Same-Sex Marriage and the Abyss of Nihilism

March 18th, 2013

We cannot embrace same-sex marriage and live in continuity with our past as a civilization. To embrace it is to deny that tradition, revelation, reason, and nature have any authority over us.

What would the triumph of same-sex marriage mean for American civilization? Americans disagree on this question. Liberals think of it merely as an incremental step toward justice understood as equality. For them, homosexuals have been unjustly excluded from marriage, and now they no longer will be. Nothing more momentous is involved.

Conservatives, on the other hand, think of same-sex marriage not as an extension of marriage but as a radical redefinition of it. To tamper with the very definition of a fundamental social institution like marriage, they warn, is to invite all manner of threatening consequences.

The conservatives are closer to the truth than the liberals on this question, but their foreboding does not go far enough. To embrace same-sex marriage is to plunge headlong into the abyss of nihilism. It is to step into a realm in which there are no longer any solid or reliable public standards of judgment as to what is right and wrong, just and unjust. It goes without saying, I hope, that this is not what the defenders of same-sex marriage intend. It is nevertheless the end toward which their position tends.

Tradition plays a larger role in some societies than in others. Put another way, some societies are more dynamic and forward-looking than others. Nevertheless, tradition is an important source of public standards in all societies. No community can afford to be so “progressive” as to disregard tradition entirely. To do so would be, in principle, to embrace chaos, since it would require constant renegotiation of the rules by which its members interact.

There is, however, no older or more widespread notion than that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. It would be no exaggeration to call this definition a tradition of the human race. It is safe to say that a society that rejects this definition has also, whether it wants to admit it or not, rejected the idea that tradition should exert any authority over the present.

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