There’s been a lot of talk recently about gay marriage. Perhaps there should be more talk about how
poorly we communicate, and how we’ve forgotten most of the lessons learned in
school about the English language. A
marriage can’t be gay – it’s the individuals in the marriage that are gay, but
I’ll save the grammatical distinction for another post.
I suppose all the conversation is really about same sex
marriage, and whether it should be legal.
Many who are against same sex marriage cite religious reasons, and state
that “God created marriage”. Supporters
of same sex marriage take the position that denying a same sex couple the right
to marry is discrimination. Any time a
topic become this heated, logic seems to take a back seat in the bus to passion,
and who can yell the loudest, while making disparaging comments about the other
side.
I won’t undertake the question of whether or not God created
a marriage – it’s a question to be answered by each individual, influenced by
their beliefs. I would argue that whether
or not God created marriage is not the point at all. Same sex couples are not arguing the case
before the Supreme Court because they want God to bless their marriage – they simply
want the government to allow it.
Today, marriage has been made into a civil institution. Almost every marriage must have a marriage
license, issued by the government, to be recognized by the government as a
valid marriage. Divorce is the commonly
recognized (and sought) end to a marriage, and is granted by the courts.
Married couples have different laws that apply to them – by one count, over
1,100 federal laws, statutes and rules. While
marriage may have started as a religious institution, we have allowed it to
become a civil one, and therefore governed by the laws of man. Unlike other sacraments of the church
(baptism, communion, confirmation, etc.), the church allowed marriage to be
taken over by the government.
There’s an old saying that says “what’s good for the goose
is good for the gander”, which I’ll use in this blog to say that if married
couples approve of, or seek the benefit of the laws that recognize a married
couple’s status, then it’s hypocritical to claim that marriage belongs to the
church and not the state.
The recognition of same sex marriages is an inevitable and
logical conclusion. Since so many laws
have been created to benefit married couples, the government will be forced
into a position where it must eventually acknowledge same sex marriage as
lawful, just as it did with interracial marriage. To not recognize those marriages is a discriminatory
practice.
It’s hard to imagine, but as recently as 1948, 30 states had
laws against interracial marriage.
Interracial marriage was finally legal in all 50 States on June 12, 1967.
Most people would think it unimaginable that interracial marriage would have
been illegal in 16 states just 46 years ago, however, according to a 2011 Pew
Research study, 16% of evangelical Christians still thought interracial
marriage was a “Bad thing for society”.
Whether or not something is bad for society has little to do
with the law. Can anyone really argue
that alcohol or tobacco are good for society?
Yet we have laws that protect these things, and generate huge amounts of
taxation as a result of their consumption. Are some of the inane TV shows,
movies and video games now available good for our society? Arguably not, and
yet there are no laws prohibiting them outright.
It is to a large degree a measure of our freedom and liberty
that so many choices are left to the individual rather than the state. The more
laws there are, the less liberty we have, and the more likely we are to
approach the threshold of a tyrannical government.
Should we do all things that are legal? Certainly not. With individual freedom comes individual responsibility,
and the thresholds that each of us have should keep us safe from the precipice
of illegality. To not accept individual responsibility means that we are ceding
that responsibility to the government, which is why the number of laws in our
country have grown to an unknowable number, as explained in an earlier blog post.
But where does the ever-expanding scope of who can get
married stop? Today it’s illegal for
people under a certain age to marry. It’s
illegal for people who are immediate family to marry (parents, siblings, and
children). Both polygamy and polyandry
are illegal. Marriages with non-humans
are not recognized as legal. Certainly, however,
in our not-too-distant future, many of these boundaries will also be tested,
and likely broken, all for the sake of equality, and the elimination of
discrimination.
It seems to me that the better course of action is to reduce
the number of laws, rather than increase it.
The more complex a system becomes, then the harder it is to manage it,
and it continues to grow until it fails.
If federal law didn’t have 1,100 special rules for married
couples, would we even be having the discussion of whether same sex marriage
should be legal? If there were no laws that benefited married couples, would
there even be a need to argue about what a legal marriage should be?
If someone is a homosexual, who am I to say whom they can
love and spend their lives with? If they
seek to enter into a “marriage contract” like my wife and I have, they should
be afforded all the same rights and privileges that contract affords. Should a church be forced to conduct a
marriage ceremony for a same sex couple?
Certainly not. Is same sex
marriage good for society? It’s certainly
no worse than alcohol, pornography or violent sports and video games, and if the
relationship is really based on love, it would seem to me that it could do more
good than harm, inconvenient as that may be for some to acknowledge.
