Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, August 07, 2010 10:52:36 AM
Now that a judge has issued an incoherent ruling that the federal
government has a 14th Amendment interest in the definition of marriage
after more than 140 years of apparent disinterest, it may be time to
reconsider government involvement in marriage entirely. Townhall’s
David Harsanyi offers the argument that government involvement may do
more harm than good to the institution, and results from a historical
mistake in the first place. Time to get on with the divorce, Harsanyi insists
We would do much better to require people to create partnership
contracts in the civil context than get marriage licenses for issues
like property sharing, access to family, and so on. If people want to
live together and share their lives to that extent, it’s healthier and
much less confusing later to have those issues expressly spelled out in
an agreement up front, just like any prenuptial agreement today. If two
people don’t want to go that far in formalizing their relationship,
then they shouldn’t be considered married anyway — and shouldn’t get
access to “palimony” and have debates over oral contracts, and so on.
If you don’t get it in writing, it doesn’t exist, in the context of
personal partnerships.
Then, if people want to get “married,” they can go to the institutions that actually care
about marriage: churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and so on.
Marriage can be a private, faith-based recognition of a sacramental
relationship that exists outside of the civil context entirely, and
houses of faith can set their own requirements as to what it means and
who can participate — just as they do now. Not only does that protect
the sanctity of actual marriage much more than a government, but it also
means that government has no way to poke the camel’s nose of
intervention into the religious tent, as it were, to force houses of
faith to conduct marriages that violate their tenets in the name of
fairness. Divorcing marriage from the state and dissolving the
partnership between government and religion benefits the latter more
than the former.
We’re on the last few steps of the path leading to the end of our
traditional understanding of marriage. Soon Anthony Kennedy will stamp
it null and void, imposing a new understanding of “marriage” as any
long-term monogamous relationship between two consenting adults of any
sex. Imposing is exactly the right word. The full power of
the State will be turned to ensuring the new definition is universally
accepted. Centuries of culture, deeply held religious beliefs, and the
objections of a majority will provide no protection. Not long ago, it
was suggested we should get government out of the marriage business.
Now, as the Anchoress notes, the government will own it completely, and it’s religion that needs to think about closing up shop
What, exactly, are the traditionalists defending? Marriage has already
become a tattered quilt of no-fault divorce and pre-nuptial agreements.
A majority may express support for it, but a minority takes it
seriously. It’s a faded old photograph of families wearing forced
smiles, posed before fairy-tale backdrops hiding sordid realities,
framed in the tarnished silver of a romanticized ideal. We should be
glad to hand the old thing over to gay couples, and hope some of them
care about it enough to polish it up a bit.