‘Gay Marriage,’ Libertarians, and Civil Rights

National Review Online ^ | June 27, 2011 | George Weigel

[madprof98]

“Gay marriage” in fact represents a vast expansion of state power: In this instance, the state of New York is declaring that it has the competence to redefine a basic human institution in order to satisfy the demands of an interest group looking for the kind of social acceptance that putatively comes from legal recognition. But as Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and others argued during the days before the fateful vote on June 24, the state of New York does not have such competence, and the assertion that it does casts an ominous shadow over the future.

*****

Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power.

[caww]

the states have defined who can get married;

Well from another poster link...it appears that the Gov. became involved at a time there were intermarriages between whites and blacks...because it was not acceptable then, they required the "state's permission to marry...thus a license giving them permission to marry. So.....why does one have to be licensed in the first place when God is the one who instituted Marriage?...so then Marriages can be performed by A pAstor or clergy without the states "permission"...licensing.

[kosciusko51]

For as long as the United States has been independent, the states have defined who can get married; there are different age and consaguinity rules in different states, and many states had restrictions on interracial marriage until the 1960s.

And all of these laws restricted marriage, but did not change the definition of marriage. What is going on now is a complete redefinition of marriage.