Bradley Birzer's words on the conflict that threatens to undermine our civilisation even more than it already has been:
"It’s a hard lesson for those of us who think so fondly of Christianity and the Christian tradition to know that even the barbarian pagans knew more and practised marriage better than we. And, yet, if we are to believe the recorders of the ancient West, they most certainly did. The republican Tacitus described the following mores and norms among the Germanic Tribes in his Germania:
The matrimonial bond is, nevertheless, strict and severe among them; nor is there anything in their manners more commendable than this…. This they consider as the firmest bond of union…. That the woman may not think herself excused from exertions of fortitude, or exempt from the casualties of war, she is admonished…. that she comes to her husband as a partner in toils and dangers; to suffer and to dare equally with him, in peace and in war…. [Further] To limit the increase of children, or put to death any of the later progeny is accounted infamous: and good habits have there more influence than good laws elsewhere.
The loss of the institution of the family over the last fifty or so years is a huge blow to the integrity of our civilization. Yet, it is not the blow that so many hysterical religious talking heads seem to think. The attack on marriage is not just an attack on the union of “one man and one woman,” but a vicious attack against every intermediary institution—from the neighborhood associations, to the Knights of Columbus, to the local mom-and-pop stores, to the elementary schools, to our medical doctors. Indeed, the work and predictions of Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Nisbet, and Christopher Dawson have all come to pass.
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