How sad is it that divorce has become the most relatable way to understand any kind of dissolution?
Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a lot of good in the idea of a peaceful separation among parts of a country who don’t like each other and don’t want to share a nation anymore. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently brought this idea back into the national conversation (with the usual vitriolic and ignorant responses), but it was the extension of this metaphor that really bothered me.
Again, the actual underlying idea is probably a good one, possibly a great one. But when you start making these comparisons, something has gone wrong:
Setting aside the odious government as parent/citizen as child confusion, isn’t it sad that the way we justify peaceful separation is by saying “It’s just like a marriage. Sometimes people don’t want to be married anymore, so they get a divorce. This would be just like that but on a larger scale.” The logic certainly follows. If you can leave someone you’ve committed to spending the rest of your life with, then you should certainly be able to separate from people you’ve never met, don’t agree with, and whom you are only connected to because of decisions someone else made before you were born. But aren’t we working backwards? Why is ending a marriage so readily accepted while ending a country is a bridge too far? Which one is more substantial? Which one is more indivisible? For that matter, which one is more: the marriage or the country?
We don’t think about it much anymore, but there is a real permanence to marriage. Insomuch as marriage is the institution in which people conceive, birth, and raise children (again, we tend to forget that marriages are fundamentally about having children), ones relationship to their spouse is as real and fixed as their relationship to their kids. In a marriage, two have become one flesh in the form of the new person they create together. And that child is and will always be your son or daughter, and you will always be their mother or father. This is reality. This is our nature, and no distance or disagreement or emancipation can change that.
And because dad is and will always be the child’s father, and mom is and will always be their mother, mom and dad are linked, indivisibly through the reality of that child. They cannot be separated in their relationship anymore than their children can be cut in half and split between them.
Note that there need not be any reference to religious belief or social conventions here. There is only the reality that men and women come together to make new men and women. Every child has a mother and a father, and nothing can destroy that fundamental relationship.
This is the reality of the union that is marriage and it is as real as the children produced by that union.
What about a country?
In the most ideal of cases, a country is that voluntary union of sovereign individuals to secure the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as Jefferson so famously put it. That such a government can be replaced when it no longer serves those ends is explicitly in the founding documents of the country. “The laws of Nature and Nature’s God” entitle a people to dissolve political bonds. It might not be done lightly, but ultimately, it can be done. It is only political bonds after all.
So pursue separation and secession to your hearts content. Argue rationally for your right to be governed if and how you please. Just stop pretending that it’s the same as trying to split a baby.