Is 'marriage' a thing of the past? It depends on what your definition of 'women' is... (Updated)

"All the News That's Fit to Print" "Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology."

Thomas Sowell elaborates:

...What was the point? To show that marriage is a thing of the past. As a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle put it: "Women See Less Need for Ol' Ball and Chain."

In other words, marriage is like a prison sentence, complete with the old-fashioned leg irons with a chain connected to a heavy metal ball, so that the prisoner cannot escape.

This picture of marriage and a family as a burden is not peculiar to the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle. It is common among the intelligentsia of the left.

Negative depictions of marriage and family are common not only in our newspapers but also wherever the left is concentrated, whether in our schools and colleges or on television or in the movies - most famously, in the "Murphy Brown" TV program that Vice President Dan Quayle criticized, provoking a fierce counterattack from the left.

The New York Times was not the first outlet of the left to play fast and loose with statistics in order to depict marriage as a relic of the past. Innumerable sources have quoted a statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce - another conclusion based on creative manipulation of words, rather than on hard facts. ...

Read it all.

Update: The NY Times Ombudsman speaks.

Also, NewsBusters.org covers the price of publishing leaks. Thanks NY Times.

Update: Ben Shapiro discusses the homosexual assault on traditional marriage:

... If gender is meaningless, children do not need both mother and father; a father and a father, two mothers, six fathers and a mother -- any or all may suffice. To homosexual marriage proponents, the fact that only the sexual union between men and women produces children is an unfortunate accident of nature. Would that nature had made mankind completely androgynous, so as to demonstrate the complete and utter homogeneity of all people!

Gender is not meaningless, of course. The radical individualism that denies all distinction between men and women is deeply pernicious. It denies the spiritual in mankind. It denies the obvious physical and spiritual bounty springing from traditional marriage. It also denies to children the benefits of a mother and father.

In one sense, Washington's same-sex advocates do us a favor: They make clear that in order to deny homosexual marriage, we must uphold the beautiful and natural distinctions between men and women. They also make clear that we must uphold the value of heterosexuality over homosexuality. We must take up the gauntlet and, in doing so, vindicate the possibility of a higher spiritual elevation through the deepest possible human relationship.

The old/main-stream media and the homosexual movement are focused on undermining traditional marriage to suit their ideology. Do not underestimate the degree to which they are succeeding.