Dan Riehl asks the question in light of today’s events in Vermont:
One logical argument would be to make marriage the province of the Church, leaving the State to deal with the social contracting aspects of so called civil unions.
That’s what I said three years ago:
If that’s what you believe a marriage is, the union of a man and woman before God and man, then what does the state have to do with so fundamentally a religious institution ? Why does the state need to recognize it at all and why does it need to grant that religious institution preferntial benefits in the form of tax breaks and a protected legal status that is not available to unmarried persons ?
Kellie and I were married in the Roman Catholic Church, which has requirements for marriage that exceed, and are different from, those of civil marriage. That wedding ceremony is what made the marriage official in the eyes of God, not the little piece of paper we got from Cuyahoga County, Ohio the day before.
Here’s my proposal. Get rid of civil marriage licenses entirely. Let people decide for themselves what they believe about marriage and let them, if they wish solemnize that union in a church of their choice. We are hundreds of years past the day where the state was involved in religious affairs, it doesn’t need to be involved in this matter either.
It’s an idea that has everything both sides want. For the marriage equality crowd, there’s the fact that all unions would get the same recognition and the same benefits from the state. For the traditional marriage crowd, there’s the idea that a special institution called, say “matrimony”, would retain it’s religious characteristics.
It seems like the best of all possible worlds.
Tell me why it’s a bad idea.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
I’ve been saying this for years, too. But I think this is how they do it in France and Germany (I’m going purely on anecdotal experience, from the one French wedding and one German wedding I’ve been to), so undoubtedly the Right will object because Europe = Bad = Socialism.
April 7th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Obviously there’s no principled reason why that would be a bad result. What you’ll get in protest, though, will look like this, once you strip away the rest of the verbiage:
“It means we’d have to treat gay people as our equals, that we won’t be able to hide behind our religion to whitewash our bigotry anymore, and we won’t have special privileges bestowed on us by the government that we can withhold from people we don’t like. Besides, being nice to gay people makes the Baby Jeebus cry.”
April 9th, 2009 at 4:46 am
You can call a rape “party sex” but its still rape. Its a bad idea because it reduces marriage from the basic unit of society to a degraded institution. If a man can marry another man will you deny a man the right to marry his adult son? How do you justify denying a man the right to marrying six consenting women? How do you outlaw the love a man has for his gerbil?
But its just bigotry to do so isn’t it and how does it effect your marriage?
In the same way that a murder of another impacts on you even if it doesn’t impact you directly. It marks yet another instance when the basic fabric of society is challenged and rent.
The basic issue is that once the Left advances its additional demands are never ending.