By Andy Torbett

As the “Delicates” scatter towards their safe place to furtively suck on a pacifier while feverishly kneading handfuls of play dough, let me explain that the title of this column refers to the denotative meaning of stupidity and not the connotative. Stupidity is derived from the root word stupor. Think of it as an aura, a fog, similar to how this construction guy feels after a hot day, baking on a roof while shingling. In simple terms, after getting fried all day at work, one prefers to sit on the couch staring at the television or computer in a state of stupidity.

But where the intellectualism? The state of our nation is this, that we have pontificated, debated, and at all points elevated our speech to such a place that the common place, common sense, and the common man is disdained, lampooned, and mocked as irrelevant, not worthy of the modern man. The Apostle Paul described it as, “Ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of truth”. Solomon observed in The Ecclesiastes and Proverbs that after all his learning, acquisition of treasure, and accomplishments that it was all “vanity” and the only final necessity was to “get wisdom”.

Could it be that in all our quests for high-minded words and soliloquy that befuddle the simple man, we dull ourselves to the basic innate powers of perception, which comes so naturally to the simple man? Can we possibly have become so churlish and bigoted in our lofty pursuits of intellectualism that what we call reasoning is nothing more then self-indulgent prattle rife with circular reasoning which has withered what was once the nation’s greatest resource, common sense, into a fallow wasteland? Like the Greek philosophers of old, Americans are walking about with a lantern searching for a honest man, a discerning man, a common man and, like the civilizations of old, we follow blindly in their wake wanting and wasting to “get wisdom” as we decline.

As the debate on our foundational structure of marriage has raged on, to which I am party, I have noticed some curious threads woven through the debate that I find fascinating. One would think as ideological barbs are cast back and forth that the only heterosexuals who have developed a marriage construct are Christians. Again, one would think that through the haze of charges of intolerance hurled so flippantly about that only Christians have built a civilization upon the foundation of their marriage construct. Finally, in our age of enlightenment, one would think that it is a small thing to dismantle and redefine the marriage construct upon which your nation is built, that moving, twisting, and reshaping this foundation upon which we for generations so labored to build will have no negative impact upon the civilization, and the mountains of evidence to the contrary which are blazed throughout history do not apply to us.

A common man with common sense could look at this list of modern arguments and say no to all of them, but since we are now intellectuals with our noses too far inclined to see anything which resembles common, it’s necessary to breaks things back down to the basics. What is the most basic building block of a civilization? Life! Yes, babies are the most basic building block of a civilization. You can’t have one without them.

The very basic essence of a civilization is the secure propagation of life. Our Constitution describes it as “to insure the domestic tranquility”. It has become a matter of debate for our civilization as to whether it is Constitutional to defend the traditional structure of marriage. I would counter that the whole of the Constitution was designed to defend that structure. You cannot ensure the domestic tranquility unless you have a domestic to insure.

• The first in all multi-part series on the marriage structure as a national security issue.