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Limited Government, Gay Marriage & The Future
Last week I had a post about how the fight over marriage equality is over. Gay marriage has won. In the ensuing discussion, the entire point seemed to have been lost. We have passed the tipping point on this issue. Just a reminder:
Look at that trend line.
It’s not just this Gallup poll. Public sentiment, as well as legal and social momentum, is clear and in one direction. My entire point is that there’s no fight to be had here politically.
I think I’ve established here on Ricochet that elections aren’t my main focus. It doesn’t matter as much to me.
But it matters to many of you, my friends here at Ricochet. What I’m trying to tell you is that if you keep pushing on this, you’ll keep losing. Electoral politics depends, rightly or wrongly, on appealing to the public. You can’t do that by pushing on issues that the public is on the complete opposite side of. If you do, you’re going to keep losing.
The problem is that we’ve reached a point where the federal government has become dangerously out of control, and since I can’t just go off into the woods and live in a cabin with my cats, I have been drawn, with enormous disgust, into having to care about this stuff.
Let me be uncharacteristically communitarian for a moment. We — those who care about human freedom, those of us who care about the future of this nation — have to stop losing elections. At a certain point, if we continue on the course we are presently on, there will be a massive, sudden, probably violent change in our government or our way of life. Frankly, I’m tired of losing elections to dangerous statists because for some reason the better candidate gets tripped up talking about gay marriage.
Enough of this.
I thus present a solution, one I have presented before here on Ricochet.
Most of you reading this have very strong feelings about gay marriage. I’m not going to argue about your feelings, your belief structure, or what you think. We’ve been through all of that over and over. I’m not going to convince you and you’re not going to convince me.
What I is suggest a change in emphasis for conservatives who care about traditional marriage. This solution I first encountered out of the mouth of a man who I know to be, frankly, a bigot. (Not in the diluted sense of the word so frequently used today. An actual bigot.)
The solution: Separation of marriage and state.
Marriage is a lot of things, among them a legal contract. As the law stands now, one needs a license to get married. We license marriages now, but we did not always. Historically, there weren’t licenses. There were records. The clerk merely recorded what others had used their freedom to do.
The point of recording marriage is to resolve legal disputes. Marriage need not be licensed. People could simply register with a government clerk. Many of you will voice practical objections. “What about X?” There’s always a solution for X.
Separating marriage and government means that how I feel about gay people and gay marriage and how you feel about gay people and gay marriage don’t matter politically. One side isn’t forcing its definitions or values on the other. We don’t need to fight. We can both be on the same side without either of us compromising our belief systems.
It’s also not an electoral loser.
Published in General
Fred, you’re not (just) an individualist. You’re a subjectivist. “Marriage” means whatever any individual (or two or more individuals) says it means. After listening to Peter Kreeft yesterday, I have a couple of his points to share.
1) No society has survived subjectivism of truth, politics, and religion, as our society is attempting. The choices are a) We don’t survive it, b) We have a re-awakening and reverse the trend, or c) We break the historical record. I’d hedge my bet by putting money on a) or b), but only a fool and his soon-to-be-parted money would bank on c).
The greatest social reformer of all time, Confucius, was once asked, if only one of his reforms could be enacted, which would he choose. He answered, “calling things what they are.” All the “great” totalitarians of the 20th century knew the best way to get control of people is to control the language. You advocate “marriage equality,” when, really, you’re advocating labeling different things the same. It’s a lie. That’s the objection of marriage and family supporters.
In nearly every piece you write, you make mention of “what you (traditionalists) think of gays,” implying bigotry. In one of the most tolerant (of gays) societies in all of history, hardly anyone cares what gays do privately. We just don’t want them (and their leftist allies) diddling with the most fundamental institution of a free society. It’s remarkable to me how you stubbornly refuse to see the totalitarianism driving the issue.
Government will continue to have something to say on “marriage.” You’ve chosen to side with the Left.
That term perfectly demonstrates the dishonesty and cowardice that has largely marked one side of this discussion. It is nothing but a platitude intended to generate an emotional response while hiding the actual nature of the change being advocated.
I’m the one arguing against using government. You get that, right?
I don’t give a fig that I’ve “chosen to side with the Left.” (Which, btw, I most certainly haven’t, nobody on the left is arguing for less government.) I’ve chosen to side with freedom, with individual rights, with individual choice.
And not for nothing, but I remember when conservative stood for individual freedom, individual right and individual choice. I remember went conservatism stood for something other than being anti-Left.
How does your proposal advance individual freedom, individual right, or individual choice?
If that were true, the wishes of the voters in every jurisdiction save one where the question has come before the voters, would be honored.
It’s never worked before. Surely it will work for us, though, because we care more.
The Left wants SSM. You want SSM. That your motivations are opposing matters little in reality. Totalitarians always take advantage of the noble motivations of others who might disagree with them in every other respect. You’re being used.
Conservatives are for freedom and individual choices — within reasonable limits. It is unreasonable to redefine something as fundamental to a free society as “marriage” and “family,” and expect it not to be exploited by ruthless ideologues.
The fight against gay marriage is not over, unless we give up. The militant gays have won many battles lately, but not the war. We cannot let the left redefine our language – “same sex marriage” is an oxymoron, just as “low-fat lard” or a “feline canine”. I have no problems whatsoever with giving gay couples many of the privileges of marriage, but we must not allow the definition of marriage to be changed. Our mantra (and bumper sticker) should be “Civil Unions Yes – Marriage NO!”
As an aside, I don’t care about opinion polls. Everyone should read the book “How to Lie With Statistics”, which contains a lot of info on polls. It was written in 1954 by Darrell Huff, and it has a lot of details about how polls are manipulated to obtain desired results, as well as how the results are presented to achieve desired outcomes in opinion polls.
And for the record again, I have gay friends, and one lady in particular that I grew up with and love (and her “wife”). However, I’m not caving to the left on this one. Fight on!
Fred,
In the end, a state that does not have to recognize your marriage does not have to respect it. What you are proposing is exactly the purpose of “marriage equality:” a vehicle to abolish state-recognition of marriage and family and replace it with state-regulated contracts.
Ultimately, this would cede to the state far more power to meddle in our relationships than ever before. It renders us all atomized individuals in the eyes of the state. Officially strangers to one another.
How pray tell do we retain family autonomy in this scheme of things? We don’t.
I agree with No Caesar above, SSM is a red herring. The desired end result is not to have “marriage equality”, whatever that means; but to have a cudgel with which to beat the religious out of public society.
With SSM being the law, anyone promoting traditional marriage will be prosecuted legally: viz. the couple in Great Britain.
The religious American is the Left’s greatest and most resolute foe.
Consent, let alone informed consent, doesn’t enter English marriage law until Cnut, not that long before marriage licenses, and enters the law of other nations much later. It is the central problem with radical utopian ideologues of all stripes that they cannot understand that the fact that everyone knows something is true does not mean that it will continue to be widely recognized when the basis for the belief is undermined.
Thus Fred suggests that the law is irrelevant to your decision to marry a parrot because there’s a broad societal consensus on what marriage means, ignoring the fact that he advocates destroying the basis for that consensus. If utopia building were easy or harmless, Fred’s predecessors would have achieved more good and been responsible for the deaths of fewer tens of millions.
Both before and after the Reformation, marriage was an area of joint jurisdiction. When you said in an earlier comment that licensing began in England in the 13th century, you’re probably referring to the Fourth Lateran Council, in the Lateran Palace in Rome in 1215. Marriage banns were required by the Westminster Synod in 1200, arguably the 12th century, in England, but the license to escape the need for banns was a libertarian advance in 1215. Both the Church and the King were able to, and did, pass laws clarifying marriage rights throughout the Middle Ages, as they did under Christian Rome. The separation of Church and state is a reformation idea, and not one that had firmly taken hold in the early colonies.
At its very worst, the damage from SSM might be a stepping stone to the statist hell that would result from Fred’s vision.
Marriage is one of the three universals of human society, along with the allocation of property and the regulation of violence. We are taking it into new territory with SSM and NFD. We may go further; add polygamy, and we’ll be abusing the concept of marriage as totalitarians abuse the concept of property. Eliminate marriage, and you bring the analogy to a pandemonium worse than North Korea, one where no concept of property, and hence no time horizon longer than a day, might exist.
Both genderless marriage and the abolition of marriage are steps away from tradition, but the abolition of marriage is at the bottom of the slippery slope, while genderless marriage is only part way down.
Randy is talking about the criteria for eligibility for marriage. Fred likes to pretend that regulation for marriage is the same as licensing for marriage, but this is obviously absurd. Marriage has always been part of the law, back to the first legal codes.
Although there are people who refer to Massachusetts as requiring marriage licences in 1639, I don’t believe that Massachusetts thought that that was what it was doing. Banns were still required, taking the form of announcements at three town meetings or public lectures, with two weeks on a public noticeboard sufficing if no town meetings or lectures were held.
I’m not a libertarian and getting the government out of the licensing of marriage isn’t my viewpoint. I was wanted Tom to clarify his position because I know he’s a libertarian.
First, Justice Thomas got through a Democratic majority Senate, and Scalia and Rehnquist avoided filibusters from a minority powerful enough to achieve them.
Secondly, Kennedy isn’t like an Obama or Carter pick. He’s to the right even of Clinton’s picks.
Thirdly, outside gay issues and capital punishment, the Court has moved to the right over the last few decades. Not winning everything is not the same as getting screwed.
You’re not arguing against government except on a highly superficial level. To analogize, if you remove government enforcement of private property rights, you destroy the basis on which people are able to get by, for the most part, without government. For this reason, most libertarians agree that abolishing private property rights is not government reducing.
Similarly, if you don’t regulate/ prohibit violence, you prevent people from being able to get by without government, so libertarians generally accept that murder should be illegal; although some of them come up with schemes in which rich people get to murder without real cost, most libertarians see the foolishness.
Similarly, if you destroy marriage, the underpinning of the fabric of society, you destroy independence from government.
if your goal is to encourage gay monogamy, I suppose, then isn’t that asking the government to legislate morality? Or at least thinking the government can do anything to improve a relationship.
Great, so when will you abandon your opposition to raising the minimum wage? Look at the polls, the trend lines. The public is overwhelmingly in favor of raising the minimum wage (73% in favor; far more than favor same sex marriage). And the same goes for tax hikes on the rich.
I hereby call on economic conservatives to abandon their unpopular positions. I’m tired of losing elections!
Well, you’re being selective here. Rehnquist was already on the Court, and had been for years. Thomas only got through after a bruising fight, not to mention Bork.
Kennedy is generally on the right, except for social issues … which is what the post was about. Kennedy smeared everyone who opposes gay marriage by declaring that the only motive for opposing it is hatred. Same for the Court overall; it moved right in general, but on social issues it hasn’t. Abortion is still legal. Gay marriage is legal.
The argument is that the Democrats believe they should get to nominate who they want, but only when they have the presidency. If they won’t reciprocate, we need GOP senators who hold firm.
Fred, good try, but they aren’t going to convince us, we’re not going to convince them, your admittedly idealistic proposal won’t go anywhere, as you no doubt knew, because Heinlein-esque reframing grand schemes won’t sell.
The SoCons still like to simply call themselves “the conservatives”, though, kinda like San Francisco likes to call itself “The City”. I guess I can’t blame them for trying. Some time ago the atheists tried to rebrand themselves as “the brights”. I kid you not.
Tsk, tsk. I can’t remember who said it, but “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Of course, I tend to read it’s meaning a little differently from the accepted one.
Rehnquist got appointed by Nixon to associate justice by a Democratic Congress, as well as to Chief. I agree that Bork did not, but my point was that things were not as bad as you suggest, not that things never went against us.
Kennedy is a moderate even on social issues; we can thank him for partial birth abortion bans, some religious liberty and public worship, President Bush, and gun rights.
Reagan wasn’t great on judges and Bush 41 got conned once, but 43 picked well. Reagan’s one solid choice, one moderate, and the three excellent Bush picks have moved our court somewhat to the right. Abortion is less protected than it was, religious liberty, and gun rights, more so, and affirmative action is less prevalent.
Many SoCons think abortion more important than SSM; for them, the Court has moved right on social issues. You’re right that abortion still exists, although at pre-Roe levels, but limited victories are still victories, and the momentum is still with us.
If Fred had proposed his scheme as a bit of Utopian radicalism, he’d only have received some of the pushback he did, but Fred is incapable of not grabbing any weapon to hand, so he sold this on the ridiculous basis that this is what everyone wants. He’s just being practical, you know?
While you don’t have to be radically SoCon to be conservative, social conservatism is nonetheless a part of the definition, and you probably do have to oppose the abolition of marriage to consider yourself a conservative.
Do you really think that, James?
GWB got one okay pick. Roberts has been mixed at best. After the heat the Court took for Citizens United, he’s lost his nerve.
He’s been an 85% ally in terms of results. If what you want is a judge, rather than a politician, that’s probably as good as you can ask for. We don’t get everything we want from him, but since Citizens United he’s dramatically supported federalism and limited the Commerce Clause, affirmative action, and campaign finance. There have been decisions with which conservatives have objected to the impacts of Roberts’ opinions, but relatively few on which legally educated non-hacks have objected strongly to the principles applied.
I don’t see evidence that the guy who failed to find protection for partial birth abortions in the Constitution has lost his nerve.