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Breaking Liberal Taboos on Education Turning On the Sixties

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The Birth of "Folliage"

by Christopher Chantrill
July 18, 2004 at 3:00 am

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THEY TOLD US it was coming.  No sooner will we get gay marriage than the polyamory advocates would be knocking on our doors.  And wouldn’t you know, the polyamory folks recently got a respectful hearing at—where would you think—the Unitarian Universalists.

It really is remarkable, how the Unitarians seem to be in on every disreputable idea that comes down the pike.  Who can forget their role in the public education movement of the 1840s, when the Unitarians at Harvard hooked up with the Puritans and the socialists to cure the Irish Catholics of their Catholicism?  Well, public education didn’t do much for literacy and numeracy, but it did encourage the Catholics who, under the principle of “first the school, then the church” built an education system that remains clearly better than the tax-fed system that was built to humiliate them.

The liberal war on marriage issue confirms one of the inevitable truths of existence.  Liberals demand absolute freedom to do the things they want, and they demand approval and subsidy too.  Liberals demand absolute freedom for sexual license, under the banner of “keeping government out of the bedroom.”  Some day, social scientists will solemnly study this Liberal Extended Adolescence Syndrome.

In the case of the relations between the sexes, those of us of a certain age recognize that sex is “for the children,” in the exact sense of the word.  The production of children is the one thing needful, because without children the whole remarkable, indeed, risky scheme of sexual reproduction falls apart.  In recognition of this fact, Nature has provided all living things with a powerful box of tools to help them focus on the all-important sexual cycle.  For humans the whole life cycle—from conception through birth to growth to pair formation, reproduction, nurturing of the young, and aging—has been socialized, that is, brought under the aegis of social cooperation, tradition, custom, and, in the bourgeois age, contract. There is a name for this socialized system. It is called “marriage.”

In Europe we have seen over the last generation a sudden collapse in child production.  Conservative commentators have attributed this collapse to the anti-marriage culture.  In Europe all sexual arrangements are given equal prestige with monogamous heterosexual marriage.  Of course, it is impossible to separate the variables out, but the combination of delayed marriage, single parenthood, abortion, divorce, and now gay marriage combines to influence women to have fewer children.  Many fewer children.  Taken together, or considered separately, these trends amount to folly on a massive scale. 

The conflict over human sexual relations puts conservatives into a head-on conflict with liberals, denying liberals what they want most of all: an absolute right to do anything they want in the bedroom.  So let us take advice from the great military strategists and try the indirect approach.  Let liberals screw up their lives, if they want.  But just don’t let them call it “marriage.”  Let us combine in a vast right-wing conspiracy to deny them the the right to dignify their sexual follies as “marriage.”  I propose “folliage,” pronounced “foll-idge,” but screaming on the printed page Folly-age.

If the liberals demand we bow and scrape before their folliage, and call it wisdom, let them.  If they demand subsidies and taxes, they got it.  If Katie Couric wants to thrill to the lucubrations of the folliage activists, be our guest.  But let there be no doubt that what they are doing is folly, a great movement of self-destructive foolishness that attacks the very nature and intent of sexual reproduction.

But every so often we should slide a stiletto between the liberal ribs, to rile up our liberal lords and masters.  If gays experience a life expectancy twenty years less than ordinary Americans, shouldn’t we suggest a social program to improve their life expectancy, something perhaps a little more immediate than an eventual cure for AIDS?  If it turns out that the children of lesbians are angy that their paternity was arranged by mixing together the semen from a couple of gay friends, shouldn’t we wonder aloud about the positive self-esteem of such a marginalized group?  Should we not demand a program of national registration so that every child is a wanted child—with a publicly acknowledged father?  And given that children living with their married, biological parents have the best chance of escaping child abuse, shouldn’t we design a comprehensive and mandatory program to maximize the number of children living with their married biological parents?  And if, as studies show, married conservative women report the highest level of sexual satisfaction, shouldn’t we do something about it, like, er, mention it in those all-important sex education programs that liberals are so keen on? 

Let the liberals have their polyamory and anything else they want.  But let’s call folly by its real name: not “marriage” but “folliage.”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

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Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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