Brace yourself. We are about to enter a new age; one in which wrong is touted as right and the harmful is extolled as the norm.

To see the new age up close and personal, all you have to do is visit one of a handful of Kentucky’s institutions of higher learning. Berea College, the University of Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky University are all considering domestic partner benefits for their employees—a subtle but powerful demarcation of this new age.

Slogans such as "equal benefits for all," and "no discrimination," sound good, but they conceal the fact that those who speak them are attempting to re-define society by re-defining the family.

Family has always been defined as those who are related by 1) blood, 2) by marriage, or 3) by adoption. There are two views a person can take about the family. The first is that it is essential; the second, that it is expendable. The policies and priorities that people and institutions set for themselves are how you tell which camp they are in.

Traditionally, our societal institutions have set themselves squarely in the first camp—among those who consider the family essential. Our culture has consistently recognized the importance of family as the building block of society and has offered various benefits to those who invest themselves in it. We allow tax deductions, sole survivor protection in the military, workplace benefits, and many other things that help encourage and sustain families.

Let us remember that family is the first school any child attends—each learns an entire language there without "formal" instruction; family is the first government or authority a child experiences—mom and dad lay down and enforce the rules; it is the first community in which a child participates; it is the first place where in-depth relationships are forged; it is the first place a child encounters disappointment and error, and then sees the adjustments he must make to deal with the consequences.

But let us not forget that there are those in the other camp—those who believe that the family is not essential. Those who believe this know, however, that most people do not share their views, and they know that, in order to promote their anti-family agenda, they must use the language of the family to do it.

The people in this camp know that they cannot speak against the family, and so they must redefine it. A family is no longer founded on marriage—that is, heterosexual marriage—but its new foundation is simply sex. It doesn’t matter what kind of sex—heterosexual marriage, live-in girlfriend monogamy, serial monogamy, plurality with maintenance of one live-in partner, homosexual partner (or partners with one being designated as the "significant other" for the benefits package). Once the new foundation is established, domestic partnership benefits is the next step forward, where we commandeer our institutions to reward those who have bought in to the new foundation.

When will it stop? Will we ultimately include multiple partners as beneficiaries because "some of us are capable of more love than others"? Will we lower the age of consent because some of us have "a orientation and special love for young children"?

It happens step-by-step. The redefinition effort is pushed by small power-oriented activists who target society’s institutions — the military, the public schools, city governments, and now colleges and universities. It is fueled by carefully crafted rhetoric and mind-numbing euphemisms. "A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine to go down." In this case, it’s bad medicine.

The redefinition is not a frontal or even deliberate assault with the purpose of destroying the family. It rather is a quiet elevation of every other kind of relationship so that all others are on par with family. The family ends up being defined so broadly that it has no definition at all.

Our institutions of learning used to be in the first camp. They considered themselves to be reflective of the ideas and values of those they served. They saw themselves as furthering the societal priorities of the taxpayers who made them possible, and whose children they trained.

The decision to provide domestic partner benefits to homosexual couples and live-in girlfriends, if that is the decision they make—will herald the full membership of our colleges and universities in the second camp. It will say loud and clear that the family—as the rest of us conceive it—is a thing of the past and something no longer to be preserved and strengthened.

Our children deserve better.