Marriage and society

Flipping through TV channels to escape re-runs of old news that was bad and uninformative enough first time around, I discovered Princeton Professor Robert George on EWTN talking with Colleen Carroll Campbell about marriage. I stopped what I was doing to listen, George being one of my favorite scholars in America. They were talking about what marriage is intended to be, because frankly, this culture needs to be reminded what that role is. What immediately caught my attention…other than George being on Faith & Culture…was hearing “the government cannot make good citizens”, which resonated as….well, true. But who ever puts it so clearly?

George went on to say government can make rules to keep citizens from being bad, or keep them in line, but virtue is only taught within the family. He exposed the fallacies of secular arguments, arguments for new definitions of what constitutes a marriage. And George, as always, followed the arguments through to their logical conclusions and showed how they break down in the process.

This exercise in reasoning about traditional marrage is repeated many times over in “The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, And Morals”, a relatively new book George co-edited. Here’s an intro snip from the Witherspoon Institute, which was behind the publication.

This volume brings together the best of contemporary scholarship on marriage from a variety of disciplines—history, ethics, economics, law and public policy, philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, political science—to inform, and reform, public debate. Rigorous yet accessible, these studies aim to rethink and re-present the case for marriage as a positive institution and ideal that is in the public interest and serves the common good.

Yes, we’re at that point of needing to reaffirm the meaning of marriage for the general population. The argument for it is in the natural law ‘written on the human heart.’ But sometimes people get confounded by pop culture debates. So consider this a handy reference book to shore up that argument.