Roads to Where We Are From Where We Were

I apologize at the outset for the title. I suspect there are many reasons we are where we are, with a mob culture controlled by progressive elites who will brook no dissent in their quest for state-inflicted individualism, as ably dissected by Mark Regnerus, here.

And it is one of Regnerus's comments which got me thinking about the Indiana hysteria (again...or perhaps it never left). In the course of his article, he states:

We family conservatives can cry foul all we want but it’s possible that what we really want is what we cannot have—a marrying culture, together with all the desired fruit of its destruction: greater freedom, security (from family violence), a social safety net, and economic and educational opportunity. We know well the undesirable consequences of the flight from marriage. But it’s a mixed bag, for sure.

The "flight from marriage." That's the phrase which really set me to pondering. As an attorney who practiced "family law," at one time much more than I (thankfully) do now, I saw...nay experienced...the effects of what R.R. Reno and Charles Murray (and others) have noted, that the liberal cultural policies encouraged (imposed?) by the elites among us have resulted in a completely fragmented lower class.

When I say "fragmented," I refer to the state of the family among the lower classes. For instance, this New York Times article noted that (in 2012), among millennials, out-of-wedlock birth was becoming the norm. While the article speculated that this occurrence was becoming more middle class, if we use college as a proxy, women with no college education had 51% of births outside marriage in the 20-30 age range, while women with some college had 34% and women who had completed college had 8% outside of marriage. While we may also speculate as to how many of these women were in long-term, non-marital relationships and unmarried, it becomes much less likely when reports from that same year indicate that Indiana child support was 2.3 billion dollars in collective arrears - and some estimations place the payors at 90% men. This would seem to indicate that a large percentage of unwed mothers are dragging ex-boyfriends to court for child support; not a usual occurrence when the parents are living together. Of the 20-some most-wanted here, 3 are women.   (Naturally, this does not count post-divorce child support, but this is almost certainly a small percentage of the debt.)

Where am I going with this, you ask?

We who are conservative are used to thinking of the cultural trends which helped create the situation in which Indiana deadbeat parents owe $2.3 billion in child support as overwhelmingly progressive. And, of course, they are often pushed by progressives - I think here of no-fault divorce, easy contraception, easy abortion, over-lessening of the stigma against unwed mothering, "no-guilt" sex, and so forth. And yet, one would be hard pressed to find many Christians now who are not in favor of contraception and divorce, and, while somewhat harder pressed, there are a great deal of Christians who support abortion (whether so-called difficult cases or not). It is also broadly true that mainline Protestant churches supported contraception and abortion during the late 1900s. As one historian notes here:

Even leaders of “conservative” denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention would welcome as “a blow for Christian liberty” the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that legalized abortion as a free choice during the first six months (and in practice for all nine months) of a pregnancy. Not a single significant Protestant voice raised opposition in the 1960′s and early 1970′s to the massive entry of the U.S. government into the promotion and distribution of contraceptives, nationally and worldwide.

While we may dispute who said what, and when, it does not seem likely that the historian is far off the mark in noting that the vast majority of Protestant denominations supported the development of contraception and abortion, if not through silence, then by outward encouragement. This continues even now as many mainline congregations embrace gay marriage.

This is one of our roads to the present difficulty in Indiana. Among the reasons for passage of the Indiana RFRA is to give Christians offering services in the community the ability to refuse to provide services for activities with which they disagree - so, to borrow a recent story, a pizza shop owner would refuse to cater a gay wedding, due to disagreement with the activity. So much to the good. However, one must wonder, would the same pizza shop (or florist or photographer or baker) have refused to cater a wedding of two divorced individuals? Of two people who proudly proclaimed they had been sterilized? (Think that people do not talk about "getting cut" with random acquaintances?)

I would be willing to bet - and this is admittedly anecdotal and hearsay - that there would not often be a similar refusal of service. I do believe that a baker ought to be able to refuse to make a wedding cake to be served at a gay marriage ceremony (though I am not sure that, absent writing on the cake, this would be a serious moral issue for a baker to do). But the hour is late - the Christian acceptance of contraception and divorce makes the gay marriage issue seem like attempting to cork the Titanic's hull. The vessel is full of seawater and headed to the bottom, partly because Christians abandoned the desire to steer, gave power to the pharmaceutical companies over their reproduction, and gave the State the power to adjudicate its divorces. We must stand on Christian teaching, but we have abandoned much of it. How could it not look like discrimination when we recognize in the Bible and in Christian tradition strong prohibitions against divorce and contraception and sodomy and homosexual sex and pornography and we have ceded the territory, or actively assisted in enemy colonization, for so long?

For too long, we have only been partial Christians when it comes to sex and marriage. If we are to have a moral standing left, and there is very little time, we must be full Christians. For otherwise, our moral proclamations against participating in gay marriage ceremonies are meaningless when we willingly assist with adultery and contracept our own children out of existence.