Free Love & Its Votaries
The Nineteenth-Century Roots of America’s War on Marriage
It is now a deeply rooted, almost unquestioned feature of our elite culture: Marriage, we are told, in its monogamous and heterosexual form, is at best only a choice one might make for purely personal reasons, as a kind of odd, nostalgic idiosyncrasy—and even then, only if it adheres to the basic guidelines of our contemporary culture of total gender equality. But real freedom, especially for women, prohibits any collective attachment to or promotion of this thoroughly outmoded and reactionary institution. We must, as a society, in our norms and our laws, recognize that it runs contrary to our new values and cast it off in its historic form in favor of newer, more exciting, more revolutionary forms of intimate interaction.
It is a breathtakingly radical perspective, when seen from the position of tradition. Where did it come from?
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Alexander T. Riley is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars.
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