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I would like to see the government out of the marriage business entirely, and thus I propose the Freedom of Marriage Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of marriage, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of parents, or of procreation; or the right of the people to peaceably engage in sexual activity.
If this sounds familiar, that's because the First Amendment says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
However, the Freedom of Marriage Amendment is not the law, and so the government is all up in our business about marriage – and everything else. Therefore, we have many government laws about marriage; and thus we have gay marriage advocates claiming that equality under the law demands those laws apply equally to gay marriage because they claim gay marriage is the same as hetero marriage in every way that is relevant to the government.
Does equality under the law really apply? If only straight people could own slaves, would it also be necessary to allow gay people to own slaves? If only straight people could be slaves, would it also be necessary to allow gay people to be slaves? If government is all up in our business about hetero marriage, would it also be necessary for government to be all up in gay people’s business about gay marriage? If everyone must be forced to subsidize hetero marriage, then would it also be necessary to force everyone to also subsidize gay marriage? If only some gays wanted marriage laws to apply to them, would it also be necessary to force those laws on all gays?
Government has a monopoly on making laws, so from government’s perspective, is gay marriage the same as hetero marriage in every way that is relevant to government?
- It is not traditional. Even polygamy is more traditional and more natural than gay marriage.
- Homosexuality is unlikely to have evolved naturally. Evolution occurs by random genetic mutations, but a random genetic mutation causing homosexuality would not survive long in the gene pool.
- Most religions oppose homosexuality.
- Gays do not have as much interest in raising children. Gay sex does not produce children. Gay sex does not produce more soldiers or tax payers – hence less benefit to government.
- Although love is a beautiful thing, anal sex is not a particularly beautiful thing. There’s poo in there.
- Vaginal sex is far less likely than anal sex to transmit AIDS, thus making a desire for anal sex unlikely to have evolved naturally.
- If gay love is the same, then why can’t Hollywood produce a convincing heterosexual romance? Why must they rely on focus groups and copy the work of past successes in order to create just an adequate romance?
- Heterosexual men who do not get married are far more likely to get into trouble, meaning they are far more likely to initiate force and fraud or overreact to an initiation of force or fraud, and thus hetero marriage has more of a stabilizing effect.
Libertarians like myself do not consider the differences between hetero marriage and gay marriage to be very relevant. If gay people say they want to get married, then that is a good enough reason to change the definition of marriage. Whereas, progressive advocates (usually not gay themselves) violently resist all of the evidence of differences, and they use the full force of their dominance in academia, media, and government to dishonestly suppress these points and advance fallacies.
Do you remember in 1987 when Oprah was one of many voices who were spreading alarmist propaganda? She said that AIDS would kill one-fifth!
... of the hetero-sexual population!
... by 1990!
Progressives would be apoplectic if the army forced men and women to shower together because naked people cannot relax when other naked people are sizing them up sexually and also looking for an opportunity to initiate a sexual encounter, and yet, progressives are determined to force straight men to shower with gay men.
Have you ever noticed how the media absolutely refuse to acknowledge how homosexuality is a factor when men rape boys in Catholicism, Judaism, athletics, charities, etc.
Have you noticed how the media absolutely refuse to acknowledge any evidence that Obama is gay?
Why do progressives feel the need to take away the tax-exempt status of churches whose doctrine will not allow them to perform gay marriages? Why are progressives so obsessed in their desire to force others to conform? Why can’t progressives ever mind their own business?
The repulsive hypocrisy, dishonesty, and fascism of progressives is unnecessary because …
Now we know there is another group of people who genuinely want marriage law to apply to them too.
… and their claim is sufficient.
To deny marriage to gays would just be mean.
To summarize, libertarian advocacy is fundamentally different than progressive advocacy. Whereas, libertarians say the law should apply the same, progressives also want to create new fascist laws, such as punishing churches who refuse to perform gay marriages. Whereas, libertarians embrace reality and tolerance; progressives are evasive, hypocritical, and fascist.
Test Yourself – Polygamy vs. Gay Marriage
Whenever any progressive advocate asks me if I support gay marriage, I say, "I'll support your right to marry another man if you support my right to marry more than one woman."
Now, any principled and honest advocate for gay marriage would respond, "Hmm... Well, yes of course. That is only fair. After all, the law must apply equally to all marriages. Thank, you for enlightening me." However, not one progressive advocate for gay marriage has ever responded anything like that, although two have reluctantly kind-of sort-of agreed after a few minutes of arguing.
The typical progressive advocate for gay marriage gets angry, and the typical responses I get from progressive advocates are:
“No!”
"What is your real agenda?"
"You are a threat to the institution of marriage."
"Marriage is between a person and another person."
"Polygamy is unnatural."
Now compare those responses from progressives to the responses I get from conservatives when I ask them to support gay marriage:
“No!”
"What is your real agenda?"
"You are a threat to the institution of marriage."
"Marriage is between a man and a woman."
"Gay marriage is unnatural."
Note how …
Progressive advocates and conservative opponents sure do sound a lot alike.
I expected as much from progressives given how the media promotes and celebrates gay marriage while disparaging polygamy. What would their so called “liberal” friends think if they didn’t conform!?
At least conservatives are not being hypocritical. They are just being consistent with their instincts and with pretty much every major religion.
Libertarians, and in some ways conservatives, are more liberal than liberals.
The Factions
As we learned from the issue of polygamy vs. gay marriage, we can learn so much more beyond the legal questions on gay marriage by comparing the various factions themselves.
Everyone agrees that gay marriages claim to be partnerships between consenting adults who expect from each other a lifetime of exclusivity, sex, cohabitation, income sharing, etc.
Libertarians agree with conservatives that gay marriage is different in some ways, but libertarians disagree with conservatives that we can’t redefine marriage. Libertarians also disagree with progressives who claim that marriage has always included gay marriage.
Libertarians know the world is the result of our individual choices, and the future is limitless.
Libertarians disagree with progressives, who want to create additional laws to force everyone to promote homosexuality and gay marriage. For example, forcing churches to perform gay marriages is pure fascism.
Many libertarians disagree with both conservatives and progressives who claim that gay marriage has been illegal in recent decades:
Polygamy has been illegal - Gay marriage has not.
For a long time before Obama was president, gays have been allowed to form marriages just like hetero couples. What gays have not been allowed to do is use the government to force others to react to both marriages identically.
Libertarians agree with conservatives who have noted progressive hypocrisy where progressives thought it helped their agenda to claim that homosexuality was a choice, and then progressives decided that it helped their agenda to claim that homosexuality was predetermined. Why did progressives flip flop on whether homosexuality is a choice vs. predetermination? Although predetermined homosexuality elicits more sympathy from others, it also invites others to find a “cure.”
Whereas, many gays would have actually welcomed a cure (before they were conditioned by the media to conform to the progressive agenda) most progressives would block development of such a cure because they would lose some of their political base. Progressives care more about political power over those they hate than they care about gay people.
Endgame
The Elites (a.k.a. The Prince) behind both progressives and neocons (Republican progressives) want to divide us against each other in order to keep us distracted, to keep us weak, and to gain more power. The Prince wants greater division until its power is permanent. Then the prince will want greater conformity – including a cure for homosexuality. The Prince cares nothing about gay people.
I agree with a lot of your points, which stands to reason since I'm a libertarian. I don't want government to be any more involved in our lives than it absolutely has to be, including its involvement in marriage (which, in its governmental form as a civil contract, is not a religious 'instutition'). In an ideal world, the government wouldn't be involved in doling out any rigid set of contracts using a religious monicker. If I had one vote to cast between a complete abolition of a government-mandated institution of 'marriage' and inclusion of gay people in the current system, I would unreservedly vote for the former.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, we don't live in such an idealistic libertarian world. We currently have a legal system in place (marriage, as mandated by a goverment) that has persisted for well over a thousand years. The fact is that this system unfairly excludes a minority while including the majority. Just as two people of different ethnicities used to be denied access to this set of civil contracts, we're now tackling another excluded group - two people of different genders. Are there others that are excluded, such as polygamists? Sure. I have no problem with the idea of polygamists, personally. I would point out that polygamy is much more of a voluntary situation than being gay or being of a certain ethnicity, but that's no reason to deny someone the ability to have a legal commitment to another person. In fact, from a conservative Christian point of view, polygamy *should* be an acceptable form of marriage. It is delineated in the bible, after all, that many of the abrahamic god's central characters had multiple wives.
Again, like you, I would like to just scrap the whole system. But that is simply not realistic at this point in history. In a hundred years, maybe we will get to that point. Maybe not. But we're not there today - culturally, and politically, we are not at a place in which a change like that could even be seriously contemplated. Look at the incredibly minute portion of the vote libertarian candidates get, after all.
Right now, we have a choice to make - we can let a less-than-ideal system continue unaltered, excluding a few additional minority groups until, perhaps, some day 100 years or more from now we may have a more evolved (and less INvolved) government while allowing those minority groups to face inequity the entire time, or we can simply include them in our current institutions, warts and all, so that we are at least all afforded the same position in society until the day we can change that society.
If we had a marriage-less society then a structure could evolve to handle miscellaneous issues couples deal with outside of an intrusive government. But we *don't* have a marriage-less society, and we're not going to anytime in the near future. We *are* likely to have 'marriage equality' in the near future, however, so long as people continue to fight for it. And, yes, as long as the 'progressives' continue to 'condition culture' to accept it as not being stigmatized. The liberals do PLENTY of cultural conditioning.... but the conservatives do just as much, if not more. What are most churches, after all, but little (and HIGHLY effective) factories for just such a thing? I certainly agree with you that conservatives and progressives are two sides of the same coin. On THIS issue, I find the progressive side of the coin to be much more humane and more conducive to overall human progress towards an equitable society, but I agree that that is more due to cultural and emotional conditioning for most than due to pure rationality. That's always the case for any group on any issue.
What I am unclear on, however, is why, when you readily admit that both of the sides in this cultural war we having going on exhibits irrational hypocrisy and the desire for further government intrusion, you seem so much more angry with one side as opposed to the other.
"Gay marriage opponents just want to maintain the status quo", whereas the liberals want to "force" everyone to confer benefits to a minority group. Is it not also the case that gay marriage opponents are already *taking* money from said minority group (taxes) and not affording them the same benefits (that they admittedly should not be affording to anyone) that they afford to others, thus robbing them and redistributing their money to others without equal compensation? We all either need equality under marriage or equality *outside* of marriage. And only one is remotely plausible in the near future. I don't think it's so deplorable to seek to accomplish the more immediately pragmatic goal of including one of the last straggling minority groups to have been excluded from a basic facet of modern society.
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