Marriage and Children? Not So Much in America

 Peter Wood is a Ph.D. anthropologist and President of the National Ass'n of Scholars.  Back in '03 he wrote an essay published in The American Conservative; it is re-printed in Main Street Conservatism.

Wood relays the generally-known anthropological facts about marriage and children which are carefully hidden by the Usual Suspects in the media and certain extremely-noisy and well-funded special-interest groups.  That's because what Wood has to say is not good news for those perverts and Hollywood Hornmeisters.  

We'll excerpt the essay, which was written before SCOTUS lost its mind on the question of homosexual "marriage," but about 73 years after Pope Pius XI predicted nearly everything Wood describes in Casti Connubii.  Pius understood that sterile sex, whether hetero- or homo-, is a path to disaster.

.....As a social scientist, I am perfectly prepared to admit that American society can normalize male homosexuality and that "gay marriage" moves us in that direction.  Other societies have run this experiment, and, in a fashion, it "works."  If America normalizes male homosexuality through gay marriage, our culture is not suddenly going to become exactly like the Etoro, or the Big Nambas of the northern New Hebrides, or other such tribes.  Rather, we will follow out the biological and cultural logic of homosexuality in our own fashion.  The general results, however, are predictable on the basis of the ethnography:  heterosexual marriage will be weakened; the birth rate will decline; the status of women as mothers will further erode; and young boys will be a much greater target of erotic attention by older males.

To say these things, I understand, is to excite vigorous disagreement from those who advocate gay marriage as just a step in the proper expansion of civil rights.  The link between homosexual desire and erotic interest in children is especially contentious.  Gay activists and their supporters frequently point out that most child molestation is perpetrated by heterosexual males.  And they emphasize that homosexuality has no necessary link to pedophilia:  a great many gay men are primarily interested in other gay men.  I grant both points, but we are also left with the stubborn empirical fact that societies that have indeed institutionalized something akin to "gay marriage" have done so in the form of older men taking adolescent boys as their partners.  To imagine that we could have gay marriage in the United States without also giving strong encouragement to this form of eroticism is, in light of the ethnographic evidence, wishful thinking......

Next?  Polygamy, in Wood's opinion.  It's likely that he didn't imagine the Tranny Movement, or at least, he didn't think it would be as ballyhooed as it is.  But then, Wood probably didn't think of doctors and psychiatrists as money-grubbers who would do anything for a buck, (meaning that Wood probably never met an abortionist).

Wood accurately lays the sexual dysfunction of America at the feet of the Libertarians, who plastered all their advocacy of amorality with 'required by privacy' signs.

.....The sexual privatizers imagine a society in which adults can seek their pleasures without interference and somehow children will get born and properly raised.  It is a sheer illusion.  A society that doesn't restrict human sexual relations in effective ways is a society that doesn't have much interest in reproducing itself.  People left to their own sexual whims will sometimes form stable families, but that is the exception, not the rule.  The more we treat sex as merely recreational, the less important we make procreation.  De-mystifying procreation--making it just another event that may or may not require heterosexual married parents in a long-term relationship--leads to both low procreation and badly raised children.  A society that abandons the effort to restrict and channel human sexual urges into approved forms loses control of the strongest emotional/biological force known to our species and invites a progressive dissolution into unconnected or randomly connected individuals...

Well, how does this play out in real life?

....[Y]ou don't really need an anthropologist to see that a breakdown in social rules governing marriage and the family has disastrous consequences.  Consider some statistics:  1.35 million children in the US born outside of marriage in 2001--33.5% of the total; 947,384 divorces in 2000, excluding those in CA., CO., IN., and LA., states that don't count divorces; by age 14, 14-20% of American girls and 20-22% of American boys are "sexually experienced"; about five million Americans are addicted to drugs and 52,000 die each year from their addictions; 15 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases occur in the US each year, a quarter of them among teenagers; about 100,000 American children engage in prostitution, and about 85% of street prostitutes report being incestuously molested by a male family-member as a child.

Those are ancient statistics, by the way.

......[W]ho doesn't know a single mom struggling to do her best for her children but inevitably coming up short? .......And you don't need an anthropologist to sense the transformation of America from a family-friendly culture to a culture of me-first.

Ah, yes!  Me-First!  The battle-cry of the Narcissists.  Very familiar to employers, too.