Marriage and Family as Health Indicator of a Society

Mystagogy on marriage and the state:

Without the family, there are no villages, which are associations of families, and without villages, there is no polis. “Every state is [primarily] composed of households,” Aristotle asserts. In other words, without households – meaning husbands and wives together in families – there is no state. In this sense, the family is the pre-political institution. The state does not make marriage possible; marriage makes the state possible. Homosexual marriage would have struck Aristotle as an absurdity since you could not found a polity on its necessarily sterile relations. This is why the state has a legitimate interest in marriage, because, without it, it has no future.

One hopes the modern super-state would have struck Aristotle as an absurdity as well. I err on the side of caution, and don't want the state to have any interest in marriage, for it has destroyed it, but then this is the modern state, and it is destroying itself.

A healthy society would endeavor to get young men and women married, and settled in some sort of household, with some means of providing for themselves. I do not see a healthy society. Anywhere. Where are the wise old men? Of the grandfathers I know, I can't think of one with a grandchild with his own last name. This implies a failure- well, it is a failure, though I suppose it may still happen for some.

And in my own life, conditions make it hard for me so see how I could raise children the way I think they should be raised.

The modern state, in it's avarice, seeks to break apart true marriage and recast it as a series of taxable transactions. It will also open the definition of marriage up, providing the divorce industry a way to extract money from homosexuals. Lawyers seem to be a class created and protected by the government- and lawyers are all over the place in government. As a note- if anyone decides try this silly republic experiment in future, don't let lawyers run for office. Your republic will eventually end, but it's life and usefulness may be prolonged. Of course, there is that other issue- that a representative republic is actually a city government and doesn't scale well- which, if you choose to remember, would do you well.

Anyway, I would suggest that if the state has any legitimate interest in anything, it should protect it, but otherwise not get involved at all. This would likely mean being rather awful to the people who try to destroy marriages, and the people who destroy marriages are not the few poor homosexuals who don't understand the nature of this ploy to raise their relationships to the status of 'marriage.' Very often the destroyer is female, taking advantage of the modern state to remove children from their fathers while simultaneously extracting money from them. Now, in a decent society, they could not do this, but in this society we have an entire industry set up to benefit from this sort of thing.