The importance of marriage in society

During the past 50 years, growing numbers of academicians became disenchanted with the family – and marriage in particular.  These academicians slowly, but surely, persuaded ever-larger segments of the past two generations that marriage requires neither a man, nor a woman, and has no necessary connection to procreation.  Rather, marriage is now described as a utilitarian concept that can (and should) be reconstructed to satisfy the longings of autonomous individuals, who are entitled to define their intimate relationships without the fetters of established sexual and social norms, including those related to human reproduction. Gender, in turn, has been similarly deconstructed.  Professors (and politicians) now insist that gender is a “social construct” that is “mutable,” “changeable” and not “essential” to “individual identity.” “Fatherhood,” when and if acknowledged, is described in modern classrooms as a relic of patriarchal oppression, while international human rights organizations – including the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women -- criticize “motherhood” as a “harmful traditional stereotype.”

In short, in recent years, rather than recognizing the family as the “fundamental group unit of society,” various actors (including UN agencies) have concluded that the family is merely a social construct and (perhaps) a harmful construct at that.   Accordingly, numerous international documents now recite a near-talismanic phrase: “In different cultural, political and social systems, various forms of the family exist.”

On one level, such language is absolutely correct. The family has always included single-parent households, households involving stepchildren, and those embracing aunts, uncles, grandparents and other inter-generational relationships. But the modern international assertion is more expansive – the “various forms of the family” now have nothing to do with “[t]he right of men and women of marriageable age to marry,” as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Furthermore, the “various forms” not only have nothing to do with the union of a man and a woman, they also have no relationship to human reproduction. Instead of the union of a man and a woman, centered on the bearing and rearing of children and predicated on law and ages-old social custom, the modern deconstructed family has become an amorphous concept defined solely by personal choice.  The family – thus understood – can no longer play the role assigned to it by the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

An individually defined, socially variable, and norm-free “family” can hardly serve as the “fundamental group unit of society.”  A “fundamental group unit,” by its very nature, must possess clear parameters and boundaries, an established mission, expected outcomes, and governing norms.  A “family” based solely on personal (and variable) choices, freed from any boundaries, mission, outcomes or norms, cannot serve as the foundation for an ordered (and orderly) civil society.  As a result, in place of the family, the foundation of modern society has increasingly become a mutable morass of newly invented legal rules enforced by judges, lawyers, prisons, reformatories and various other enforcement personnel.

As the family declines (as it did in Nazi Germany), government power grows and the international community moves – one step at a time – from freedom toward totalitarianism.  Oddly (and tragically) enough, all of this has taken place because of society’s increasing (and unthinking) obeisance to the modern totem of “individual autonomy.”  A society composed of completely autonomous individuals, it seems, requires hordes of policeman (and scads of laws) to keep the unruly and autonomous herd of humanity from running complete amuck.

I believe the great men and women who founded the United Nations System in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s would be genuinely dismayed that the fundamental group unit they established as the necessary foundation for peace and social progress has been ignored, criticized and (perhaps) fatally deconstructed.   Nevertheless, in the first decade of this new millennium, there is indeed reason for hope.

I will make three observations.  First, regardless of theological and cultural differences, the world’s great faiths share a common understanding of the natural family. Second, this shared understanding is supported, not just by religious beliefs, but by the preponderance of social scientific evidence.  Third, and finally, by returning to the foundation left by those who drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we can make real that noble generation’s promise of peace. By building upon the norms established during the founding period of the UN System, we will not only strengthen the family—we can also bring peace to the world.

-- Professor Richard Wilkins’s paper “Strengthening the ‘Natural and Fundamental Group Unit of Society’” presented at the 8th Annual World Family Policy Forum, 2007