Jonah Goldberg on Marriage

HoBos - By Jonah Goldberg - The Corner - National Review Online

All I can say is that my position on gay marriage and civil unions is the same as it’s always been. I would prefer civil unions for all the reasons people following this debate already know, but I suspect that eventually the state(s) will require that we call these unions marriages and that the sky will not fall as a result. I think that delaying that eventuality would still be good for society, but I’m sympathetic to the impatience of gays who believe that justice delayed is justice denied.

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Marriage is an ancient, bedrock institution born thousands of years before anyone even knew how to spell democracy. It is impossible to even guess how many other institutions it supports. As Friedrich Hayek noted, such institutions are the real storehouses of human knowledge: “[M]ore ‘intelligence’ . . . is incorporated in the system of rules of conduct than in man’s thoughts and surroundings.”

And that’s why I’m willing to wait a while longer — to muddle through as we sort all this out — before we radically redesign marriage. If Andrew is right about gay marriage, waiting is no doubt unfair to gays seeking to have their monogamous relationships legitimized by the state. But it was Edmund Burke — the champion of temperamental conservatism — who noted that sometimes we “must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes.” Indeed, the conservative must point out that the beaches of history are littered not only with the human wreckage of bad ideas rushed out too quickly, but with the wreckage of good ideas rushed out too quickly as well.