Here’s a wonderful romantic story endorsed by the New York Times, which represents the worldview of elite leftists. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

WHAT happens when love comes at the wrong time?

Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten classroom. They both had children attending the same Upper West Side school. They also both had spouses.

[…]Mrs. Riddell was a reporter and anchor on WNBC television in New York and a mother of two.[…]Mr. Partilla, then a 42-year-old triathlete and a president of media sales at Time Warner, recognized a kindred dynamo. “She’s such a force,” he said. “She rocks back and forth on her feet as if she can’t contain her energy as she’s talking to you.”

The connection was immediate, but platonic. In fact, as they became friends so did their spouses. There were dinners, Christmas parties and even family vacations together.

So Ms. Riddell was surprised to find herself eagerly looking for Mr. Partilla at school events — and missing him when he wasn’t there. “I didn’t admit to anyone how I felt,” she said. “To even think about it was disruptive and disloyal.”

What she didn’t know was that he was experiencing similar emotions. “First I tried to deny it,” Mr. Partilla said. “Then I tried to ignore it.”

But it was hard to ignore their easy rapport. They got each other’s jokes and finished each other’s sentences. They shared a similar rhythm in the way they talked and moved. The very things one hopes to find in another person, but not when you’re married to someone else.

Ms. Riddell said she remembered crying in the shower, asking: “Why am I being punished? Why did someone throw him in my path when I can’t have him?”

[…]As Mr. Partilla saw it, their options were either to act on their feelings and break up their marriages or to deny their feelings and live dishonestly.

[…]“I did a terrible thing as honorably as I could,” said Mr. Partilla, who moved out of his home, reluctantly leaving his three children.

[…]The pain he had predicted pervaded both of their lives as they faced distraught children and devastated spouses, while the grapevine buzzed and neighbors ostracized them.

[…]All they had were their feelings, which Ms. Riddell described as “unconditional and all-encompassing.”

“I came to realize it wasn’t a punishment, it was a gift,” she said. “But I had to earn it. Were we brave enough to hold hands and jump?”

[…]“I didn’t believe in the word soul mate before, but now I do,” said Mr. Partilla.

[…]“My kids are going to look at me and know that I am flawed and not perfect, but also deeply in love,” she said. “We’re going to have a big, noisy, rich life, with more love and more people in it.”

Just FYI, I am using the word “adultery” for this because I consider carrying on an emotional affair while you are married to be adultery.

I think that this view is very popular among liberal elite circles, such as New York city. These elite liberals get very impatient with morality once they have risen to a certain level. They tend to want to elevate the pursuit of happiness (the “right” to be happy) over moral obligations to other family members who depend on them. There is no transcendent purpose for marriage, on their view – it is just another thing that is supposed to make them happy, like cars, vacations and careers. It doesn’t really matter what happens to the children. The leftist elites blunder their way into marriages thinking that marriage is just another accessory added to their exciting glamorous lives, like triathlons and careers in news media. (Or yoga, recycling, animal rights crusading, and vegetarianism in other cases). Then they find a way to weasel out of their marriages so that they can be happier and more fulfilled with more glamorous and exciting partners. But what is the deeper issue underlying this view of marriage? After all, people didn’t use to treat marriage as being about personal fulfillment… what happened?

The root cause

Obviously the people in our story are either functional atheists or outright atheists, since they are unrepentant adulterers. So why do atheists struggle so much with staying married? Let’s see.

You know how I am always talking about how atheism doesn’t rationally ground self-sacrificial moral obligations? Well this instance of adultery is exactly the kind of example that I am talking about. The problems with atheism and morality arises when an atheist is confronted with a desire to be happy that goes against what his society in that time and place considers to be moral. On atheism, right and wrong are relative to an arbitrary time and place in which the atheist was born – they are just like traffic laws and clothing fashions. It’s arbitrary. And no atheist in the world is going to sacrifice a moment of happiness because of arbitrary customs and conventions that change over time and place – as long as they can escape the consequences. The whole point of atheism is to dismiss moral obligations, to look down on those who are moral as stupid, and to pursue selfish happiness in this life. But what happens when atheists face a “moral obligation” (as defined by culture) that goes against their self-interest, i.e. – their feelings?  Well, the moral obligations go out the window – as long as they can avoid the social costs and punishments of their society (which is why the left is always so busy breaking down the Judeo-Christian morality of parents in the secular leftist public schools – they don’t want your kids to judge them for things like adultery and divorce). This is why the left support same-sex marriage – they want to redefine marriage so that it is based on the feelings and needs of selfish adults, not on moral obligations to children. The left doesn’t care about born children any more than they care about unborn children – they care about themselves. And they spin these self-serving “i’m the brave victim of your silly cultural prejudices” stories to minimize their culpability for the damage they cause. They are inventing a new standard of morality – one that glorifies selfishness and the triumph of the strong over the weak (children, born and unborn).

On the Christian worldview, God is real, and he has a design plan for us. Part of that design plan is that we were made to honor our relationship with him. Honoring that relationship with him means treating others a certain way, especially our spouses and children. We have to train our whole lives in order to be able to shoulder the burdens of family relationships – to our spouse and to our children. If a man neglects his education or his employment history or his investment portfolio, then he cannot be a provider. His feelings on those obligations don’t matter. If he wants to marry, he has a God-given obligation to provide. If a woman reads “The Shack” instead of “On Guard”, votes Democrat because she thinks that the Comedy Channel is more reliable than Fox News, and sleeps around a lot in college after freely choosing to make herself drunk, then she has failed to prepare for her role as a mother and wife. Denying yourself happiness as you prepare for moral obligations in a marriage is not rational in a godless universe. If God does not exist, then there is no way you ought to be, and no way marriage ought to be, and no way children ought to be treated. Children are the biggest victims of all – if the leftists aren’t killing them outright through abortion, then they are voting for no-fault divorce, single mother welfare, same-sex marriage, etc. in order to encourage selfish adults to deny children relationships with their two biological parents.

The problem with the left is that they want the prestige of marriage, but they won’t give up their selfish moral relativism. But how can marriage, which is built on the idea of vows and self-sacrificial moral obligations, be entered into by non-theistic self-centered leftists who are guided only by their self-interest and their emotions? It can’t. What they should have done is invented a new relationship, like cohabitation, and entered into that. But what they did, and what same-sex marriage activists are trying to do, is entering into marriage and then changing marriage into cohabitation by law. This is what conservatives mean when we say that no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage change marriage. If one party can dissolve a marriage unilaterally, then marriage has no meaning. If marriage can be had by people in non-exclusive relationships, then marriage has no meaning. They should have invented somethings else – something consistent with a worldview that denies self-sacrifice and moral obligations to children.

Anyway, read the whole disgusting, self-serving New York Times story, and leave me some comments.