Marriage

We're really being distracted by both political sides in this debate. My own views on gay marriage have always been clear to me: I oppose it. However, I was always troubled by holding that view and it was not until I thought more deeply into the issue that I realized why.

There are really two issues here.

First, the morality and legitimacy of gay marriage. This is a moral, cultural and religious issue. For thousands of years, marriage was sanctioned and sanctified by the church and there was very little government involvement in the institution. People who didn't seek church sanction had common law marriages. It was all rather casual.

It's hard for people to understand today in our heavily-monitored world, but for much of history, you could set out walking or riding, and in a day or two, a matter of less than a hundred miles, you'd be somewhere where nobody knew you, nor had they any easy way to check up on you. It was possible, in those days, to live an essentially anonymous life, unless you were a notoriously wanted criminal.

There were no master registries of your marriage. It might be filed in a church record, or at the county courthouse where you were married. But if that courthouse was 500 miles away, people just took your word on it for the most part. You were married because you said you were married.

Now we get to what is, for me, the real issue. The issue of government intrusion into the institution of marriage. At what point did we decide it was vital for government to monitor and be the sole arbiter of the legitimacy of a marriage?

I can't condone that. I reserve the right to speak with scorn and disdain regarding gay marriage, but I cannot abide the idea that the federal or state governments get to set the terms for approval of my marriage under God. It's between me, my wife and God. That being the case, I obviously have no standing to ask the state or federal government to set the terms for approval of a gay couple's marriage.

The problem, however, is that the state has intruded so deeply into the institution of marriage. It has set itself so firmly as the sole judge of what marriage is or is not -- it is even allowed to issue rewards and punishments to people based on their marital status -- that we cannot separate the issue of state approval of gay marriage from the issue of state control of all marriage.

So, my stand on principal is that I want the government out of the marriage business. That's rightly the role of churches and individuals. Any state role can be handled under contract law. If I want my spouse to have joint ownership of my possessions and right of  inheritance, I can do that via civil contract. If I want to say that this is my wife in the eyes of God, that's not the state's business.

If "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" then Congress cannot rightly sanction the Christian concept of monogamous marriage while prohibiting other forms of marriage, because marriage is a fundamentally religious concept as much as it is a social concept.

The state needs to retreat to speaking in terms of rights of contract under civil law, not in terms of the religious and cultural language of marriage.

If we are a free people, then we do not need the state to set the terms of our marraiges for us. We have rights of free association, which would include the right to marry who we want. Our personal lives are not a proper subject for state intrusion.

I know that people think that if we condone all sorts of immoral unions that we contribute to the moral decline of the nation, but the moral strength of a nation does not derive from its laws. The reverse is true. A nation's underlying moral strength is reflected in its laws. If we are culturally and morally strong, then the laws are a mere afterthought. You cannot make people respect monogamous heterosexual relationships, and the cultural background that go with them, by forbidding them the alternatives. That respect can only flower in individual human hearts, and only by choice, and by following good examples, not by compulsion. If we are a moral people, we will appear to be a moral people. If we are a people in decline, we cannot halt that decline with laws forbidding moral decline.