thought police tribunal for the crime of propounding traditional Catholic sexual morality. Meanwhile, we rejoice in televised cage fights between women, which even our parents, much less our grandparents, would have regarded as the essence of barbarism.

At the same time demonstrators can march through the streets calling death to Israel, or even denouncing the evil of the Jews, without attracting legal penalty.

If a society has lost strong beliefs, can it really excite the transcendent loyalty of its own citizens, or of people who join it through migration?

At the same time there is well-documented crisis of governance across the Western world. No Western nation can balance its expenditures with its revenues. All are caught up in an entitlements ­crisis. Health and welfare spending are ballooning, so are unsustainable deficits. The prestige of democracy is under severe attack. For most of the Cold War, millions of people in the Third World, and in communist societies, yearned to live in nations governed as well as those of the West. It is a hard argument to make to a young banker or IT worker in Shanghai now that they would be better off if their government had the resolve and technical skill of Greece or Spain.

Put this all together and it’s not quite yet a full-blown crisis of a civilisation. But there’s a great deal of trouble ahead.

Reality Of Family Violence

Silent victims: both mothers and fathers can be violent

• BETTINA ARNDT
• THE AUSTRALIAN
• NOVEMBER 14, 2015

There was a funny discussion recently on the new ABC television show How Not to Behave. One of the hosts, Gretel Killeen, started complaining about “manspreading” — men sitting with their legs apart. “Men sitting with their legs so wide apart you’d think they are about to give birth,” she quipped.

The male host, Matt Okine, suggested men sit that way simply because it is more comfortable. “For whom?” asked Killeen. “For my balls,” Okine responded, with a funny explanation involving a grape ending up in a wine-making process after being squashed at the apex of two adjoining rulers.

Manspreading has attracted attention on public transport in New York because of men’s spread legs sometimes taking up more than their allocated seat space. The city ran a campaign: “Dude, Stop the spread, please. It’s a space issue.” Fair enough. It makes sense to promote consideration for others in public spaces — but, as always, the public discussion descended into talk about male aggression. It’s all about patriarchal men claiming their territory, sneered the feminist commentators.

Hardly a day goes by without some new story appearing that rubbishes men.

After being criticised non-stop for about a half-century, it’s probably time men had a right of reply, British journalist Peter Lloyd writes in his recent book, Stand By Your Manhood. Arguing that men have spent decades as the target in a long line of public floggings, Lloyd comprehensively but with surprising good humour outlines the “dismissive, patronising and skewed” narrative about heterosexual men that has dominated mainstream media and public policy for so long.

“So why is it that, today, there has never been a worse time to be a man?” Lloyd writes. “Rubbishing the male of the species and everything he stands for is a disturbing — and growing — 21st-century phenomenon. It is the fashionable fascism of millions of women — and many, many men, too. Instead of feeling proud of our achievements, we men are forced to spend our time apologising for them. When people chide us for not being able to multi-task or use a washing machine we join in the mocking laughter — even though we invented the damned thing in the first place.”

Lloyd’s examples of this skewed public discussion include many that should make any ­rational woman squirm.

Like his comment on the front-running US Democrat candidate: “Hillary Clinton once said — ­remarkably, with a straight face — that women have ‘always been the primary victims of war’, not the men who get their legs blown off in the battlefield in Iraq. Or Libya. Or Sudan.”

He mentions that in Nigeria, Boko Haram set fire to a school dormitory killing 59 sleeping boys — the third tragedy of its kind in just eight months. There wasn’t a peep about this, yet two months later when the same terrorist organisation kidnapped a group of schoolgirls the world mounted a viral campaign in minutes. “What gives? Why is boy’s life worth less — or worthless?” questions Lloyd.

Isn’t it odd, he asks, that men’s health is not given any priority, given that men die five years ear­lier in a life expectancy gap that has ­increased 400 per cent since 1920? Lloyd’s book includes an Australian example of the disparity in health funding. Data from our National Health and Medical Research Council shows a “spectacular gender gap” with “men’s health problems being allocated a quarter of the funding women’s research gets”. Lloyd quotes a News Corp article showing funding specifically targeting men’s health ranks 36th in health research priorities, just behind sexually transmissible infections.

Yet where the anti-male bias reaches its zenith is in the witch-hunt over domestic violence. In their determination to promote what is a very serious social problem — the violence of some men towards their partners — the zealots controlling public debate on this issue are absolutely determined to allow no muddying of the waters. Violence by women is dismissed as irrelevant, violence against men is routinely ignored or seen as amusing.

A few months ago a promo for a “screwball” comedy, She’s Funny That Way, ran in all our major cinemas. It featured three successive scenes showing different women slugging men in the face, followed by a woman sniggering, “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.” Audiences found that hilarious and there has been not one word of protest about the promotion.

Anyone speaking out about the circumstances that drive men to violence is reined in. Look at what has happened to Rosie Batty. Who could forget this extraordinary woman speaking with such compassion about her mentally ill former partner, Greg Anderson, within days of him murdering their young son. “No one loved Luke more than Greg, his father,” she said, explaining Anderson’s mental health had deteriorated after a long period of unemployment and homelessness.

How disappointing, then, to hear her speech at Malcolm Turnbull’s first major policy announcement, the launch of a $100 million women’s safety package. “This is a gender issue,” she said firmly, mouthing the party line — not one word of compassion for men, noth­ing about men and children who are victims of female violence.

Open your eyes, Rosie. The epidemic of violence you are rightly so concerned about isn’t just about men. Didn’t you notice Melbourne mother Akon Guode, who has been charged with murder after driving her car with her four small children into a lake? Or Donna Vasyli, arrested after her Sydney podiatrist husband was found with seven stab wounds.

Why is it that when a woman was charged last month with murdering her partner in Broken Hill, the story sunk without a trace and domestic violence was never mentioned in the media reports?

Around the country there are government departments struggling to cope with daily reports of child abuse, most often by their mothers. Yes, it is appalling that so many children grow up in homes terrorised by violent fathers, but abuse by mothers is surely part of the story of violence in the home if we are really concerned about protection of children and breaking the cycle of violence.

Bill Shorten’s wife, Chloe, recently gave a speech boasting about her husband’s and her mother’s commitment to the eradication of violence against women. Funnily enough her talk mentioned a book, Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear,written by the woman who set up the world’s first refuge, Erin Pizzey. Clearly Chloe Shorten’s speech writer isn’t up on the politics of domestic violence. Pizzey is now world famous for her strenuous campaign arguing that domestic violence is not a gender issue.

“I always knew women can be as vicious and irresponsible as men,” she wrote, describing her childhood experience with a mother who beat her with the cord from an iron. She points out that many of the women in her refuge were violent, dangerous to their children and others around them.

Pizzey’s honesty has attracted constant attacks — she was forced to flee her native England with her children after protests, threats and violence culminated in the shooting of her family dog.

The 76-year-old started her own “White Ribbon Campaign” to counter “40 years of lies”, the constant male-bashing misinformation that dominates the domestic violence debate. The feminist White Ribbon Campaign that operates here and overseas is a prime offender.

“We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women,” says Pizzey, arguing that the “insidious and manipulative philosophy that women are always victims and men always oppressors can only continue this unspeakable cycle of violence”.

This brave, outspoken woman is one of a growing number of domestic violence experts and scholars struggling to set the record straight about violence in the home. There’s Murray Straus, professor of sociology from the University of New Hampshire and editor of several peer-­reviewed soci­ology journals. Back in 1975 he first published research showing women were just as likely as men to report hitting a spouse. Subsequent surveys showed women often initiated the violence — it wasn’t simply self-­defence. These findings have been confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence summed up in Straus’s recent paper, Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner ­Violence.

It’s true that physical violence by women may cause fewer injuries on average because of differ­ences in size and strength, but it is by no means harmless. Women use weapons, from knives to household objects, to neutralise their disadvantage, and men may be held back by cultural prohibitions on using force towards a woman even in self-defence.

Straus’s review concludes that in the US men sustain about a third of the injuries from partner violence, including a third of the deaths from attacks by a partner. (In Australia, men made up a quarter of the 1645 partner deaths between 1989 and 2012.) And proportions of non-physical abuse (for example, emotional abuse) against men are even higher. Women are about as likely as men to kill their children and account for more than half of substantiated child maltreatment perpetrators.

(The world’s largest domestic violence research database published in the peer-reviewed journal Partner Abuse summarised 1700 peer-reviewed studies and found that in large population samples, 58 per cent of intimate partner ­violence reported involved both the female and male partner. See http://bit.ly/1GNOjoN.)

Strauss has spent much of his working life weathering attacks for publicising these unwelcome truths about violence, regularly being booed from the stage when he tried to present his findings. On two occasions the chairwoman of a Canadian commission into violence against women claimed publicly he was a wife-beater — after repeated requests she finally was forced to apologise to him.

Straus has received death threats, along with his co-­researchers, Richard Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz, with the latter the subject of a campaign to deny her tenure and attempts made to rescind her grant funding.

“All three of us became ‘non persons’ among domestic violence advocates. Invitations to conferences dwindled and dried up. Librarians publicly stated they would not order or shelve our books,” Gelles says.

It would be nice to report more civilised debate over this issue in Australia but, sadly, here too lies and bullying are par for the course. Look at what happened to Tanveer Ahmed. This Sydney psychiatrist has long written about taboo topics, such as reverse racism or denial in the Muslim community, which got up the nose of the Fairfax Media audience. Two years ago he ended up losing his column over plagiarism charges.

Ahmed had spent six years as a White Ribbon ambassador but this all came unstuck this year when he wrote an article for The Australian that pointed to the pernicious influence of radical feminists on public debate over domestic violence and suggested the “growing social and economic disempowerment of men is increasingly the driver of family- based violence”. Boy, did that bring them out in force. Fairfax columnist Clementine Ford condemned his dangerous message, which “prioritises men’s power over women’s ­safety”, adding that she didn’t have time for “men’s woe-betide-me feelings”. After a tirade of attacks on social media, White Ribbon asked him to step down, informing him that to be reinstated he would need to undergo a recommitment program. Shades of Stasiland, eh? There’s a fascinating twist to this whole saga. Heading up White Ribbon Australia’s research and policy group is Michael Flood, who is on the technical advisory group for the UN’s Partners for Prevention, which has produced research papers supporting the essential points Ahmed makes about the links between men’s social disempowerment and violence towards their partners.

Flood has spent his ­career focusing on men’s violence, from his early years teaching boys in Canberra schools about date rape through to alarmist papers suggesting pornography promotes male aggression, to his latest role as pro-feminist sociologist at the University of Wollongong. ­Des­pite his years in academe he’s happy to play fast and loose with statistics when it comes to demonising men.

“Boys think it’s OK to hit girls.” Back in 2008 this shocking news about teenager attitudes to violence led to headlines across the country. The source was a press release by White Ribbon Australia reporting on a publication by ­Flood and Lara Fergus that made the extraordinary claim: “Close to one in three (31 per cent) boys believe ‘it’s not a big deal to hit a girl’ .” Politicians jumped on the bandwagon, and everywhere there were calls for the re-education of these horrible, violent young men.

Flood and his colleagues had it totally wrong. The research actually found males hitting females was seen by virtually all young people surveyed to be unacceptable. Yet it was quite OK for a girl to hit a boy — 25 per cent of young people agreed with the statement “When a girl hits a guy, it’s really not a big deal”. When the error was brought to their attention, White Ribbon finally issued a correction and sent letters to newspapers, but of course none of these had the impact of the incorrect, misleading media headlines splashed right across the country.

A simple mistake? Well, perhaps, but there actually has been a steady stream of misleading statistics about domestic violence and it’s a full-time job trying to get them corrected. The person who has taken on that daunting task is Greg Andresen, the key researcher for the One in Three Campaign, which seeks to present an accurate picture of violence in the home. The Sydney man somehow manages to challenge much of the deluge of misinformation about domestic violence while also working a day job and rearing a young family.

The campaign’s reference to “one in three” refers to the proportion of family violence victims who are male. Our best data on this comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Personal Safety Survey in 2012 that found 33 per cent of people who had experienced violence by a current partner were male.

Confusingly, there’s another “one in three” figure constantly bandied about in domestic violence discussions, referring to the proportion of women who have experienced violence during their lifetime. This figure actually refers to all victims of incidents of physical violence, not just violence by partners, and about one in two men experience similar violence — as explained in an excellent report just released by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety.

The One in Three website (oneinthree.com.au) opens with a startling image of a man with battered nose and a shocking shiner plus the slogan, “It’s amazing what my wife can do with a frypan.” That certainly makes the point but the strength of this site is the solid statistical analysis — more than 20 pages dissecting misleading statistics aired over Australia’s media.

Here’s one example from ABC’s Radio National: “A recent survey in Victoria found family violence is the leading cause of death and ill health in women of child-bearing age.” Andresen draws on Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data to show the top five causes of death, disability and illness combined for Australian women aged 15 to 44 are anxiety and depression, migraine, type 2 diabetes, asthma and schizophrenia. “Violence doesn’t make the list,” he concludes.

The same nonsense about domestic violence being the leading cause of death in young women also appeared on Sky News last year, spurring psychologist Claire Lehmann to do her own analysis, which she published in her blog (http://bit.ly/1Km1xEg) on White Ribbon Day. Lehmann made it clear she supports the important work of the campaign but, she writes, “what I do not support, however, are dodgy statistics and false claims which belittle this good cause”.

In great detail she demonstrates how the dodgy statistics stem from misleading analysis of a VicHealth report and presents all the Australian data from the ABS and AIHW showing the claim is totally absurd. Yet the ABC, presented with all the data, still concluded the claim was accurate.

One of the tactics used by domestic violence campaigners is to highlight only men’s violence and leave out any statistics relating to women. “A quarter of Australian children had witnessed violence against their mother,” South Australia’s Victims of Crime commissioner Michael O’Connell thundered in August 2010.

This statistic came from a Young People and Domestic Violence study that showed almost an identical proportion of young people was aware of domestic violence against their fathers or stepfathers. Yet this barely got any mention in the media coverage.

Whenever statistics are mentioned publicly that reveal the true picture of women’s participation in family violence, they are dismissed with the domestic violence lobby claiming they are based on flawed methodology or are taken out of context.

But as Andresen says: “We use the best available quantitative data — ABS surveys, AIC (Australian Institute of Criminology) homicide stats, police crime data, hospital injury databases — all of which show that a third of victims of family violence are male. The same data sources are cited by the main domestic violence organisations but they deliberately minimise any data relating to male victims.”

A recent episode of the ABC’s satirical comedy Utopia showed public servants who ran the Nation Building Authority all in a twit working out how to knock back a Freedom of Information request. It made for great comedy watching the twists and turns of the bureaucrats seeking to refuse the request, assuming it was better to block it “just to be on the safe side”. Pretty funny considering this fictional FoI request turned out to relate to a harmless, long-finished multi-storey carpark.

The bureaucrats must run around like headless chooks when they receive the regular FoI requests sent to all government bodies regarding the long-term cover-up of the gender of child abuse perpetrators.

Imagine the scene at the AIHW when they received FOI requests relating to a long-term cover up regarding the gender of child abuse perpetrators.

The one time this body published this data was in 1996 and showed 968 male perpetrators to 1138 women. Since then FoI requests have produced data only from Western Australia, namely state Department for Child Protection figures that showed the number of mothers responsible for “substantiated maltreatment’’ between 2007 and 2008 rose from 312 to 427. In the same period the number of fathers reported for child abuse dropped from 165 to 155. Easy to see why bureaucrats would be nervous of figures like that.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk recently made headlines by calling for campaigns against domestic violence to include male victims.

Her comment was met by a barrage of complaints from domestic violence services warning her not to recognise male victims at the expense of women.

According to Pizzey, that’s the real issue. It is all about funding. In a 2011 article forThe Daily Mail she argued domestic violence had become a huge feminist industry, “This is girls-only empire building, and it is highly lucrative at that.”

Pizzey has spent most of her life speaking out about the lies being promoted by this industry to protect their funding base and begging audiences not to create a domestic violence movement hostile to men and boys.

“I failed,” she concludes sadly, but she hasn’t given up. Her message is clear: “The roots of domestic violence lie in our parenting. Both mothers and fathers can be violent; we need to acknowledge this. If we educate parents about the dangers of behaving violently, to each other and to their children, we will change the course of those children’s lives.”

As Lloyd so eloquently points out, domestic violence is only one of many issues where men are being demonised, where the exclusive promotion of women’s priorities leaves men with a dud deal. His book explores issues such as paternity fraud, schools failing boys, circumcision, becoming a weekend dad, men’s sex drive, pornography and the early death rate.

Ironic, considering how often we are told men still hold all the power.

It’s about time those male newspaper editors, politicians, bureaucrats and other powerful men started asking hard questions about the one-sided conversation that leaves so many men missing out. And maybe women who care about their brothers, sons, fathers, partners and male friends may care to join in.

The Real Agenda?

MERV BENDLE

Green Salvation’s Hellfire Preachers

Apocalypticism used to be packaged as the forever-looming punishment for man's sins against God. These days it is Gaia who has been sinned against, according to her legion of environmental Jeremiahs. Unlike the Old Testament prophet, these retailers of the woe to come richly deserve to be scorned

Once again, the Australian people are about to be sold out, offered up as human sacrifices on the altar of the new religion of Gaia. Having successfully staged a coup to dislodge climate change moderate Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, along with Greg Hunt and Julie Bishop, can now make their pilgrimage to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the objective of which is to establish a legally binding and universal agreement on draconian climate change action from all the nations of the world.

In this fashion they will deliver us all into the gaping, insatiable maw of the global warming racket, with hundreds of billions of dollars to be expropriated annually from the middle-classes of the West and funneled into financial institutions, giant rent-seeking corporations, UN bureaucracies, and Third World kleptocracies.

The mendacity, gullibility, and self-interest of these politicians and their accomplices (especially in academia and the media) is breathtaking, but ultimately they are building upon a carefully choreographed campaign of eco-apocalyptic agitation and propaganda that has been underway for decades. While the machinations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and similar agencies are notorious, the longer-term history of the campaign to enchain the people of the world under the pretense of preventing a climate catastrophe is extremely illuminating as it discloses the true nature of the crusade presently being waged.

Central to this strategy is the mobilization of a new form of secular apocalypticism centred on the dogmatic assertion that the world is about to end as a result of human industry and technological ingenuity. The tremendous momentum of this otherwise unlikely global warming panic exists because it has been able to build upon and exploit the long history of apocalypticism.

Traditional apocalypticism is a major religious phenomenon based on the belief that the world and/or all human civilisation will shortly come to a catastrophic end through Divine intervention. It has had a firm grip on the Western culture for some 2500 years, and has reached fever-pitch on many occasions, frequently inspiring the widespread conviction that Armageddon was imminent and that humanity would shortly face Divine judgement.

The 20th century was one of the most apocalyptically obsessed periods in history, driven by world wars, revolutions on a continental scale, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. This has had a massive impact on popular consciousness, as I have previously discussed in an academic article. Above all, it made people extremely susceptible as traditional apocalypticism took on a secular guise, “evoking world destruction and transformation through ecological disaster … and technological breakdown”, with both religious and secular versions “converging upon the belief that the accepted texture of reality is about to undergo a staggering transformation, in which long-established institutions and ways of life will be destroyed”, as Paul Boyer explained in When Time Shall Be No More (1992).

Remarkably, the central role to be played by the global warming myth in this agit-prop campaign was spelt out by some of its ideological leaders 22 years ago:

“Humans need a common motivation … either a real one or else one invented for the purpose. … In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”

So declared Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider in The First Global Revolution, A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome (1993). The book was a sequel to The Limits to Growth, the infamous 1972 jeremiad produced by the Club of Rome, an incredibly well-resourced NGO consumed by the belief that the world was about to end unless global political control was placed in the hands of a technocratic elite (i.e., themselves and their protégés). Despite none of its predictions coming true it was translated into 30 languages and sold over 30 million copies, becoming the best-selling environmental book in history.

It was able to exploit the popular hysteria and moral panics that surrounded such best-selling eco-apocalyptic polemics as Rachel Carson’s hysterical Silent Spring (1962), which led to a ban on DDT and other insecticides and resulted in the preventable deaths of between 60 and 80 million people (mainly in the Third World) who might otherwise have been protected from malaria and other diseases. Even more sensationalistic was Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968). This alleged that a global ‘population explosion’ would lead to hundreds of millions of people starving to death within 20 years. It intentions to terrify were emphasized by its cover, which depicted a black anarchist bomb with a lit fuse and the slogan: “The population bomb is ticking”.

Ehrlich was expanding on Paul and William Paddock’s eco-apocalyptic prophecy, Famine 1975! (1967) and this was followed by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which predicted that the Armageddon promised in the Bible would shortly bring global destruction; it consequently became one of the best-selling religious books in history. Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle; Nature, Man, and Technology (1971) declared that the impending environmental catastrophe was caused by capitalism and insisted that only global eco-socialism could save the world. Similarly, the communist historian, Lefton Stavrianos, argued in The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (1976) that environmental equilibrium would only be re-established when the present Imperialist world-order collapsed as the Roman Empire had done previously and the world entered a new ‘Dark Age’. He insisted this would sweep away the destructive elements of modern industrial society and purify the world.

The 1970s also saw the first appearance of catastrophic climate change theory. Ironically, this new form of eco-apocalypticism focused on the insistence that the earth was confronting a new Ice Age caused by global cooling! A NASA scientist, Stephen Schneider argued in 1971 that industrialization was producing high levels of atmospheric dust and that this would prevent sunlight reaching the earth’s surface and cause a temperature drop of some 3.5 degrees Celsius. Science News concluded in its March 1975 cover story that such a percipient decline would trigger an Ice Age, and this assessment was confirmed by a 1975 report from the US National Academy of Sciences. Subsequently, Lowell Ponte publishedThe Cooling in 1976, carefully describing the global effects of such a catastrophe, while the BBC produced a documentary on the subject. Later, the resurgence of Cold War tensions later provoked Jonathan Schell to publish The Fate of the Earth (1982), a best-seller that depicted the annihilation of most life on earth in a nuclear war, with a ‘nuclear winter’ freezing the planet and leaving only “a republic of insects and grass”.

It was at this time also that Jack Sepkoski and David M. Raup published “Mass extinctions in the marine fossil record” in Science (March 1982), identifying five mass extinction events in the history of the world, headlined by the demise of the dinosaurs. This eventually overthrew the prevailing gradualist model of planetary history and established the theoretical foundations for the central eco-apocalypticist idea that the earth could undergo sudden, cataclysmic and irreversible physical and environmental change.

The apocalyptic mood intensified further in the 1980s with the appearance of AIDS, which brought the ‘Sexual Revolution’ of the Sixties to a screeching halt and led celebrity opinion-makers to proclaim the approach of a carnal Armageddon. This was exemplified by the 1987 on-air declaration of Oprah Winfrey that “research studies now project that one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years – believe me!”, as Simon Pearson recalls in The End of the World: From Revelation to Eco-Disaster (2006). In Australia this moral panic was accompanied by the infamous ‘Grim-Reaper’ TV advertisements which depicted the average heterosexual family (including grandma and her grand-daughter) being bowled over by AIDS. Building on the pre-existing dread of nuclear annihilation, life increasingly was seen as vulnerable and contingent.

The 1980s also saw the emergence of the Gaia Hypothesis, which restored the religious dimension to eco-apocalypticism. It was first formulated by the biologist James Lovelock and popularized in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), followed by many other books by Lovelock, including such panic-inducing tomes as The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006) and The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can (2009).

According to this new form of pagan theology, the earth (‘Gaia’) is a transcendent superorganism, and is indeed the largest known living being, with its own super-complex nervous system (of which humanity is a small but significant part). As such, in a quasi-Divine fashion, Gaia deserves and demands reverence while severely punishing (indeed, making extinct) those species, e.g., humanity, that threaten its equilibrium or survival. Gaia theology quickly became a New Age cult and remains extremely influential throughout the environmental movement.

(To his credit, Lovelock has proven to be more of a genuine scientist than a theologian,recently conceding the rate of global warming has not been as predicted: “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he observed in a 2012 interview on MSNBC. He also criticized environmentalists for treating global warming like a religion, advocates fracking as a major source of energy, and dismisses the claims that modern economies could be powered by wind turbines as meaningless drivel.)

The 1980s also saw the rise to pre-eminence of the Deep Ecology movement and related eco-extremism.  Deep Ecology was invented by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess and is based on the premise that human life has no priority over non-human life, such as animals, plants, amoeba, or bacteria, or even over objects in the natural environment –mountains, wilderness and the like. Consequently, Deep Ecologists demand a 90% decrease in the human population if Gaia is to be saved. Naess visited Australia in the early 1980s and had a massive impact, inspiring the fledgling Greens and the floundering communist parties which went on to construct the watermelon form of leftism: green on the outside, red on the inside. These activists became and remain extremely influential in universities and schools, and some sit in our Parliament.

Other eco-apocalyptic extremists from this period that had significant influence on Australia include the Earth Liberation Front and Earth First! eco-terrorist organizations, which advocated economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare in what they saw as a fight to the death with modern industrial society for the honour of Gaia. Consequently, for many years they engaged in ‘eco-tage’, ‘monkey-wrenching’, and tree spiking, and also (for obscure reasons) waged a war on SUV dealerships in the United States. Prior to the 9/11 attacks they were on top of the FBI list of domestic terrorist threats.

The eco-apocalyptists found their most influential ally in Al Gore, who published in 1989 Al Gore published an opinion piece in the New York Times that likened industrial society to a drug addict continually in need of a fix to feed its self-destructive habit. He also compared the threat of global warming to the rise of Nazism. We face, he declared, an “ecologicalKristalnacht” and an “environmental holocaust”. Later, his eco-apocalypticism took full flight in Earth in the Balance (1992) which insisted that global warming was “the most serious threat we have ever faced”, discounting true catastrophes like the Black Death, which killed half the population of Europe in a matter of a few years, or the Mongol invasions, which nearly destroyed the European and Islamic civilizations. He even overlooked the scourge of 20^th century totalitarianism, which accounted for several hundred million lives.

In this Gore gave voice to one of the central conceits of eco-apocalyticism – its insistence that the most critical moment in history is right now and that the present time is always just one step away from Armageddon and the Final Judgement.

Meanwhile, the leading theorist of global cooling, Stephen Schneider, adroitly re-invented himself as a leading theorist of global warming as this was adopted as the preferred scenario by the Club of Rome and other NGOs and agencies. In Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? (1989) he predicted a 5 degree Celsius rise in temperature by 2050, sufficient to severely degrade most societies on the planet. Predictably, the IPCC (which was constituted by the UN in 1988) declared such catastrophic global warming a reality in its first report in 1990 and this set the scene for the developments of the past quarter-century, including the Kevin Rudd-led hysteria leading up to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Schneider also made some revealing comments in 1989 about how he saw his role as a scientist committed to the ideology of global warming:

“As scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method [but] our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change [means that] we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

This signaled a paradigm shift in the role expected of scientists with a significant input into the policy process and the political sphere – it was henceforth seen as acceptable and even required that scientists deliberately mislead the public and obscure the implications of their research if it conflicted with pre-determined political outcomes.

(In 2006 Schneider served as an advisor to the South Australian Government on climate change and renewable energy policies. He was instrumental in increasing the state’s reliance on ‘renewables’ to over 30 %, with predictable effects on its economy.)

It was after these developments that The First Global Revolution with its similarly revealing confession appeared in 1993. This was in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The Club and other NGOs saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to seize control of the global political agenda, initiating what they saw literally as “the first global revolution”. With the defeat of communism it declared a new enemy was needed to mobilize the masses under elite control:

“The need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor … With the disappearance of the traditional enemy [communism] the sudden absence of traditional adversaries has left governments and public opinion with a great void to fill. New enemies have to be identified, new strategies imagined, and new weapons devised”.

Global warming was to be that contrived enemy.

The strategy therefore was to move eco-apocalypticism to the centre of global political concern. Freed from the spectre of communism the global masses could now be terrified into action in a new war, this time against carefully contrived threats of global environmental catastrophe. Nothing exemplifies this better than Gore’s Oscar-winning eco-apocalyptic documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), with its images of the polar ice-caps and enormous glaciers expiring while hurricane victims scurry for shelter. America, he declared, must lead the fight against global warming, just as it allegedly did against slavery (?!).

This was accompanied by Alan Weisman’s non-fiction celebration of a post-human world inThe World Without Us (2007). This celebrates in excruciating detail what would happen to the natural and built environment once human beings are removed from the world. As The Guardian’s review (3/5/2008) exalted, people “learn during the course of this book, to feel good about the disappearance of humanity from the Earth”. It is a measure of the penetration of eco-apocalyptic ideas that Western intellectuals, enjoying the greatest freedoms and highest standards of living in history, nevertheless think that “there is something about a description of our own extinction that pulls at the heart”, and muse about “what is it that is so seductive about the idea of complete human extermination?”

Notoriously, Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister around this time and eagerly adopted the eco-apocalyptic perspective, casting himself as the global savior at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, maintaining the Prime Ministerial jet on stand-by at Canberra airport, ready for him to intervene at a moment’s notice in the conference negotiations, in order to save the world. Now, all too conveniently, Australia has another true believer as Prime Minister, eager to pay homage to Gaia at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in the City of Light.

While the alleged objective of this campaign is to prevent alleged catastrophic global warming its real aim is to enmesh countries like Australia in a legally binding framework that would require a vast re-distribution of wealth away from economically successful nations like Australia, while also establishing the basis for a form of global governance that would entail the surrender of national sovereignty.

Led by corrupt UN agencies, unaccountable NGOs, wealthy foundations, mendacious politicians, opportunistic academics, and Third World kleptocracies, the eco-apocalypticists are committed totally to re-shaping the world and its people into a Gaia-friendly and easily administered mass.

Indeed, despite the emphasis on environmental threats the real target of the campaign has always been human beings, as The First Global Revolution made clear:

“In their totality and their interactions these phenomena [global warming, pollution, famine, etc.] do constitute a common threat [but] all these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

In this respect modern environmentalism is no different to the earlier forms of totalitarianism, with their fierce desire to re-make humanity according to their fanatical conceptions of race and class. Where its obsessions differ from those of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot is in its anti-humanism, as exemplified by Gaia theology, Deep Ecology, and the other misanthropic ideological tendencies present throughout the movement.

Ultimately, the role of apocalypticism as a major cultural and political force throughout history should make people pause and examine carefully all suggestions that the world is facing extinction or a cataclysmic global upheaval. At the very least people should be skeptical, and so should their representatives. However, such reflection and skepticism is difficult or even dangerous, because intolerance of all dissent and doubt is a core characteristic of apocalyptic systems of thought, and apocalypticists are always eager to punish those who question their prophesies.

The tragedy of the accelerating moral panic about alleged global warming is that we know a great deal about the history of traditional apocalypticism and the devastation it has wrought in the past, and yet we seem unable to place the contemporary eco-apocalyticism in that historical context and see it for what it really is: a fundamentally religious phenomenon being exploited by very powerful interests intent on enchaining the world under their control.

What Marriage is

AUGUST 14, 2015

The Birdwatcher’s Guide To Marriage

TYLER BLANSKI

At last, here is an easy-to-follow guide for identifying a real marriage that exposes the new imitations to be, well, imitations. Essential for the 321 million Americans who have a biological mother and father, this new guide includes stunningly accurate illustrations, important field marks and behaviors, plus expert advice on identification basics that will help readers judge for themselves: what is the definition of marriage? Compact and comprehensive, the Birdwatchers Guide To Marriage is an excellent choice for the married and not-so-married.

As any birder can tell you, sometimes the most obvious things are the hardest to see, and marriage is no exception. That’s why so many Americans are taking marriage back to its basics. Having now explored all the possibilities of what a marriage could be—straight or gay, permanent or temporary, sexual or asexual, monogamous or polygamous, adding or subtracting ad infinitum—we rediscovered an understanding of marriage that’s so old (no sexual technology, no operations, no Supreme Courts necessary!) it’s new again.

Pull Out Your Binoculars: Two ViewsWhether you’re new to birding or a seasoned expert, it’s safe to say that everyone believes in marriage equality: we believe government should treat all marriages equally. What we might disagree about is what marriage is. Ken Myers, host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, has observed that when a government takes steps to protect or preserve or prevent some activity or condition, it must first be able to define the thing in question. So when a government decides to protect wetlands, for example, it must first define what a wetland is, what qualifies a certain space to be a “wetland.” So also with marriage. If a government should provide public support for marriage, that government must have some agreed upon definition of what marriage is.

So, what constitutes a marriage? The authors of What is Marriage? have observed that the debate is primarily between two views of marriage: the conjugal view and the revisionist view.

Why does marriage exist? The conjugal view gives one answer: babies. Marriage exists because humans reproduce sexually, and human offspring are raised best with both the biological mother and father. Although not all marriages produce offspring, and although marriage has many other goods and purposes, marriage is different inkind from other relationships because other relationships do not so suitably conceive and rear children. Marriage came into being because humans reproduce sexually, and because human children require an unquantifiable amount of nurturing and education. So marriage is the institution that binds one man and one woman as husband and wife to be mother and father to any children that are born of that union.

Against this, the revisionist view is that—regardless of what it once was—marriage today is a loving emotional bond, a “sexual-romantic companionship” or “domestic partnership,” one distinguished from other relationships not in kind but by degree, by the intensity of emotional or sexual fulfillment. In the phrasing of same-sex advocate John Corvino, marriage is a relationship with “Your Number One Person.”

So. Is marriage gay, straight, or both? Is marriage monogamous or polygamous? Is marriage the conjugal union of one husband and one wife for life, normally for the procreation and provisioning of progeny, for the vitality and health of society … or is marriage simply a sexual-romantic bond between whomever, whenever, and for as long as they feel like it?

Let’s say a group of people, however mixed, claims to be married. Are these lovebirds really married? Is this a real marriage or an imitation? Here are four simple questions that will help you spot a real marriage when you see one.

1) Can It Be Consummated?Why is marriage sexual? Marriage is a wide-ranging cooperation in domestic life, but nesting is not the distinctive feature of marriage. Unlike friendships, which are a relationship of hearts and minds, and unlike college roommates who simply share a living space, what makes a marriage so distinctive and unique is that it is also a bodilyrelationship. Robert P. George reminds us that, historically, a marriage was not considered valid until it had been consummated by the act that fulfills the behavioral conditions of procreation, until the husband and wife had become “one flesh.”

How can two people become “one flesh”? Two human beings genuinely become one flesh in the generative act. We digest our food, we walk, we think, as separateindividuals. But sexual reproduction is different. Sexual intercourse is a single act, but it is performed by two human beings—not as individuals—but as mated pairs, as male and female. Mating doesn’t always produce children: our law has always understood that, and it has never treated infertility as a barrier to marriage or as a ground for legal annulment; but it has always treated non-consummation as ground for a legal annulment. A marriage is not complete until it is consummated.

Marriage is different from other kinds of sexual or romantic unions not only in degreeof intensity, but different in kind: it can produce and rear offspring.

This does not mean that sexual intimacy and pleasure are not meaningful in themselves, for even when conception is not achieved, the bodily union is. Two men, two women, and groups cannot achieve bodily union for there is no function toward which their bodies can coordinate. Although same-sex partners can engage in acts that lead to orgasm, they cannot become a single reproductive principle; they cannot unite in a way that even infertile couples can unite in acts that fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation.

It is only because a man and a woman can become a mated pair—and not because humans long for intimacy or friendship or release from sexual tension—that marriage came into being. Yet the Supreme Court’s reasoning turns marriage into an especially intense emotional relationship with Your Number One Person, and a definition so subjective, so dependant on personal feelings, tastes, or opinions, is hardly viable for society. Marriage is more than roosting.

What are we left with now that the Supreme Court has abandoned the conjugal definition of marriage and embraced the idea of marriage as a sexual-romantic companionship to Your Number One Person? We cannot explain why marriage should be a sexual relationship. We cannot explain why two people couldn’t just as well consider the central integrating feature of their marriage to be mixing cocktails together or worm-fishing or some other non-sexual interest.

But why, then, should the state be involved at all? Government is not ordinarily invested in people’s relationships—of ordinary friends, or siblings, or cousins, or tennis players, or book clubs. Even more, if marriage is just a commitment to Your Number One Person, why should a marriage be sexual?

Government cares about civilization, and marriage is the foundation of civilization. Government does not care about the romantic partnerships to Number One Persons. As author Ryan T. Anderson puts it, the government is not in the “intense companionship business.” Historically, government has been concerned about marriage because marriage is connected to procreation and child rearing in a very natural and fundamental way that is good for society.

Here’s a bird’s-eye view: Every single child is begotten of a man and born of a woman, and every single child has the right to be raised by his biological mother and father. Who are we to preemptively deprive them of this right by normalizing gay marriage?

2) Is It Two?A flock of geese may come in any number. Not so with marriage. Why is marriage a bond of two people, and not five or eight? Again, however strange it might sound to us today, the short answer is babies. How many people does it take to make a baby?

It’s true: a husband and wife share a common life that is not only physical but also financial, emotional, moral, intellectual, and spiritual. But the comprehensiveness of this sharing is distinct from other kinds of relationships in its unique suitability for begetting and rearing children.

Marriage, historically understood, is a union recognized by society that formalizes legal rights and obligations between the husband and wife, the parents and child, and the family and community. This recognition is not only necessary for the benefit of the spouses, but especially for the benefit of any children the marriage might produce.

Three or four people may choose to sexually stimulate one another, but they cannot become a single reproductive principle. The idea that marriage is the conjugal union of one husband and one wife emerges out of human nature and is therefore universal. Only one man and one woman can become “one flesh.”

The revisionist definition of marriage cannot explain why marriage should be the union of two and only two people, and not three or more people in so-called “polyamorous relationships,” since three or five people can feel a close emotional bond and can decide that they like to express their emotional feelings for each other in mutually agreeable sexual play.

Birds of a feather flock together. It’s only natural that people with the same tastes and interests will be found together. But marriage is not a grouping of any number of persons for any number of reasons because every single human child has one biological mother and one biological father, and unless there is a tragedy (either abuse or abandonment or death), it is best for human children to be raised by their biological parents.

Husband and wife are sexually complementary. This is what makes them so suitable for a shared life as spouses and for being the parents of their children, conferring upon them the natural benefit of both maternal and paternal contributions to child rearing.

Besides, trying to be 100 percent committed to more than one person in a “polygamous marriage” could never result in a truly equal relationship. Despite the best of intentions, multiple lovers and children by multiple spouses always leads to competition and disharmony within the “family.” This is why monogamy (being married to one person at a time) is a good idea.

3) Is It Exclusive?“Whose child is this?” It’s an important question for any society, and the vow of fidelity helps to answer that question. Historically, sexual infidelity has been grounds for divorce because sexual infidelity threatens the one thing that makes marriage so unique and so distinct from other kinds of relationships: making babies. For example, if a wife is sexually unfaithful to her husband and a child is conceived, a very problematic question rises: who is the father?

George Gilder makes a compelling case in his book Men and Marriage that when a child is born the mother is always there. Biology takes care of that. But will the father be there? Will the biological father stay with the biological mother and help that mother raise and nurture their child, conferring on him or her the enormous benefit of being brought up in the committed bond of the union that brought that child into being? Biology does not take care of that. If that happens, it’s because culture makes it happen. And the way a culture secures for its children the benefit of a father and a mother in a committed bond is marriage.

So marriage is sexually exclusive. By vowing fidelity, each partner makes it public that they are no longer sexually available for others. Fidelity not only encourages spouses to commit to raising the children that this marriage has produced in a stable union, but it also ensures the emotional commitment of the bond. Marital jealousy is real, and fidelity helps to preserve trust and peace—for the parents and the children.

According to the revisionist view of marriage, there is no ground or principle—opinion, maybe, but no principle—for why marriages should be sexually closed, rather than open. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; it’s better to be content with what you have than to risk losing everything by seeking more. A proverb, however, is not a principle. According to gay marriage ideology, there is no principle for why there should be fidelity and not promiscuity apart from feelings. But feelings wax and wane, and marriage is “till death do us part.”

4) Is It Permanent?“Till death do us part.” Who would ever promise something so … permanent? Because humans are not sharks. Marriage has historically included a vow of permanence because the children who come into being as the result of human sexual reproduction do not come into being like baby sharks, who simply swim away from their mothers as soon as they are born. Human children need to have their diapers changed, they need to be nursed, swaddled, loved, and educated. The idea that marriage is permanent is linked to human nature.

The stability of the marital bond is beneficial for the spouses themselves, since a commitment to a lifelong bond is a power incentive to give the marriage your best, but it is especially beneficial for their children. A child’s sense of belonging and security is directly linked to the stability of his parents’ marriage. Even more, a child benefits enormously from receiving both the maternal and paternal contributions in education. Biological parents have a unique incentive to raise their children well. Many parents fail to do the best they can, of course, but there is no other bond which can be relied on to provide a greater possibility that children will be raised by people committed to them than the parental bond.

—And parenting never stops. Even when children become adults and fly the nest, the fact remains that they still have a biological mother and father, and that the committed bond of that union is a positive good in their lives. Except for in the case of abuse, abandonment, or sexual infidelity, the stability and harmony of life-long marriage is good for both the husband and the wife and any children they might have.

Without admitting that marriage and children are linked, no account can be given according to the revisionist understanding of why marriage should involve a pledge of permanence as opposed to being a temporary partnership for as long as the love lasts. But a diamond is forever. And marriage is for life.

The Misidentification of MarriageIs it a friendship or a love affair? Is it a brotherhood or a partnership or a marriage? It’s time to take your birding to the next level, and these four questions will help for fast identification in the field. The Supreme Court’s ruling is not a tiny tweak that simply helps gay people to consider their relationships as marriages. We are talking about a fundamental misidentification—an abolition—of marriage, because it would abolish all the historic norms and criteria and principles of matrimony that make it so suitable and fruitful and healthy for the great project of child-rearing and human flourishing.

This guide fully admits that a real marriage is not necessarily a good or happy marriage. The degree to which married couples respect and love one another differs, and the level of mutual support varies as much as the level of enthusiasm. But even the worst of marriages are more real than the imitations. However well intentioned or happy other kinds of relationships may be, if they are not a bond between one man and one woman as husband and wife to be sexually faithful, to be committed for life, and to be mother and father to any children born of that union, then they are not a marriage.

I think everyone can agree that the new definition of marriage is pretty indefinite. Two guys? Five women? A woman and two cats? Cohabitating sisters? The book club that feels they’re being treated like second-class citizens? The soccer team that wants to adopt a child? Hey—love is love!

Love is love, and a platitude is a platitude. The question in the so-called “gay marriage debate” is not about if gay people love each other, but about if love is enough to make any relationship a marriage. That’s why the Birdwatcher’s Guide To Marriage is not directly about who gets to marry, but about what marriage is.

Marriage is one of our greatest natural resources. If we redefine marriage to be something other than a conjugal union of husband and wife for the procreation and rearing of children, the meaning of marriage simply dissolves. All of this, of course, will be seen as bigoted and closed-minded and insane, but in the end marriage is the only thing that keeps humanity going—at least when it comes to the birds and the bees.