What Child Is This?

And that is the real tragedy of the story here from the AP: how it seeks to imitate what a family ought to be, and how deeply it fails in that regard. And in the end, it is also a parable of how far those involved are willing to wander from the truth and into what seems right in their own eyes by forcing the Law to do things for them which, if they are honest, they were unable and unwilling to do for themselves.Is it really a matter of how many American States issue a legal verdict that this sort of thing ought to be legal and be called “marriage”? Does that actually improve what has happened here, and what happens thousands of times every year? Or does it simply make a bad system of reasoning and living worse by giving permission to people to do it more often?That’s the root of it: what else will we permit? How far will we go to show that in fact we do not have to let a man to leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two to become one flesh, in order to have a marriage and a family? At what point are we actually destroying this thing we think we are longing for?And then where is the refuge from our own work? That is: how do we get out from under the way we have made the world, doing the things we want to do, and suffering for it because what we want is at the same time somehow apparently-necessary to us and so utterly futile and broken?If all the things I want to do I cannot do, and all the things I should not want I do with gusto, how terribly faulty, flimsy, forlorn, gloomy, hapless, hopeless, and hurting am I?And who can save me — the law?