Posted on 06/27/2011 7:43:28 PM PDT by Servant of the Cross
According to a New York Times story of June 25, an essential part of the coalition that brought “gay marriage” to the Empire State consisted of Republican financial high-rollers who gave Republican legislators cover for voting in favor of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “marriage equality” bill while generously funding the pro–“gay marriage” ground campaign, and who “were inclined to see the issue as one of personal freedom, consistent with their more libertarian views.”
More intellectual and political confusion would be hard to pack into one sentence.
“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. For if the state in fact has the competence, or authority, to declare that Adam and Steve, or Eve and Evelyn, are married, and has the related authority to compel others to recognize such marriages as the equivalent of what we have known as marriage for millennia, then why stop at marriage between two men or two women? Why not polyamory or polygamy? Why can’t any combination of men and women sharing financial resources and body parts declare itself a marriage, and then demand from the state a redress of its grievances and legal recognition of it as a family? On what principled ground is the New York state legislature, or any other state legislature, going to say “No” to that, once it has declared that Adam and Steve, or Eve and Evelyn, can in fact get married according to the laws of the state?
There is a curious rhetorical fact that has usually gone unremarked in these debates, but which is worth pointing out. That what the New York state legislature approved has to be described, not as marriage, but as “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” is itself a verbal indicator that what is being done here is counterintuitive. We all know, or thought we knew, what marriage is, and to add the qualifier “gay” or “same-sex” is a tacit admission by the proponents of the practice that it requires an appeal to authority to enforce what seems strange, odd, not right. The verbal tic of “gay marriage” or “same-sex” marriage is thus itself a rhetorical warning sign that what was done in Albany was an exercise in raw state power, the state’s asserting that it can do X simply because it claims that it has the power to do so.
And that is an exercise of power that libertarians ought, in theory, to resist, not support.
New York State notwithstanding, the argument over marriage will and must continue, because it touches first principles of democratic governance — and because resistance to the agenda of the gay-marriage lobby is a necessary act of resistance against the dictatorship of relativism, in which coercive state power is used to impose on all of society a relativistic ethic of personal willfulness. In conducting that argument in the months and years ahead, it would be helpful if the proponents of marriage rightly understood would challenge the usurpation by the proponents of gay marriage of the civil-rights trump card.
That usurpation is at the heart of the gay lobby’s emotional, cultural, and political success — the moral mantle of those Freedom Riders whose golden anniversary we mark this year has, so to speak, been successfully claimed by the Stonewall Democratic Club and its epigones. And because the classic civil-rights movement and its righteous demand for equality before the law remains one of the few agreed-upon moral touchstones in 21st-century American culture (another being the Holocaust as an icon of evil), to seize that mantle and wear it is to have won a large part of the battle — as one sees when trying to discuss these questions with otherwise sensible young people.
But the analogy simply doesn’t work. Legally enforced segregation involved the same kind of coercive state power that the proponents of gay marriage now wish to deploy on behalf of their cause. Something natural and obvious — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” — was being denied by the state in its efforts to maintain segregated public facilities and to deny full citizenship rights to African Americans. Once the American people came to see that these arrangements, however hallowed by custom (and prejudice), were, in fact, unnatural and not obvious, the law was changed.
What the gay lobby proposes in the matter of marriage is precisely the opposite of this. 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.
A humane society will find ample room in the law for accommodating a variety of human relationships in matters of custodial care, hospital visiting rights, and inheritance. But there is nothing humane about the long march toward the dictatorship of relativism, nor will there be anything humane about the destination of that march, should it be reached. The viciousness visited upon Archbishop Dolan and other defenders of marriage rightly understood during the weeks before the vote in Albany is yet another testimony to the totalitarian impulse that lurks beneath the gay marriage movement.
One might have thought libertarians understood this. But evidently some do not.
I don't consider Libertarians to be deep thinkers. They have certain principles, and they don't seem to waste much time considering the consequences of those principles. They want the immediate gratification and want someone else to cleanup the mess.
Mind you, the GOP is no better. The Republican party (for the most part) has no principles at all. They'll support anything, so long as they think someone will be their friend for 5 minutes.
Why do some people think that someone should be able to inherit wealth without taxes from his partner in anal sex but children should be made to pay a tax on what they inherit from parents?
Why do some, for that matter, think that someone should be able to pass on his Social Security benefits to his partner in anal sex but parents should not be allowed to pass them on to their children?
"Gay marriage" is a destructive scam.
I agree with the author here completely. I’m a fairly libertarian Republican, especially when it comes to things like the war on drugs and intervention overseas. However, I’ve never understood why some libertarians support government recognition of same sex marriage. It’s just an enormous expansion of government that will greatly expand the welfare state. It basically advances the idea that the government grants rights to people, which is a very anti libertarian idea. The truth is that most libertarians themselves aren’t “libertarian” on this issue.
Maybe it’s time to press for phasing out all government involvement in marriage.
Other than that I'm torn on whether or not the government should be in the marriage business in the first place. Who is marrying who does not seem like an issue for the government to be deciding and gay marriage decisions, IMHO, are an unintended consequence of government interference.
>> It basically advances the idea that the government grants rights to people, which is a very anti libertarian idea.
You nailed it.
Welcome aboard.
Libertarians seem to have a slide-rule type of mentality. They have some narrow principles that they apply to everything whether they work or not. They are especially weak in understanding of the human condition, they are cut-and-dry, matter-of-fact people who have trouble understanding intangible ideas such as morality.
When Conservatives take over the State, they can co-opt Obama’s policy of not enforcing marriage laws.
We’re a nation crippled by an overabundance of law and enforcement.
It amazes me that libertarians think that the issue of gay marraige has anything at all to do with individual liberty. It is the complete opposite.
In the first place the gay marraige movement wants acceptance of homosexuality to be obligatory by force of the law. If you voice objection to homosexuality they want you punished by being fired, or to go through sensitivity training, or sued if you are a business owner. This is already happening. Many businesses have been sued in my state of New Jersey already. Many individuals have been punished or fired or sued as well.
I had always thought that libertarians believed in the individual’s ‘right to association’ but I guess not being that so many of them support a movement that wants to force you to follow their perverse morality.
Secondly, the gay marraige movement does not support at all the individual’s right to representation. They do not seek laws to be made with majority support but to dictate their positions on public decency issues through the Courts. There have already been cases whereas laws have been challenged in Courts that tried to outlaw sex acts (by homosexuals) in public parks, bathroooms and other public areas that have been fought in Courts by this movement as being discriminatory.
Now I know that libertarians are not huge supporters of the ‘right to representation’ but you would think that they would even see how over the top the gay rights movement is in opposing the rights of individuals to make law to impose some sort of public decency in their communities.
Basically the gay rights movement is a fascist movement. It is amazing how stupid many people are who call themselves libertarians.
Tribune7 above gives some of the reasons why. The government demands taxes from inheritors other than spouses, and denies government benefits transfer to those not spouses. This gives the government a vested interest in the definition of “spouse”. Libertarians would prefer government have no interest, but a prerequisite to that should have been elimination of inheritance taxes and government benefits programs. To expand the definition of “spouse” without regard to these issues does not garner my approval.
I see the same problem with drug legalization. One can make the case the the War on Drugs is a failure -- but you can't just legalize them. We have a vast social safety net in place. Lots of taxes, lots of government relief, lots of government intrusion. If drugs are legalized, more people will need that safety net, and government will just get bigger.
Job #1: Get rid of the Government Charity for the irresponsible.
Job #2: Legalize drugs.
The order is important.
Just so:
Get rid of inheritance taxes and government benefits programs.
THEN we might reconsider allowing government recognition of certain unions.
Any society which expects to endure longer than a single generation has a vested interest in the protection and nurturing of children who by definition require protection, education, and support for many years before they can assume the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. So here's the irony: The state has no legitimate interest in what two (or more) adults may do in private but it has a natural and compelling interest in the welfare of any children which arise from heterosexual unions. It is only by confusing these two and focusing attention on adults that we get into spurious debates about marriage.
Marriage Laws historically have always been about protecting children and (to a lesser degree) a dependent wife. Human history attests that the best environment to provide for raising the next generation of citizens is the biological family. And this is why the State has an interest in supporting and protecting the common-sense notion of marriage.
#1 - Gay Marriage is NOT a civil right. This is NOT the 60’s and the gay struggle to get married is NOT the same as blacks struggling to vote. To equate the two is offensive on every level.
#2 - There are reasons why men and women are separated in the military. It’s done for discipline reasons. Gays now have legal grounds to force their way into the military. I fear what this will do to morale.
#3 - New York state is going down the crapper economically. High taxes and regulations are driving off businesses and they take time for this?
#4 - Al Queda has got to be laughing at us. Not only can we not beat them, they have some points when they say our society is morally bankrupt. For one of the first times in my life, I’m kind of embarrassed by my nation. :(
I’m glad to see people are starting to articulate this simple concept. Gay marriage has at its core the government using its powers it a way that is more far reaching than even its fiscal reach to redefine a commonly accepted and well understood word ‘marriage’. Now because it is counterintuitive the govt will find a need to use its power to try to make true its redfinition. We are talking about a big open door for some of the most orwellian big govt ever imagined even to the point of controlling one’s ability to excercise their conscience freely.
It has already begun with the cleansing of the military and the civil service where if you don’t take kindly to being “re-educated” on the idea of basic human sexuality than you might very well find yourself without a job or sufferring some kind of retaliation or punishment.
“Libertarians” seem to be split between true libertarians with a frontier-type mentality and poser-libertarians who are just white liberals who see no place for themselves in the affirmative-action Dem party. To split the conservative vote, the latter try to appear as a voice for the middle ground, while their views are left of center (think Bill O’Reilly).
Good points.
This brings up another point: If the government has a compelling interest in the welfare of children of heterosexual marriages and said heterosexuals give the child up for adoption, would you favor a homosexual “couple” adopting the child?
The more interesting question arises if one of the partners is the child's biological parent. Here consanguinity takes precedence. Removing a child from its biological parent is ipso facto a gross affront to liberty and should only be done for the gravest of reasons, and the sexual preferences of an adult parent do not, of itself, warrant such intervention. Note that this does not imply that the single parent is entitled to any special sanction for their chosen lifestyle.
The State's interest is in supporting societal structures which history has shown will maximize the beneficial rearing of most of its future citizens, not in micro-managing the upbringing of each child individually. That is the fine line between liberty and justice that any society which calls itself civilized is compelled to walk.
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