From The College Fix.
Excerpt:
An upcoming conference organized by Stanford University’s Anscombe Society called “Communicating Values: Marriage, Family & the Media” has been dubbed “hate speech” by the college’s graduate-level student government, which refused to allow any of its student fee-funded budget to support the event.
The Anscombe Society is a conservative student group centered around traditional marriage and family values; it also encourages chastity, and tackles subjects such as sexual integrity and pornography.
According to the minutes of the student government meeting on March 5, a large group of angry students attended to protest the conference and its request for funding.
[…]Ultimately, the Graduate Student Council refused a $600 funding request: “With a vote of 10 for, 2 against, and 2 abstaining, the funding to Anscombe Society has been retracted by the GSC,” the minutes stated. What’s more, the Stanford Daily reports that the undergraduate student government also denied the Stanford Anscombe Society a $5,000 funding request last week.
According to the Anscombe Society’s website, the event aims to “help university students and young adults to promote the values of marriage, family, and sexual integrity to the broader popular culture. Featuring speakers at the forefront of this effort, the conference will allow students to network with other individuals who are willing to engage in intellectual and civil discourse about the issues of marriage, family, and sexual integrity.”
These days it seems as if college students have moved away from the traditional view of marriage in more ways than just the male-female formulation. They think that male-female marriage is too restrictive because marriage should be about being happy and being in love, not about complementary sexes. Marriage should last as long as love-feelings and happy-feelings last, it’s not about commitment and self-sacrifice and the responsibilities of parenting. Now, the marriage means happily ever after – it means that if you have a wedding, then you are guaranteed happiness, without having any self-sacrificial responsibilities to spouses or children. It means that you can continue to be selfish, and that somehow, you and the other person will be able to keep the relationship going by just living like you’re each still single. Your spouse is there to make you happy. Your children are there to make you happy. There is nothing that marriage teaches you, because there is no design for it other than to produce happy feelings.
My view is that people who are rejecting the old definition of marriage, and the old responsibilities of husbands and wives in marriage, will never be able to produce a lasting, loving marriage. Either the challenges and responsibilities of marriage and parenting excite you, or you won’t have a real marriage that lasts. If you are going into the the thing with the attitude that there are no rules and responsibilities, and that it’s all about you and your feelings, you will fail. You can have a wedding, but it’s not going to magically produce a permanent, exclusive, life-giving union. Marriage is a specification, and you can’t magically implement the specification with a big wedding, any more than you save enough for retirement by winning the lottery. There is a right way to do it and a wrong way. Smashing all the rules is the wrong way.