More on Marriage

I’m not quite a week into the month-long wedding trip. It took until late Friday evening to get internet, so now I can post when I get time to write.

In my last post I said that I would be re-publishing some pieces I wrote back in 2004-5 about protecting the definition and institution of marriage. I’ll start doing that later this week. But I think I may have sounded as though I hadn’t written about those things much on this blog, and that isn’t quite true. Only a few are related to the specific “same-sex marriaige” issue, but there are quite a few on the importance of marriage and family to civilization, which is always my point of view. I don’t think I have found them all, since the concepts are integrated into so many topics. But here is a partial list of blog posts from the past year (June 2011 was a good month to read in total):

·         6-6-2011 Good Parenting Yields Civilization

·         6-10-2011 Family Is Essential

·         6-16-2011 Demographic Winter

·         6-17-2011 Honoring Fathers

·         6-20-2011 Building Better Families

·         6-23-2011 Mounting Data on Families

·         6-24-2011 My Rational Belief in TraditionalMarriage

·         6-27-2011 New York—If You’d Only Asked, We HaveAnswers

·         Devaluing Marriage and Family = Decay of Civilization 

o   6-30-2011 Part I: Vico and Unwin

o   7-1-2011 Part II: Death of Marriage in Scandinavia

o   7-7-2011 Part III: Decay of Civilization

·         8-31-2011 Speaking Up

·         10-3-2011 The Way Back Up to Civilization

·         10-5-2011 Priceless Women

·         10-26-2011 Parental Rights

·         11-18-2011 One Small Victory

·         2-24-2012 Formula for Success

Plus my post a week ago about my intentions to cover this topic for a while: 4-16-2012 Wedding Plans.

I hope you’ll find these posts and the ones to come to be a good resource. One more quote for the day, from Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, which is the light reading I’m doing during my vacation:

What did [Henry] Adams, writing in the 1880s; [Francis] Grund and Tocqueville, writing a haf century earlier; and the founders, writing a half century before that, have in mind when they spoke of virtue in the people?

Different writers stressed different aspects of the topic, and they could be parsed in several ways. But if there is no canonical list, four aspects of American ife were so completely accepted as essential that, for practical purposes, you would be hard put to find an eighteenth-century founder or a nineteenth-century commentator who dissented from any of them. Two of them are virtues in themselves—industriousness and honesty—and two of them refer to institutions through which right behavior is nurtured—marriage and religion. For convenience, I will refer to all four as the founding virtues (p. 130)

At the Spherical Model, writing 230+ years after the founding, I am still writing about those founding virtues.