Windmills of Faith, Family, and Freedom
I took my family to Tulip Time, in
Holland, Michigan, recently. There we saw endless fields of colorful spring
blooms and toured the reconstructed De Zwaan (The Swan), the
last authentic Dutch windmill to
be disassembled and shipped from the Netherlands.
De Zwaan is an active flour mill. The miller is a woman who was
trained in her craft in the Netherlands. This trailblazer is the first American
woman to be so trained. Our family eagerly bought sacks of flour from her.
Climbing up five stories on the
tour, I was amazed to find my whole family paying rapt attention to the
costumed interpreters. We had five stories of stories. We learned how Dutch
settlers came to Western Michigan in the 1840s and how they brought their
farming skills with them. They came to America so they could be free to worship
God in accordance with their faith, and to raise their children in their
church.
We learned that during World War II,
this windmill was used by the Resistance forces in the Netherlands to send
signals. It was a symbol of their refusal to give in to the Nazi oppressors of
their country.
During our tour, our guides showed
us the bullet holes made by German soldiers as they fired upon this Graceful
Bird. Still, they could not kill the spirit of these brave Dutchmen, who
stubbornly held out for freedom.
The descendants of those first Dutch
immigrants to Western Michigan have made innumerable contributions to our
American pageant. And their story -- like that of latter-day immigrants -- can
inspire us to meet new challenges. Those settlers came here to reaffirm their
devotion to faith, family, and freedom.
In making their way to America,
those hardy Dutch settlers were not unlike the Vietnamese boat people who
ventured out onto the South China Sea in leaking, overcrowded vessels a hundred
forty years later. President Reagan paid handsome tribute to such
freedom-seekers when he delivered his Farewell Address to the American people
in 1989.
The president saluted these new
Americans. He described how they approached a naval launch from the aircraft
carrier USS Midway. The leader of the refugees yelled out: “Hey,
American sailor! Hey, Freedom Man!”
We are facing a very different
challenge to the ideals of freedom this spring. In this beautiful season of new
life and new growth, the threat is a domestic one. And the threat is not
an oppressive state ideology but a misapprehension of the true meaning of
freedom itself. We Americans are being told we must adjust to a radical
change in all we have been, in all we have believed about the family and the
institutions that protect it. We are being ordered to accede to the ending of
marriage in our country. If we do not yield, we are branded as hateful, as
bigots, as people who are “extreme.”
And this lie animates many of the
elites in our own country. These elites dominate the chattering class of
journalists, academics, and entertainers. Instead of guns and tanks, we are
assaulted with TV cameras, those weapons that Gen. Alexander Haig called the “siege
engines of our time.” The forces of political correctness are threatening to
roll over us.
The power of the Internet is
unleashed against any who would resist the idea that marriage has an immutable
core of meaning. Be prepared to be listed as a “hate group” and your thoughtful
words dismissed as “hate speech.” At my organization, Family Research Council,
we were even attacked by a gun-wielding young man who managed to shoot and
seriously wound our building manager, Leo Johnson, before this brave, unarmed
man took down the attacker. But for Leo Johnson’s courage, dozens of us in the
FRC building that day in 2012 could have been murdered for believing what every
generation up to our time knew to be the essential logic of the marital union.
Even now, Americans are evenly divided on the issue according to recent
Rasmussen surveys.
The truth is our position is so
commonsense, so mild and moderate, that we could have passed the Defense of
Marriage Act in 1996 without a single Republican vote! Even Democrats
understood what marriage was then, less than 20 years ago. The difference today
is that we have not “evolved” to what national elites think is best for
us.
We need to be clear about what is
being proposed. The MarriagEnders don’t simply want to expand the definition of
what constitutes a legal marriage. They demand that we “fundamentally transform
this country.” Those words of candidate Barack Obama are being lived out by
radicals determined to make this country over in their own image.
It is not merely marriage that will
be overturned by this revolution. Family is being undermined. Today, 48 percent
of first-born children in America are born out of wedlock. These children may
suffer many disadvantages in education, in health care, in safety from crime and
abuse. Fortunately, many of their parents will eventually marry. And many
others will find shelter in schools, child-care centers, and congregations
created by America’s churches.
Still, powerful radicals are driving
this change. Prof. Jonathan Turley told an audience of journalists, graduate
students, lawyers, and congressional staffers in 2008 that he was in favor of
polygamy. When the Supreme Court ruled against true marriage last year, Turley
raced into a lower court and got a judgment favorable to polygamy. Other
radicals, led by Georgetown University Law Professor Chai Feldlum and feminist
activist Gloria Steinem, issued a manifesto calling for the end of marriage as
an institution in America. They published their goals for all the world to see
in www.beyondmarriage.org.
In their view, any number of adults should be able to claim legal custody of
any number of children. This is not a family for all, but a free-for-all.
Despite these radical notions,
President Obama named Chai Feldblum to a critical federal position and he
awarded Gloria Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Poll after poll is taken and
publicized purporting to show that Americans favor these changes. The questions
are often skewed and misleading. And pollsters never ask these questions:
1.
Should marriage be ended?
2.
Should fathers and mothers be abolished in law?
3.
Should children be subject to being bought and sold through surrogacy
contracts?
During the passionate debates over marriage in
the French National Assembly recently, one Deputy -- Bruno Nestor Azérot --
rose to challenge the idea that this was a “progressive” change. Overturning
marriage between one man and one woman reintroduces the practice of wealthy men
paying poor women to carry their children for them. And if the woman who bears
their child forms a motherly attachment to the child of her womb, she will
be compelled under law to give it up to those who have paid for it.
This French Deputy was not a
Christian conservative -- far from it. He is a black man and a member of a
leftist political party (GDR). But he nonetheless put his finger on the truth:
Abolishing marriage as the union of
one man and one woman reintroduces the core principle of slavery. Natural
bonds will be sundered for the sake of economically powerful interests who
eschew true freedom.
The Republican Party was founded to
oppose the spread of slavery and the tolerance of plural marriages. The first
Republican Platform dared to state that “slavery and polygamy are the twin
relics of barbarism.” That was in 1856.
Today, more than 82% of Republican
voters believe marriage should be between one man and one woman. What we need
is for a similar super-majority of Republican officeholders to stand fast for
marriage. After all, it is only because of the support they receive from those
voters that they are officeholders in the first place.
We need leaders with the courage and
vision to see the grave threat to America presented by the overturning of
marriage and family. Nothing less is at stake than the future of families,
peoples, and nations. Conservative philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke
called the family that “little platoon in which we move in society.” Today, the
federal government is attacking our little platoons with each passing day.
So when we stand up for Faith,
Family, Freedom, we do not stand for ourselves alone. This is not just a
struggle for our time. It is a struggle for a vast future. That historic
windmill is a good symbol of resistance. When we find leaders who understand
this, we can yet save our country.
Bob Morrison is a senior fellow at
the Family Research Council.
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