Bonald’s maxim on what makes a family

I’ve heard it from several different sources, so I think it counts as a slogan.  People say that we should recognize homosexual marriages and allow homosexual adoptions because “love makes a family”.  Gays love each other; therefore they form valid families, QED.  This goes wrong from the very start–love most certainly does not make a family.  Friends can love each other.  What does make a family?  Here’s Bonald’s maxim on what makes a family, a correction to the popular slogan:

Duty makes a family.

It’s simple, short enough to fit on a bumper sticker, and it has the additional virtue of being true.  Lots of family members don’t love each other–some even despise each other–but what makes them family is that they’re bound to each other by ties of personal obligation.  So the question is not, “Can’t a man love another man the way he could love a woman?”  The question is “Can a man really have precisely the same obligations to another man as he could towards the woman who is the mother of his children?”

In defense of religion, part III

Below is the third chapter of my defense of religion (about 3 pages).  In this chapter, I begin the metaphysical analysis of God’s existence and nature.  Actually, this chapter just lays out the preliminaries for this analysis, which will come in the next two chapters.  However, it will not be possible to understand the later chapters without going through this material first.

Republicans should aspire to be the Stupid Party

Let us suppose that it’s true, as I pointed out in an earlier post, that smart and educated people will always tend to be liberal, not because liberalism is hard to understand or because the arguments for it are strong, but because liberalism legitimates the will to power of the educated class.  If that’s true, two things follow from it:

1. Attempts by conservatives to “retake the culture” or to convert a significant fraction of the intelligensia are futile.  The universities, newspapers, and television should be regarded as permanent property of the enemy.
2. Conservatives should position themselves as the champions of the cognitive lower-class.  We should regard liberalism as an ideology that serves the interest of the cognititve upper-class, and so we should counter by upholding the interests of everyone else.

Bonald’s maxim on Christianity and Paganism

A popular rhetorical trick for philosophes and liberals is to raise pagans, Muslims, and other non-Christians to the status of honorary liberals.  You know the routine:  pagans were so life-affirming, so tolerant, so open-minded, so natural, etc, etc.  It is only Christianity that has irrational hang-ups about sex, that crushes mens’ spirits behind a weight of dogma and tradition, that breeds violence, etc, etc.  The basic idea is that Christendom is the odd man out.  If someone were to divide humanity into two camps, it would be Christians on one side and everybody else on the other.  Thus, the philosophes can claim to be the true party of mankind.

This has things quite backwards:  it is liberalism that is the odd man out.  On all the issues that divide liberals from Christians, the actual pagans of history, as well as the actual Muslims of the present, stand squarely with the Christians.  I will even go so far as to encapsulate this in the maxim

Christianity is the vindication of paganism.