Goodbye, Netflix!

From The American Thinker:

As I discovered last weekend, however, those efforts are not enough to shield them from such efforts at this kind of social indoctrination. My kids have recently become fond of Netflix's exclusive new program The Who Was Show.  This is a children's show that highlights historic figures, with actors singing songs and telling jokes to educate the children-viewers.  It all seems harmless enough. I was giving the show mild attention as my kids watched in the living room until I caught this passing quip by a narrator, describing how the Roman Republic was an "extremely advanced civilization:"

While most of the world struggled to stay alive, the Romans had running water, air conditioning, shopping malls, and same-sex marriage [sic].

To reference a show I watched as a child, one of these things is not like the others. What, after all, does same-sex "marriage" have to do with staying alive or quality of life in the ancient world?  The first three are reasonable observations worthy of the suggestion that the Romans were an advanced civilization.  But the observation that the Romans "had same-sex marriage" is clearly forced and incongruent among the other things described, clearly pressing a distinct and ideologically driven social position upon impressionable children, and perhaps worse than any of that, it couldn't be more of a bald-faced lie.

But it's a bald-faced lie with purpose. 

Here are the facts.  Marriage, as an societal institution, was strictly monogamous in ancient Rome, and strictly heterosexual in nature.  The laws were structured toward the advancement of its civilization – namely, the production of children who would become Roman citizens.  There were never codified laws allowing same-sex "marriage" among Roman citizens.  The suggestions that it even occurred at all amount to singular and depraved examples. Laura Geggel, for example, cites at Live Science that Nero "castrated a young boy named Sporus to make him womanlike" and married him, and that Emperor Elagabalus "referred to his slave, Hierocles, as his husband." Both examples refer to emperors, bound by no laws and having an appetite for sexual activity with boys, "marrying" those boys.  Her arguments for "precedent" of same-sex "marriage" in ancient Rome include an emperor "marrying" a castrated boy and another's de facto "marriage" to a slave.  This is hardly evidence of a society that broadly "permits" same-sex marriage. So why introduce the lie that it was broadly permitted in ancient Rome to children?  Because the precedent of an "advanced civilization" practicing same-sex "marriage" is of importance in arguing for its current societal value. 

At least it was an important consideration in the deliberations leading up to the Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex couples to get marriage benefits in America in 2015.  Justice Scalia asked Mary Bonauto, a lawyer arguing for same-sex "marriage" rights: "But I don't know of any – do you know of any society, prior to the Netherlands in 2001, that permitted same-sex marriage [sic]?"  Bonauto answered that "as a legal matter," she did not. (Read more.)

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