Posted on 06/04/2014 10:19:50 AM PDT by Iced Tea Party
Cultural civil war can be avoided by getting government out of marriage
There is no question that the media, political, and cultural push for gay marriage has made impressive gains. As recently as 1989, voters in avant-garde San Francisco repealed a law that had established only domestic partnerships.
But judging by the questions posed by Supreme Court justices this week in oral arguments for two gay-marriage cases, most observers do not expect sweeping rulings that would settle the issue and avoid protracted political combat. A total of 41 states currently do not allow gay marriage, and most of those laws are likely to remain in place for some time. Even should the Court declare unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman for federal purposes, we can expect many pitched battles in Congress. The word “spouse” appears in federal laws and regulations a total of 1,138 times, and many of those references would have to be untangled by Congress absent DOMA.
No wonder Wisconsin’s GOP governor Scott Walker sees public desire for a Third Way. On Meet the Press this month he remarked on how many young people have asked him why the debate is over whether the definition of marriage should be expanded. They think the question is rather “why the government is sanctioning it in the first place.” The alterative would be to “not have the government sanction marriage period, and leave that up to the churches and the synagogues and others to define that.”
Governor Walker made clear these thoughts weren’t “anything I’m advocating for,” but he gave voice to many people who don’t think the gay-marriage debate should tear the country apart in a battle over who controls the culture and wins the government’s seal of approval. Gay-marriage proponents argue that their struggle is the civil-rights issue of our time, although many gays privately question that idea. Opponents who bear no animus toward gays lament that ancient traditions are being swept aside before the evidence is in on how gay marriage would affect the culture.
Both sides operate from the shaky premise that government must be the arbiter of this dispute. Columnist Andrew Sullivan, a crusader for gay marriage, has written that “marriage is a formal, public institution that only the government can grant.” But that’s not so. Marriage predates government. Marriage scholar Lawrence Stone has noted that in the Middle Ages it was “treated as a private contract between two families . . . For those without property, it was a private contract between two individuals enforced by the community sense of what was right.” Indeed, marriage wasn’t even regulated by law in Britain until the Marriage Acts of 1754 and 1835. Common-law unions in early America were long recognized before each state imposed a one-size-fits-all set of marriage laws.
The Founding Fathers avoided creating government-approved religions so as to avoid Europe’s history of church-based wars. Depoliticizing religion has mostly proven to be a good template for defusing conflict by keeping it largely in the private sphere.
Turning marriage into fundamentally a private right wouldn’t be an easy task. Courts and government would still be called on to recognize and enforce contracts that a couple would enter into, and clearly some contracts — such as in a slave-master relationship — would be invalid. But instead of fighting over which marriages gain its approval, government would end the business of making distinctions for the purpose of social engineering based on whether someone was married. A flatter tax code would go a long way toward ending marriage penalties or bonuses. We would need a more sensible system of legal immigration so that fewer people would enter the country solely on the basis of spousal rights.
The current debate pits those demanding “marriage equality” against supporters of “traditional marriage.” But many Americans believe it would be better if we left matters to individuals and religious bodies. The cherished principle of separating church and state should be extended as much as possible into separating marriage and state. Ron Paul won many cheers during his 2012 presidential campaign when he declared, “I’d like to see all governments out of the marriage question. I don’t think it’s a state decision. I think it’s a religious function. I am supportive of all voluntary associations and people can call it whatever they want.”
Supporters of traditional marriage know the political winds are blowing against them. A new Fox News poll finds 49 percent of voters favoring gay marriage, up from just 32 percent a decade ago. And among self-described conservatives under 35, Fox found support for gay marriage is now at 44 percent. Even if the Supreme Court leaves the battle for gay marriage to trench warfare in the states, the balance of power is shifting. Rush Limbaugh, a powerful social conservative, told his listeners this week: “I don’t care what this court does with this particular ruling. . . . I think the inertia is clearly moving in the direction that there is going to be gay marriage at some point nationwide.”
But a majority of Americans still believe the issue of gay marriage should be settled by the states and not with Roe v. Wade–style central planning. It might still be possible to assemble a coalition of people who want to avoid a civil war over the culture and who favor getting government out of the business of marriage.
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.
Your political goal is DOA because the very legal institutions you embrace have declared it so.
Take, for instance, Prop. 8 — the people of CA amended their constitution in order to define marriage, and yet this definition has been destroyed in the federal courts even to the point where the USSC has denied that the people themselves have standing to see their own constitution amended.
Your political goal is to somehow persuade America to vote to end marriage as we know it, remove it from all laws and government, including military service, and let religions, mosques and cults control marriage, which means that literally anything goes.
Not really.
Because it's not a political goal — I simply don't believe that ceding the power to define marriage to the government is a good idea.
Ask yourself how things would have gone in the legal system is Prop 8 had been the allowance of homosexual marriage
instead — would any of these roadblocks or denials have been raised?
IOW, the validity of a state's constitution is now dependent upon the goodwill of the federal judiciary… this is not a good thing in my estimation.
A political movement that we all know isn’t going to happen.
Again, not political.
Your pretend political goals are not very convincing, especially since they are being used to oppose the important political issues we conservatives need to be discussing for the next election.
Oh, if you want things to discuss about the next election [my political goals, in no particular order] I'd be happy to share:
“But in that time there were also ecclesiastical courts, so not everything was handled by the State:”
Alfred the Great uses religious imagery but he wasn’t the head of the church and his legal code wasn’t ecclesiastical. The legal code of the Dome Book deals with oaths, injuries and sexual offenses and is a basis for common law.
Marriage is a cultural institution and reflects the culture of its society. Britain was part of Christendom. Christendom was synonymous with Western civilization. American culture is part of that heritage. Or it least it has been. If libertarian characters like John Fund get their way it will become less so.
The move to separate marriage and government has long been popular with liberals and libertarians who dislike Christian sexual mores. The sexual liberation of the ‘60s was a great triumph for both groups.
I’m waiting to see how this latest war on Christian derived marriage plays out when Islamics start demanding the right to practice polygamy.
I thought conservatives wanted the gov to get out of our private religious lives.
Part of the law practice of Thomas Jefferson, was divorce law.
Great. Another lib telling us conservatives what we're doing wrong and what we need to accept.
Look. While we might have to accept it, we will not - like libertarians - eagerly accept and endorse it.
That does seem [at least to me] to be the implications of some things posted.
Why are you being so cutesy in your pushing of gay marriage?
Obama changed the policy at the federal level for the military, federal employment and immigration, not in churches, and here you are wanting the mosques to add polygamy.
LOL - Good reply.
(And probably has a lot of truth to it.)
Wow, making up nonsense that I didn’t say, and then posting it as coming from me, in a post that you didn’t ping me to.
I thought you were religious?
I don’t support gay marriage at all. Where did you get that from? What I support is a person’s legal rights.
Which is the point I’m trying to make in that post. Let people create any kind of church they want, for whatever purpose they please. God will recognize whatever he chooses, and if government has no role in deciding what is and isn’t a marriage, then people can decide for themselves who they do and don’t consider to be married.
bye bye
I think that Christian sexual mores are the right way to go — I also believe that it's useless to try to try to force these with the law because the real issue is in the heart. The church has given up a lot of it's authority in the matter because of how it generally condones/accepts divorce rather than as-a-group standing for a higher moral standard — this is born out in that there is little difference in the divorce-rate from the high general population value.
I’m waiting to see how this latest war on Christian derived marriage plays out when Islamics start demanding the right to practice polygamy.
Aye, that one might be really interesting.
I have the feeling that it too will be hoisted upon us via the courts though.
That’s obviously incorrect, otherwise our government would be defending the sanctity of marriage and strengthening it.
It’s plain as day that the government and the associated elites that have infested it have an immense loathing of the Republic as founded and have spent now decades trying to slowly undermine it.
They seem to be doing a bang up job of it too!
The only way conservatives are going to either change, or merely make it through this era, is to live and set the example of the cultural and spiritual aspects of the society and fight the change physically through economic means.
Governments weak spot is cash flow, and our side provides a large portion of that to the institution and to the major entities arrayed against us. If conservatives spent as much time getting and remaining debt free, and subsequently prioritizing their purchasing power towards like minded individuals and institutions as we spend dickering over government “sanctioning” this or that we’d make a lot more headway...
Reversing Obama policy at the federal level in regards to abortion and gay marriage, is vastly more realistic than your pretend agenda of wanting to win the votes to remove marriage as we know it, from American law and government, and any common definition whatsoever, or any common concept in the public space, and divorce protections.
It seems that your actual political goal, is what we see here at conservative freerepublic, persuade the conservatives to drop it as an issue in this election, and those to come.
Where is the political party or movement that represents your supposed political position?
The government asserts itself in that arena. There is no "ceding" to it, it has "always" claimed power in that arena. There is no way to get the government out of it.
The government used to act to uphold sound tradition. For the past 80 years or so, it has been a force of tearing down tradition, and setting itself up for a bigger piece of the pie.
The only reason I don't see this as a political issue is that it is being decided by judges, who are roughly out of political reach. The politicians don't want to be involved in anything controversial, and are all too happy to let the judges help with running the country into the ground (although I am sure that neither group sees itself as doing any harm). A person who sees judges as in the political realm will disagree with my "not political" label. I don't recall hearing a single politician or candidate articulate a policy of impeachment and removal of judges who find a constitutional right to homosexual marriage. Unless those candidates start appearing, there isn't a political solution in any form!
The UK is the evil nation. They’re Sinister dontcha know! ;-)
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I don’t support gay marriage at all. Where did you get that from? What I support is a person’s legal rights. |
Post 19. You were arguing for civil unions for gays. So what were you saying about not supporting gay marriage/civil unions?
So you support our fight against gay marriage, and want to reverse Obama's opening up the military to gays and giving gay marriage equality at the federal level in the military and immigration and federal employment.
If you are with we conservatives on gay marriage, your writing and arguments just doesn't reflect that.
Don’t forget though, a bunch of folks “threw in the towel” in Europe at one time and came over here to try to set up something different...
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