Tea at Trianon: Karl Marx, the Revolution, and Redefining Marriage

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Karl Marx, the Revolution, and Redefining Marriage

From Catholic World Report:

While most commentators credit the sexual revolution and the Stonewall uprising of 1969 as the “beginning” of the gay rights movement that led to last week’s Supreme Court same-sex marriage decision, the reality is that the roots of the movement to drastically change the definition of marriage can be traced back to 1848 and the publication of Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto. Proclaiming that the “abolition” of marriage and the family was central to the fundamental transformation necessary to implement a “just society,” Marx wanted to transcend what he called “bourgeois” marriage, replacing it with a redefined marriage—a form of marriage that “moves beyond marriage.” For Marx, who predicted that “the bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course,” the goal was always to move “beyond marriage.”

Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage (WND Books, 2015), a new book by best-selling author Paul Kengor, points out that “Marx showed blatant contempt for marriage not only in his public writings but in his private actions.” Tracing the roots of the “anti-family” movement through the history of socialists and communists—including Marx, Friedrich Engels, Margaret Sanger, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse—Kengor calls same-sex marriage a “Trojan horse for the far Left to do what it has always wanted to do: take down the natural, traditional biblical family and attack religion in the process.”

Kengor believes that the “takedown” of the traditional family unit has always been the goal of the same-sex marriage movement, and points to the ways in which Marx’s personal lifestyle redounded to the kind of revolutionary state that he not only wanted but needed for his own lifestyle. In 1862, Marx wrote a letter to Engels, his writing partner, noting that every day his wife expressed a wish to die; such was her misery. Later he asserted to Engels, “Blessed is he who has no family.” Quoting Aristotle’s statement that: “Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives,” Kengor concludes that “whatever Marx and Engels lived and meant with their writings, their ideological inheritors would not hesitate to seek to alter or abolish the family, marriage, the parental function, home education, and anything and everything else that stood in the way of their new utopia.” (p 30). (Read more.)