Politics & Power Quote by Jim DeMint

Apocalyptic framing is the oldest trick in political persuasion, and Jim DeMint deploys it with practiced efficiency. By beginning with "Since the dawn of time", he drags a contemporary policy fight out of the messy specifics of law and rights and into the realm of myth. The move isn’t about accuracy; it’s about authority. If something is positioned as ancient, it’s made to feel inevitable. Debate becomes heresy.

"Traditional marriage" does double duty here: it pretends to describe a neutral historical norm while quietly legislating who counts as legitimate. The parenthetical definition ("the union between one man and one woman") is the ideological payload, smuggled in as clarification rather than argument. It narrows the frame so any alternative isn’t just different, but fundamentally destabilizing.

Calling marriage the "building block of civilization" elevates private relationships into infrastructure. That metaphor is doing political work: if marriage is a foundation, then changing its definition becomes an attack on the whole structure, not an expansion of it. That’s why DeMint’s language leans on siege imagery ("severe attack") instead of disagreement. Opponents are cast not as fellow citizens with competing values, but as aggressors.

The line about "our nation's history" localizes the threat, tapping patriotic reflexes and implying that defending heterosexual marriage is synonymous with defending America. In context, this rhetoric fits the late-2000s/early-2010s conservative mobilization around same-sex marriage: a culture-war rallying cry designed to unify a base through fear, not persuade skeptics through evidence.