"Don't ever take a fence down," wrote the great English essayist and novelist G.K. Chesterton (d. 1936), "until you know the reason it was put up."
It's difficult not to think of that statement while contemplating our society's widespread experimentation with novel definitions of "family" and the wholesale rejection, in many elite and other quarters, of "traditional values."
Sheer antiquity by itself, of course, doesn't prove an attitude or a moral judgment good. We're well rid of slavery, narrow tribalism and open racism, for example, and the cheerful and untroubled zest with which our ancestors often went to war is, happily, unimaginable to most of us today.
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