Two Millennials Supporting Marriage: Not Dead Yet

from Stand Firm by Sarah

Great article over at NRO, where there is more:

We will lose heart in those efforts only if we lose our historical perspective. And in this, there is a parallel to the pro-life movement, as one of us (RTA) argues in the forthcoming issue of Human Life Review. The day after Roe v. Wade was decided, a front-page headline in the New York Times declared: “Supreme Court Settles Abortion Issue.” This headline, today, is embarrassingly false, shortsighted — an artifact of astonishing elite hubris.

But it wouldn’t have seemed that way in the years just after Roe, when public opinion shifted strongly in favor of abortion access. With each passing day, it seemed, another pro-life public figure — Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Bill Clinton — would switch to embracing abortion on demand. Elites ridiculed pro-lifers as being misogynists, on the wrong side of history. The pro-life ranks were aging; their children, increasingly against them. It looked like a losing battle. How easy it would have been just to give up and go home.

But courageous Americans refused to sit silently. And now the pro-life side has turned the tide in key areas of the struggle. On the question of the humanity of the child in the womb, pro-lifers have won the intellectual battle decisively. Today, most Americans oppose most abortions, and pro-life state laws are making great progress.

There are lessons here. Today’s young people basically inherited pro-life arguments, organizations, and strategies ready-made. Now we have to do that work on a new issue. Whatever journalists, intellectuals, and other elites may tell us, the only way to guarantee a political loss is to sit idly. Arguments must be developed, coalitions formed, strategies devised, and witness borne.
Witness to the truth matters for its own sake, but persistent, winsome witness also tends to bear good fruit, even if it takes 40 years and counting.

So, taking this longer view, we like our chances for at least two reasons. First, as young people themselves settle down, marry, and have kids, they’ll develop greater appreciation for what makes a marriage and for the gendered nature of parenting. They’ll come to see that husbands and wives aren’t interchangeable, and that mothers and fathers aren’t either.

Second, if we are correct about the likely harms of redefining marriage, then even a season of nationwide genderless marriage and its consequences would lead to a reassessment — just as the harms of divorce and non-marital childbearing led to the marriage movement of the 1980s and ’90s.