FAMILY INTERGRITY

Have you ever experienced regret? Not the casual passing kind, but an entrenched piercing regret? The kind that comes with heartbreak? As Fulton Sheen explained in ‘Three To Get Married’, “a broken heart is not a fracture of a single heart but the rupture of two hearts once united in the rapture of a single love.” Have you ever suffered such loss?
In contrast, is there anything more uplifting than a small child’s eyes, than its smile, its laughter? Can the dancing eyes of a child fail to melt the hardest heart? Can any tragedy compare with the violent loss of childhood innocence? Those who have suffered real loss may understand something of the tragedy of innocence lost, a replay of the first ancient tragedy of man, the tragedy of the lost paradise of Eden.
Mankind’s first tragedy moved John Milton to compose his epic 350-year-old poem ‘Paradise Lost’. His anguished prayer bears repeating, “O Spirit… say first, what cause moved our grand Parents, in that happy state, favoured of heaven so highly, to fall off from their Creator and transgress his will? … Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?” Milton later puts into the mouth of the villain Satan this fearful defence: “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”
The social institution of ‘marriage and family’ survived the ruins of the ancient Paradise Lost. It was later renewed through the redemptive Easter events dramatised in Milton’s ‘Paradise Regained’. It now exists to rescue human love from corruption and to defend childhood innocence from violation. Thus Fulton Sheen affirmed marriage and family as follows, “The pleasure associated with love is the frosting on the cake; the purpose is to make us love the cake, not ignore it.”
It is egotism and the decline of reason that make decadent civilisation give primacy to sex over human love. This may be unknown to some media persons whose casual approach to sex, marital fidelity and family integrity is eroding our society’s capacity for love. Through the print and electronic media, these priests and priestesses of libertine sex continue to curse the Kenyan family and seduce it to a foul revolt.
The purveyors and consumers of libertine sex crave ecstasy as the pathway to love. What they find though is the bitter dregs of marriage perverted, family destroyed and a mirage of love that doesn’t satisfy. Martin Luther King’s unanswerable words ring out, “On the bleached bones of dead civilisations are written the words, ‘too late’.” The Kenyan family should be saved before it is too late.
Available statistics show that family is essential for the good of children, and marriage for the good of spouses. Physical, psychological, social, economic and spiritual wellbeing derive from marriage and family. A recent American study showed that children living with cohabiting parents, or with the mother co-habiting with a boyfriend, are respectively four and eleven times more likely to be sexually, physically or emotionally abused or vulnerable than children living with married biological parents.
Family integrity is in the best interests of our children (art 53(2), Kenyan Constitution). Stable family secured from adultery, cruelty and whimsical divorce is also good for men and women, and the basis of social order (art 45(1)). By nurturing our positive cultural heritage (art 11, 44), we can safeguard marriage and family. Thus the drafters of Kenya’s Marriage Bill should reject subtle proposals that cheapen marriage. Come-we-stay should not equate to marriage. No-fault or on-demand divorce, which treats sacred covenantal vows as worth even less than simple contracts, must be rejected. And polygamy should be limited by granting veto rights to women in customary marriages.
Have you ever been really happy? Not the contentment of a healthy animal but the stable uplifting joy that grows even through pain? Look into it and you will see that such joy, which implies a personal gift of self, always springs from family or similar community of love. Don’t you care to share such joy?