What principles would one have to hold in order to defend Palin’s statement as more than the clumsy impromptu of a perfunctory debate? Among them: the union of husband and wife is a justly privileged one. It constitutes the cornerstone of the family. But it also delimits the extent of the family, so that by family we mean the nuclear family, composed of husband, wife, and progeny, as opposed to the extended family, or clan, which extends both lineally across generations and horizontally beyond siblings to their respective nuclear families. The privileging of the nuclear family is ceremonial and affects only a very small number of civil and legal norms. The family is juridically defined, and so the State actually can define marriage as “between one man and one woman.” Sexual acts and elective filiations are entirely private (non-juridical), whereas the ceremonial title of marriage is public, and so, to define the latter impinges not at all on the former. Sexual acts and elective filiations are two consumer choices among others, and to assert that certain such acts cannot be recognized as marriage in no way denies their freedom and legitimacy, first, as actions that can be “tolerated” socially, and, second, as behaviors that can justify certain civil privileges under the rubric of “contract law.”

I have little doubt most Americans would agree with all these principles. My object is not to demonstrate how unpalatable an apparently benign claim becomes as soon as we sift the principles that subtend it. Rather, I propose that the agreeable patina of Palin’s statement expresses principles that most people have not articulated but already accept. And that, therefore, in the heart of American society, the family is already—has long been—effectively dead. If we accept this death, then it is a matter of indifference whether we retain the ceremonial privilege of the nuclear family or whether we continue to debase, devalue, and decentralize the idea of family until the trends long since underway finally erase that institution from the face of the West. If, on the other hand, we suspect that the prejudice in favor of the family that Palin’s comments reveal might have some legitimate and living foundation, we ought to engage upon a sustained and radical revaluation of the principles according to which modern society operates. We have no choice but to do so, for the family as a present institution may be dead—or at least suffer from clogged arteries—but the prejudice in its favor is inextricable from the heart of man.

I would offer five points toward that revaluation.

1) The family pre-exists any state or church, any civil or religious code. It may not precede the state chronologically (who knows?), but it does in order of principle. It certainly does not precede Christian truth in principle, since the person is ordered to that truth from the moment of creation by his very nature. But it does precede Christian truth chronologically (human beings were already families long before marriage became in some places sacramental, or monogamous, much less romantic). Moreover, the family precedes civil and religious truths in the order of knowledge: one experiences it and experiences it richly before one knows anything else. St. Augustine wrote of having imbibed the name of Christ from his mother as if he drank it in with her milk; but he actually did drink his mother’s milk from the very commencement of his life. As such, the family is the building-block, the basic unit of all human societies, temporal or otherwise, and is prior to any laws or statements we may make about it.

The Catholic Church acknowledges these foundational and determinate qualities by having bride and groom perform their own sacrament of marriage, while the priest witnesses on behalf of the Church. This witnessing fortifies and sanctions certain marriages because those particular marriages reinforce and continue the family. This does not give the Church some “right” to create marriages, but only to shepherd unions that it believes God has brought into being, and which only God can dissolve. The Church appeals, therefore, not to its own authority but to the authority of human nature and human destiny, when it offers guidance upon the components of a true marriage.

Civil law may also fortify and sanction marriages in order to strengthen the family, as befits the state’s role as the common-good extension of a society constructed of families. Thus, the State cannot define marriage, save perhaps in a provisional way, as it lends support to the marital practices that have long since demonstrated that they make possible the continuation of families. Marriage defines itself, requiring not human invention or authority but only human participation.