A maxim in the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas states that nothing exists in the intellect that does not first come to the senses (Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu). The faculties of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling introduce the child to the nature of reality. Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses recalls the memorable impressions of childhood that strike the child’s five senses. The eye notices the cow walking in the meadow: “The friendly cow all red and white, /I love with all my heart.” The ear perceives the rustle of Auntie’s skirts: “Her dresses make a curious sound/They trail behind her up the floor.” The body feels the warmth of the fire: “Close by the fire I sit/ To warm my frozen bones a bit.” The mouth tastes the sweetness of dessert: “She [the cow] gives me cream with all her might, /To eat with apple-tart.” The nose delights in the freshness of newly cut hay: “Those green and sweetly smelling crops/ They led in wagons home.” In these lines, the child identifies the good with the visible, tangible realities that his senses perceive. The body reveals a source of truth.
Through these perceptions, common sense recognizes the quantitative and qualitative nature of things, the opposites of things and the degrees of things: the differences between large and small, harmonious and dissonant, hot and cold, sweet and bitter, pleasant or foul smelling, beautiful and ugly, and male and female. Moral knowledge also derives from the association of the good with the beautiful and the natural and relates evil to the ugly and the unnatural. A child’s awareness of reality begins with the recognition of a mother and father who own different bodies, wear different clothes, speak in distinctively masculine or feminine voices, perform different activities, and exemplify different virtues. Through these five senses a child makes sense of the surrounding world by noticing the similarities and distinctions that inhere in the structure of reality and in the composition of a family. With common sense, a child perceives the reality of marriage and the family as physical in aspect: fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. To deny the evidence of the senses makes knowledge impossible and reality unknowable.
Same-sex “marriage”s with adopted children disorient and confuse the young. Children intuit and realize its unnaturalness with all of their five senses. But when propaganda and ideology trump reason and nature, human beings are expected to reject the evidence of their five senses, the truth of the body, and the reality of complementarity—the givenness of male and female revealed throughout all of creation and the whole spectrum of the animal kingdom. If man cannot rely on the five senses as a touchstone of truth, then he can know nothing. If the intellect cannot trust the senses, it cannot perform the work of thinking. Thinking becomes reduced to doubting, and skepticism replaces common sense. In the philosophy of skepticism the truth becomes unattainable, and man’s unreliable reason does not function as an instrument of truth.
To the skeptic, then, all truth that comes to the intellect through the five senses is uncertain and suspect, subject to revision and reinterpretation, and every natural human relationship is tentative and unstable, vulnerable to new definitions and reinvention by way of social engineering: man is woman and woman is man, boys are girls and girls are boys, sex is not gender, and gender is not sex. A genderless deconstructed world lacks meaning and intelligibility for any human being or child. As philosophy professor Deborah Savage writes in Living the Truth in Love, “It is an attempt to force our children to live in a world in which they cannot believe in the evidence of their senses; it is to ask them to live in a world that doesn’t make sense.”
At the core of Western civilization the worldview of Greek philosophy founded by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle illuminates the truth of human nature and the structure of reality: man is a rational animal living under natural law seeking happiness through knowledge. The world is intelligible and operates according to orderly natural laws and by causes and effects—a logical language that man’s reason apprehends. Reality speaks in a universal tongue, and all men possess the intelligent power of understanding Nature’s meaning: Nature does nothing in vain, and everything that lives also moves according to its nature and seeks its natural end, whether it is the river rushing to the ocean, the cat pursuing a mouse, water descending downhill, or animals mating to reproduce the species. The legal status of same-sex marriage and the situation of the adopted children in these relationships subvert logic, philosophy, nature, reason, the reality of the body, and the clarity of the five senses.
Once again, as in all the social experiments of the sexual revolution, the child is the victim. He not only suffers from the absence of a biological father and mother but also from the deprivation of a maternal and paternal influence and example in his daily life. Not to know a mother’s tenderness, kindness, gentleness, mercy, and unconditional love and not to experience a father’s justice, discipline, authority, and chivalry creates an imbalance in the nurture of the child. Because every person is born from the union of a mother and a father, the child’s wholeness as a human being depends on this indissoluble bond that no surrogate relationship can equal. A family of two married fathers or two married mothers makes no sense to the child because it refutes the self-evident truths of the body.
As Dr. Jennifer Morse Roback has written in her essay “Understanding the Sexual Revolution” in Living the Truth in Love, “Removing the gender requirement from marriage, as the United States has just done in the Obergefell ruling, tacitly dismantles these structural rights of children. A genderless marriage cannot attach children to their own mothers and fathers. A genderless marriage system replaces biological attachments with the intentions and desires of adults. Hence, a genderless marriage system will aggravate existing systemic structural injustices to children and create new sources of injustice.” Separating children from the context of normal families with a mother and father and placing them in imaginary families without the balance of biological complementarity only disorient and confuse the child who is designed and intended to trust his five senses as the primary source of truth.
While adults may call every imaginable arrangement a “family” and invent new definitions of marriage, the simple child in his heart and soul will know he is not experiencing the real thing. Sophisticated adults can cleverly lie, pretend, and act that the Emperor’s new clothes look magnificent, but the child’s clear, unbiased eyes will see and his honest words will say that the king is naked: “He’s nothing on!” If a child cannot trust what he sees or hears by noticing the evidence of his five senses and the material reality of physical bodies, then he will forever be at a loss to understand the nature of all things—the nature of manhood, womanhood, marriage, love, and truth itself. A child who cannot trust his eyes and ears cannot experience the innocent joy celebrated in Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, the boy who sees that “The world is so full of a number of things/ I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings” (italics mine). That is not skepticism but the clarity of an Aristotelian mind that first received the knowledge of the senses.