Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Yes. I think that once you’ve internalized a Libertarian Party position, you’re happy to argue for the importance of government borders, for the imposition of rules by majorities in democracies, for the support of tyrannical dictatorships, and particularly for compromise in the pursuit of electoral success, whatever principle du jour appears likely to support the LP position.
I think that at some level, you know that if this proposal was a surefire electoral winner, then one senator with a large polling budget would have adopted it. I don’t think you care about that, though, because you’re not interested in Republican electoral success, something you regularly actively oppose by promoting third party voting.
Harshness…
I don’t know what the LP’s position on anything is. I haven’t read the platform and I’m not a member.
You’re right in that I’m not interested in Republican electoral success for its own sake.
And if no senator has adopted this position, its because they’re all caught up in the current head to head log jam that doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s a paradigm that I’m trying to break through.
Just so there’s no confusion, I’m a statist when it comes to marriage. Generally not my preferred way of doing things, but I think it’s the best of the available choices.
I’m still also not sure what the practical difference is between state marriage licensing and the marriage registry system Fred proposes. Getting our marriage license was, essentially, registering our marriage: we had to show show proof of identity, affirm that we weren’t already married, sign a document, and pay $30 or something. Least painful interaction with government I’ve ever had.
So much for societal determinations…
James of England
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.
About 60 Rico SSM posts and literally thousands of comments testify to the disagreement over this point. I should thank you for the “probably”, though as I’ve said here a number of times I don’t support anything called “the abolition of marriage”. (“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you just want to extend it to gays”. Yep. )
Another commenter–not James–brought up the traditional place of the SoCons within the GOP coalition. This “tradition” lasted roughly 1980 through 2005. It is not coded in DNA. Reagan’s electoral coalition is little more relevant to our times than Ike’s was 25 years after he left office.
No, I don’t see the difference between a marriage license and marriage registry either. Essentially the license is a form of registering, so I don’t know how that would be a political solution.
I hope by now we see that these social issues are a loser for the right. All we do is fire at each other. Thus we follow the Left’s playbook of distracting us while they run everything off the cliff. We need to focus on what we agree and table the rest if we want to win. The only place we can find agreement on social issues seems to be to roll back the Obama predations on religious liberty and freedom of conscience. No more SSM red herrings!
Gary, do you think I believe that SSM constitutes the abolition of marriage? Did you read my reply to Jennifer where I said that it wasn’t?
My worst fear is that SSM might lead over time to the abolition of marriage, but I don’t think that it will necessarily happen. Who knows? What I was describing as the abolition of marriage was Fred’s position that marriage, which is and always has been a legal construct (or the analog of a legal construct in pre-legal societies) be abolished as a legal construct.
I didn’t say that you needed to be a social conservative to be a Republican. I said that social conservatism was part of the definition of conservative. If you prefer, it’s part of the basket of goods that defines “conservative”. I also said that you probably couldn’t be a conservative and favor the abolition of marriage. As you noted, you don’t favor the abolition of marriage, and while I believe support for SSM to be a liberal position, I think every conservative of significance has held some liberal positions.
Favoring the abolition of marriage, though, preferences the paradigm of the French revolutionary over anything resembling Burke. It is radical revolution in the literal sense of destroying the roots of society. One cannot be a conservative and advocate the Year Zero of the Khmer Rouge or of Robespierre.
I’m not suggesting that you adopt your positions out of a paid or institutional party loyalty, although I don’t think anyone is surprised when Libertarian quizzes on where you stand mark you out as 100% or 99% matching their ideology, while no one else on Ricochet clears 95% for any party, and most people scored way lower.
You don’t believe what you do because you’re bribed; you come by your lockstep devotion honestly. When other politicians compromise, or hold incorrect beliefs, it is proof of their natures. When Johnson makes his number one campaign effort the support for campaign financing, it’s because one has to live in the real world.
Fred, You have hit on the nexus of the problem. Why is the state interested in marriage?
1) The state cares that children become good citizens. We only have to look at the inner city to see the disaster parentless childrearing presents to society.
2) A child has a right to be raised by his biological father and mother. The husband of a child is legally assumed to be the child’s father. The child is a truly powerless person who needs the state to proactively work on his behalf.
3) The idea of permanence in marriage keeps couples together for the sake of the children.
4) The state protects the family unit from outside interference, even from the state. The parents make the decisions concerning the child’s welfare, not the grandparents, school administrators, or the state itself.
We have marriage recognized by the state because we desperately need parents to rase responsible children. The state will not function if the whole county is like Detroit. The destruction of the legal definition of marriage will, like no-fault divorce before it, lead to an accelerated breakdown of the family structure, something the state should be very against.
I know that I’m being something of a naif here, but you don’t see that this is the whole problem? There should be no right or left on the court. They should interpret that Constitution; that only. As soon as you start talking about right and left on the court, you get into territory where the court shouldn’t be. After her clearly political dissent in the Michigan affirmative action case, Sonia Sotomayor should be removed from the court.
Feel free. I am a conservative. I usually vote Republican, but if the Republicans abandon their opposition to redefining marriage, my vote will go with it, along with those of other conservatives. Democrat lite is not going to win elections for Republicans. Why would anyone who now votes Democrat switch to get a watered down version of Democrat policies?
If you prefer, “living constitution” vs. “originalist”. It just happens that support for the original constitution means being conservative, since the Founders weren’t super excited about gay rights, atheism, or protecting murderers from punishment, but were into gun rights, religious liberty, and federalism.