My personal view on marriage is that it is the union of one man and one woman, joined together permanently, exclusively and monogamously. But as for the marriage wars, I’ve long argued that government should not be involved. People should be free to join together in whatever groupings they want and the government should not favor one such group over another.
To be clear, I do not mean by this that I support the government redefining marriage to include same-sex unions or other groupings. You can read more on my views in “The Rise of the Same Sex Marriage Dissidents.” I’ve never been persuaded that such a redefinition is an appropriate or coherent act for government or leads to greater liberty. We’ve definitely seen the loss of liberty that comes with it.
Marriage existed prior to government. It is public, not private, but it does not intrinsically require legal recognition. Our tax laws shouldn’t play favorites based on marital status. I wish the government were much smaller and less involved in marriage, whether that plays out in forcing florists to provide bouquets for marriage ceremonies they believe to be sinful or firing teachers who don’t wish to violate their beliefs in how they teach about marriage. In fact, I think that the stronger the family, churches, and other institutions are, the less invasive the government. The stronger and more involved the government is in regulating marriage law, the weaker these other institutions are.
Still, my position gives me pause in a few different ways. And has for years since I began thinking more deeply on this topic, if I’m being honest. One is simply the recognition that it’s based on unrealistic thinking. We don’t live in a world where people seek less government involvement.
More importantly, though, what does it really mean to get the government out of marriage? What singled marriage out throughout all time and human history as a different type of recognized relationship is that sex was involved. There’s only one bodily system for which each of us only has half of the system. The unit is the mated pair. In sexual congress, in intercourse between a man and a woman, you are literally coordinated to a single bodily end. And not infrequently, that end involves the creation of another human being. What does it mean to get the government out of marriage when you’re thinking of the natural end of coital sex? That is, children.
Abolishing the many laws regulating marriage sounds like a way to decrease state involvement, but it undeniably opens up avenues for greater state involvement in lives. Would each group of people seeking to join together draw up their own contracts? Who would adjudicate the violations of such contracts? This is an already complicated process when everyone’s operating on similar understanding. Family court judges are meddlesome enough, but imagine the layers of appeals that we would see in a “privatized” situation, appeals that would go to the Supreme Court to establish precedents.
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