Rejecting the Obvious
by S. M. Hutchens
Liberals seeking to improve their own lives might look to social institutions as resources that can help lift life satisfaction. This would be a challenge, given that support for marriage and faith has dropped more in recent years among liberals than conservatives, and secularization has been concentrated among more left-leaning Americans. In other words, the very institutions that might improve liberals' happiness are increasingly viewed negatively by liberals. (Wilcox, Boyd, and Wang, "How Liberals Can Be Happier," The New York Times, Nov. 25, 2021)
It is also revealing, and worth keeping in mind, that liberals understand this intuitively. This explains why they spend so much energy constructing fantastic and unnatural substitutes for what they have rejected—why, for example, people of the same sex claim a right to be "married," adopting children and building twisted families—and why they are so anxious to establish that there are many kinds of family. It is also the raison d'etre of liberal "churches" founded on humanistic principles. The truth of this, of course, cannot be avowed in modern scholarly circles, where an idea of natural law, originating in God and written in nature, meant to govern human relations and serve human happiness, cannot be recognized from the beginning, the very notion being unscientific by definition.
S. M. Hutchens is a Touchstone senior editor.
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