Parenting & Family Quote by Jeff Miller

"Thousands of years of human experience" is doing the heavy lifting here: it’s a politician’s way of laundering a contested policy preference into something that sounds like gravity. By invoking endurance, universality, and religion in one sweep, Miller isn’t just praising heterosexual marriage; he’s trying to take it out of the arena of argument. If it’s "honored in all cultures" and "by every religious faith", then dissent becomes not merely disagreement but deviation from civilization itself.

The sentence structure is a familiar cascade of legitimizers. First: tradition (enduring institution). Then: consensus (all cultures, every faith). Then: a moral telos (children are "meant" to be nurtured there). Finally: epistemic closure ("We know this"). It’s a rhetorical padlock: you’re meant to feel that the case has already been tried and settled by history, so current debates - about same-sex marriage, divorce, single parenthood, adoption, reproductive tech - are framed as reckless experiments.

The subtext is gatekeeping. "Man and woman" isn’t descriptive; it’s boundary-setting, a definition deployed as an argument. Children function as the emotional trump card, shifting the focus from adult rights to societal obligation, and implying that alternatives are, at best, second-best and, at worst, harmful.

Contextually, this is classic culture-war language from a U.S. political tradition that treats family structure as a proxy battlefield for religion, gender roles, and national identity. The claim’s power comes from its performance of certainty. Its vulnerability is the same: the moment you remember history is messy, plural, and full of arrangements that endured without fitting the script, the "we know" starts to sound like "we’d prefer."