The basic meaning of honoring father and mother has been truncated by the introspective conscience of the West

kabad -- to be honored, to be great, to be plentiful, to be glorious, to multiply oneself, to make oneself numerous

The basic meaning of adding honor to father and mother is giving them grandchildren, in obedience to the Urgebot to be fruitful and multiply, and in fulfillment of the promise to Abraham to make his descendants as the sands of the seashore and the stars of the firmament. It's not simply about "obedience", as Luther would have it in his Large Catechism. Few commentators, in fact, connect the honoring of parents with the number of their posterity as the Old Testament does generally.

Children's children are the crown of old men; and the glory of children are their fathers.

-- Proverbs 17:6

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

-- Psalm 127:3ff.

That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies;

-- Genesis 22:17

The Hatfield Clan in 1897

Joel Miller rebukes the therapeutic view of marriage but is consumed by it like the rest of Christianity

Here (emphases mine):

[T]he church understands marriage to be a sacrament, a gift of God’s grace for the transformation of the recipients. Look for a moment at two examples: baptism and eucharist. The first moves us into relationship with Christ and his church, while the second gives us the life of Christ so we can become more like him. Marriage is the same way. The endgame is union with God as we grow in Christ. ... Our marriages have the power to transform us into the likeness of Christ. ...

Marriage is now primarily a relationship for the betterment and self-fulfillment of two individuals. Two are stronger than one, after all. Together two individuals can better gratify each other’s desires and fulfill each others needs—right up until the moment they no longer seem able or willing, of course.

None of that is false, so far as it goes.

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You will search the essay in vain for the words "baby" or "children" or "reproduction", the essential object of marriage.

It's as if a "proper" view of marriage never existed in the whole history of all humanity before the followers of a crazed Pharisee called marriage a mystery of Christ and the church in the epistle to the Ephesians.

The tyranny of that one line is the culprit behind the distortion of the immemorial view of marriage as humankind's divinely ordained outlet for expressing God's creativity through the family. The idealizing conception of marriage as spiritually transformative has exposed marriage to all the worst elements of an unattainable mysticism which has bred the contempt for the institution which now plagues the West. Instead of ordering our culture around marriage and children and family we have done everything to delay, deny and redefine what nature and nature's God demands. And then we complain when we lose control of our politics.

Maybe if we had done what God has always commanded we wouldn't now be alone and ashamed as a tiny army of homosexual enemies invades our gates and routs us.

"How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them;

They will not be ashamed

When they speak with their enemies in the gate."

-- Psalm 127:5

In the Name of the Infantilis, the Jejunus, and the Holy Puerilis

The otiose David Warren dissects our Atheocracy here. The best thing about it is that it can't last too long, because it won't reproduce itself, and is defenseless. The point of having a "quiver" full of sons, after all, is to have your own army to defend the gate. Happiness is both that easy, and that hard:

[W]e have an upside-down religion, in which there is no God, but that "Not God" commands an obedience more absolute than God ever required, stipulating everything from the sanctity of antinomian sexual behaviour, down to how we should sort our garbage.

It rides upon an inexhaustible series of mildly fluctuating, but invariably self-contradictory moral and epistemological premises (or more precisely, conceits); and because everything is "relative," nothing may be challenged. It is ... a religion for which an extremely arid Darwinist materialism provides the founding cosmological myth. And abortion is its principal sacrament.

Or to put it another way, a religion that is not going to last forever, but has nevertheless been growing at an accelerating pace for more than 200 years. Moreover, a religion not without some real appeal, to a society of nearly pure consumers. ...

I once commissioned an essay from the estimable Eric McLuhan, expounding the philosophy of Peter Pan. It was a subject I even began drafting a book upon, myself: about the ease with which people may be ruled, once the faith of Peter Pan has been accepted. According to that faith, those who age will die. The secret of immortality is thus to remain perpetually a child, wishing perpetually upon a star. It requires some Nanny, to fulfil all the wishes.

Hence, our theocracy.

Children, we, of a lesser god.