Tea at Trianon: 'Obergefell' Has Harmed Children

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

Sunday, February 1, 2026

'Obergefell' Has Harmed Children

From The Federalist:

Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the Obergefell majority opinion, wrote that same-sex couples needed to be afforded the “constellation of benefits” that marriage provided. The last 10 years have proved that children are among those so-called “benefits.” Thus, in the name of constitutional rights, the law had to accomplish what biology prohibits: making two same-sex adults the parents of a child. That legal mandate has reshaped family law in sweeping ways: parenthood statutes have been stripped of sexed terms, regarding mothers and fathers as interchangeable “parents;” infertility has been reclassified so that same-sex couples can deliberately produce motherless or fatherless children with the help of insurance subsidies; birth certificates have been altered to legally exclude a child’s biological parent; new parentage pathways have been created that bypass both biological and adoptive safeguards; genetic parenthood has been downgraded as just one option among many; procreation has been stripped of its unique social value within adult partnerships.
Obergefell did not merely extend legal recognition to same-sex couples, it was a legal change that is incongruent with any familial distinctions that had, for centuries, grounded marriage and parenthood in both common law and biological reality. These are not mere academic shifts. They are foundational changes in how the law and culture understand the human family, with real consequences for children. When familial distinctions are erased, children become items to be awarded by state-enforced contract. (Read more.)