“Chinese government says when it arrests political dissidents and locks them up in labor camps.”
There’s a difference between enforcing a ban, and between legal recognition. How does the legal recognition of marriage have anything to do with locking people in jail? The state isn’t locking people away for not getting married.
It’s all in Reynolds. Federal government has a duty to maintain a consistant standard of marriage. Given what we’ve seen since the 50’s, it’s clear that the state should protect marriage.
This hasn’t got anything to do with ‘keeping people together’ but everything to do with providing a model and a guide for behaviour, a set of oughts by which society functions much better than all the alternatives.
Legal recognition of marriage is very often the basis for government handing over your hard-earned assets to someone other than who YOU want to have them (and in the case of the “marriage tax”, that someone is the federal government). Legal recognition of marriage was also the sole reason that the creepy Michael Schiavo was able to get his wife’s feeding tube removed against the wishes of her parents and siblings.
Free citizens don’t expect their government to provide them with “a model and a guide for behavior.” Again, that’s what communist governments do — they decide what values the people ought to live by, and then use government power to make life more difficult for those who don’t comply. The degree of difficulty varies widely, from execution to lack of favors granted to correct-living citizens, but the warped and freedom-destroying principle is always the same: that government has a right to tell people how to live their lives.