In his recently-published dystopian novel titled Exogensis, Peco Gaskovski depicts a world where the government closely controls fertility and family life. The means of control include systematic sterilization of the population, a one-child policy, and procreation via the laboratory rather than sex.
Gaskovski’s imagined future depicts people who are still allowed to get married and have children. Yet, married couples do not have sex to have children. The government controls the raising of children by experts in institutions. Parents have the right to visit their children regularly, but they do not parent them. They are even called “guardians.” Siblings are regularly separated for the purposes of expediency and efficiency. Family life is non-existent.
The distortion and destruction of the family is a trope in dystopian literature. From Plato’s Republic, to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, many have recognised that the distortion and destruction of the natural family, and the ecology of relations that organically grow from it, must be at the foundation of any comprehensive social and political nightmare.
The Sexual Revolution set the table for dystopia. Advocates of sexual liberation imagined a libidinous social order, where one and all could express themselves through copulation, sodomy, and whatever acts their imaginations could conjure up. Biological sex would come to mean nothing in particular. Gender, a groundless “social construct,” would act as a vehicle for self-expression. People could rub themselves against one another in any way they pleased, for the primary purposes of pleasure and self-fulfilment, so long as no one was hurt along the way and everyone consented.
Obergefell represented the pointy end of this Revolution. That is to say, the Obergefell Supreme Court decision was the legal expression of what was already in fact. It legally overturned the natural, given order of things, and validated the libidinous social life that had emerged since the 1960s. The Supreme Court held the old socio-sexual order, built upon nature and the order of God’s creation, irrelevant.
Jeff Shafer has shown us how this decision was presumptuous in the claims it made. The majority ruling by the Court was also fundamentally flawed in the scope it claimed for subsequent jurisprudence. As Shafer says, Obergefell could not find grounds, nor did it give grounds, for the overturning of the natural family in law. It simply declared that the disordered desires of two consenting human persons ought to be, by inherent constitutional rights, recognised by the state and wider society. God and His Nature be damned. We can, and will, remake man and his relations in our image.
Marriage has multiple purposes. One is the imaging of Christ and His Church (Eph. 5). The theological response to Obergefell must be founded on the Apostle Paul’s radical claim that the union of man and wife is a mystery that shows us something about the Son and the Bride. Any divergence from the creational norm is a distortion of the redemptive and eschatological grounds of the institution.
Setting aside the redemptive, typological, and eschatological ends of earthly marriage, we find more to say. Shafer points us to the legal implications of Obergefell’s ontology. The majority opinion, and the cultural and social meanings that flowed from it, redefined something that is fundamentally unchangeable. Shafer shows how family law is couched in an impassible social order. It is presaged by a set of conditions and assumptions about how a family is constituted. The law can only make a mockery of itself by using words to attempt to affect that order.
Roger Scruton, the great conservative philosopher, argued that the family has “no aim besides itself,” and that it is “based in a transcendent bond.” What Scruton meant by this is that the origins, aims, and outcomes of the family outlast the lifetimes of those who presently constitute it. The family’s aim is to perpetuate itself, both biologically and culturally, into the future. Further, the family does not rest on a contract or conventional agreement; that is, its existence is not dependent on the tacit or explicit agreement of the members. It simply is by virtue of a spiritual and physical bond between the people in the household.
Central to Scruton’s understanding of the family, and any sound understanding, is the marriage covenant and the consummation of that covenant with sex. The sex act without the covenant must ultimately be framed simply as an act of the will, not an act of natural affection with the aim of procreation. As Kathleen Stock recently wrote, contemporary visions of sexuality “reduce sex between humans to a blind urge to reproduce genes, or to a repressed version of childhood attachments, or to animal lust untrammelled by civilising religious impulses.” Stock doesn’t acknowledge the importance of marriage in this emaciated vision. Two humans rubbing themselves on one another aside from a covenantal context has no deeper meaning or purpose than the same act performed by two slugs.
The human people participating in the act are, to be sure, experiencing something more meaningful than animal copulation. But this only goes to show the limitations of extra-covenantal sexual relations. Those who participate know something is deficient about it. Sex ought to be an act of mutual affirmation of one’s covenant partner and, at least potentially, directed towards procreation. Deliberately sterile sex (e.g. in a same-sex marriage) or sex that is life-giving but in a disordered context (e.g. extramarital sex) has disordered results.
Which brings us back to Obergefell. The SCOTUS ruling deliberately overturned the covenantal context and procreational ends of marriage. Obergefell reduced the meaning of marriage to an act flowing out of libidinal will by removing fertility and covenant from the centre of the institution.
But the problems do not end there. They extend into wider social and political bonds. The family is a foundation, a “seedbed” to use the Ciceronian phrase, of the political order. This isn’t simply a pagan idea, either. Christians, from the late medieval period onwards, have interpreted the fifth commandment, “honor your father and mother,” as requiring submission to earthly authorities more broadly, including political authorities and ecclesial authorities. Nor is the idea contained to antiquity and the medieval era. G. W. F. Hegel, for example, understood the family to be the launching point for people to become recognised and integrated into the wider order of civic life.
Families are the basis for individual identity. The family is where people learn to be social and political. Families are where we are formed as citizens of the City of God and the City of Man. Further, as Augustine argued in City of God Book XIX, there is a close connection between the order of the household and the order of the commonwealth. Good order in the family results in an orderly and just commonwealth. Disorder begets disorder. Obergefell is the midwife of political chaos.
Around the same time as the SCOTUS determined that marriage was a constitutional right for same sex couples, the Veritas Project released secretly recorded videos depicting Planned Parenthood personnel discussing the trafficking of infant human body parts as a feature of their operation. At first glance, there appears to be no direct link between trafficking the body parts of aborted babies and two men (or women) having their relationship recognised as marriage.
However, the link is the family. More precisely, it is the destruction of the family. In the Planned Parenthood videos, we see the ghoulish forces of the abortion industrial complex plotting the elimination of one of the main purposes of the family. In Obergefell, we witness the overthrow of the origins of the family. Both of these events signal the same thing. The natural family must be destroyed and replaced by formations of relations provoked only by the will and whims of the human spirit.
We are living in a dystopia. It is different to the dystopia of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Gaskovski. However, if the literary trope is true, our age is a truly troubled one. The Veritas Project videos and Obergefell are scenes from a dystopia. Thanks to our glorious God, it is a dystopia that will come to an end because the creation order cannot be ignored forever. The post-Obergefell order cannot survive. It will collapse under its own weight, because it provides no grounds for creating, maintaining, and perpetuating the institution that lies at the heart of the social order and political order.
Simon P. Kennedy is a Senior Research Fellow at Alphacrucis University College, a Senior Research Fellow at the T. C. Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland, and a Non-resident Fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest.