By Kelly O'Connell ——Bio and Archives--November 16, 2014
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Friedrich Engels, a nineteenth-century scholar and famous Marxist, had tried to trace the origin of the family and to link its evolution to the changes in the mode of production and the emergence of private property and capitalism. His work, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", was first published in 1884. Engels believed that during the early stages of human evolution, property was collectively owned and that the family as such did not exist. The community itself formed the family and there was no limitation to sexual access. However, with the emergence of private ownership of property and the idea of having heirs who were to inherit the property, the question of paternity grew in importance and the rules of monogamous marriage were created to control women's sexuality and assure the legitimacy of heirs.One can easily posit that a happy childhood is the key to human happiness simply based upon the number of persons who later blame family instability or abuse as the chief cause of their present misery. Yet Americans are no longer even concerned with happy families because we don't even care about the raw material--being a father and mother of their own children, living together for the life of the parents. According to the NY Times essay, The Stories That Bind Us, families with a narrative history are the most successful, claims Dr. Marshall Duke. Yet what stories will be told by the present generation of kids, many from families of no coherent origin, without any fixed structure or history, living in a society that no longer values loyalty, commitment, tradition, or virtue?
The shift is affecting children's lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.A 2007 NY Times article describes the changing demographics: Before 1970, most unmarried mothers were teenagers. But in recent years the birthrate among unmarried women in their 20s and 30s has soared, rising 34 percent since 2002, for example, in women ages 30 to 34. In 2007, women in their 20s had 60 percent of all babies born out of wedlock, teenagers had 23 percent and women 30 and older had 17 percent. An additional layer exists regarding the atomization of the family. The identity of all persons is formed within the context of the family structure. For example, a child raised in the institutional setting of an orphanage will have a radically different view of life than one raised in a traditional family. The first words spoken by an infant are traditionally learned from the parents, and likewise the family's culture is imbibed. To lose an in situ parent is therefore to sacrifice at least half the cultural and familial history. And in the case of boys, the loss of fathers delivers staggering dysfunction. The WA Times articles also states,
In every state, the portion of families where children have two parents, rather than one, has dropped significantly over the past decade. Even as the country added 160,000 families with children, the number of two-parent households decreased by 1.2 million. Fifteen million U.S. children, or 1 in 3, live without a father, and nearly 5 million live without a mother. In 1960, just 11 percent of American children lived in homes without fathers.The impact of fatherlessness on children is so epic that billions of dollars a year are lost dealing with the consequences, such as drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, sexual abuse, prosecutions and incarcerations, and other institutionalization. For example, a typical litany of fatherless statistics includes such troubling facts as:
One group consisted of conflicted and guilt-ridden homosexual men who saw a sex-change as a way to resolve their conflicts over homosexuality by allowing them to behave sexually as females with men. The other group, mostly older men, consisted of heterosexual (and some bisexual) males who found intense sexual arousal in cross-dressing as females.Sadly, the operations did nothing to help with the transexual's deep-seated psychiatric issues:
We saw the results as demonstrating that just as these men enjoyed cross-dressing as women before the operation so they enjoyed cross-living after it. But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with. With these facts in hand I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.
From this alone we see the essential character of the conjugal union among the ancients. Two families live side by side; but they have different gods. In one, a young daughter takes a part, from her infancy, in the religion of her father; she invokes his sacred fire; every day she offers it libations. She surrounds it with flowers and garlands on festal days. She asks its protection, and returns thanks for its favors. This paternal fire is her god. Let a young man of the neighboring family ask her in marriage, and something more is at stake than to pass from one house to the other. She must abandon the paternal fire, and henceforth invoke that of the husband. She must abandon her religion, practice other rites, and pronounce other prayers. She must give up the god of her infancy, and put herself under the protection of a god whom she knows not. Let her not hope to remain faithful to the one while honoring the other; for in this religion it is an immutable principle that the same person cannot invoke two sacred fires or two series of ancestors. "From the hour of marriage," says one of the ancients, "the wife has no longer anything in common with the domestic religion of her fathers; she sacrifices at the hearth of her husband."The notion of "gay marriage" would simply not have been incomprehensible to ancient Romans, but positively illegal, according to O.F. Robinson's The Criminal Law of Ancient Rome. This crime was stuprum, and applied to Roman men or boys. Unfortunately, slaves--being defined as res, or things--not persons, were not protected from exploitation by law. But no ancient society accepted, or even conceived of a "gay marriage." It used to be common knowledge that marriage was essential for a healthy society. In his 1834 Commentaries, US Supreme Court Justice Story wrote,
Marriage is treated by all civilized societies as a peculiar and favored contract. It is in its origin a contract of natural law . . . . It is the parent, and not the child of society; the source of civility and a sort of seminary of the republic.
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Kelly O’Connell is an author and attorney. He was born on the West Coast, raised in Las Vegas, and matriculated from the University of Oregon. After laboring for the Reformed Church in Galway, Ireland, he returned to America and attended law school in Virginia, where he earned a JD and a Master’s degree in Government. He spent a stint working as a researcher and writer of academic articles at a Miami law school, focusing on ancient law and society. He has also been employed as a university Speech & Debate professor. He then returned West and worked as an assistant district attorney. Kelly is now is a private practitioner with a small law practice in New Mexico.