Publisher’s Note: The Mote in our Brother’s Eye

For Republican strategists, gay marriage is a gift from heaven. Like Voltaire’s God, if it didn’t exist, they would have had to invent it. Fortunately, Massachusetts came to the rescue.

Massachusetts has a habit of rescuing Bushes. In 1988, it was a Massachusetts governor who didn’t believe schoolchildren should recite the pledge of allegiance. This time, it is a Massachusetts court that decided to impose a definition of marriage that has never been recognized by any culture or religion.

Gay marriage is a contradiction in terms. Words don’t change in meaning because some Massachusetts judges and gay activists indulge in Orwellian doublespeak. Some things transcend statute.

So why do I find myself increasingly bothered more by the opponents of gay marriage than the proponents?

For one thing, I am a conservative who believes in federalism. If Roe v. Wade was wrong constitutionally (and it was) in overruling state laws on abortion, so is a Constitutional amendment on gay marriage. The essayist Albert Jay Nock said that America would be a stronger country if every time we crossed a state line, we automatically reached for our passports. Nevada allows prostitution; if Massachusetts wanted to do the same, so what?

The other thing that bothers me is that homosexuals aren’t the ones undermining marriage. Maybe I’m offended at all the posturing over gay marriage because it seems to me like the pot calling the kettle black.

Conservative Christians are more likely to get divorced than any other faith group. Baptists get divorced at a higher rate even than atheists. Conservative Dallas has more divorced women than New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—those well-known dens of iniquity.

In fact, it’s a compliment to the tattered institution that so many gays want to join it. For more and more heterosexuals, marriage isn’t even on the radar screen. In 2002, a quarter of white women in Texas who gave birth were single. Three-fourths of new black mothers were single. This is a social—and moral—disaster in our own state that makes gay marriage look like a crumb in a sandstorm. Fatherless boys are three times more likely than other children to have psychiatric problems; fatherless girls are four times more likely. Seventy percent of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. Three-fourths of kids who develop drug or alcohol addictions are from single-parent homes.

Yet maybe those unwed mothers are onto something. Nearly half of children born today to two parents will witness their parents’ divorce. Of these, close to half will also suffer through the failure of a parent’s second marriage. About divorce’s effect on children, one family psychologist says, “Of the two ways to lose a father, death is better.”

Maybe conservative Christians like me ought to spend more time on our own families than telling others why they can’t form a family. Maybe the mote in our brother’s eye can wait until we’ve cast out the beam in our own.