Posted on 07/07/2015 8:28:42 AM PDT by Reddy
At first glance, it sounds nice to say we should “get government out of the marriage business.” Marriage, as far as the state is concerned, would be merely a private relationship contract, with no reference to the lasting features of natural marriage between a man and woman, and its connection to the bearing and raising of children.
Many libertarians, including Rand Paul, and now even some conservatives, claim that this will solve the same-sex marriage controversy. Few understand the logical implications of their argument. There are at least seven reasons why “marriage privatization,” if really achieved, would profoundly harm citizens and society.
(1) Private “relationship contracts” would immediately legitimize and permit polygamy, group marriages, incest and other aberrant relationships.
Anthropologist Stanley Kurtz notes that even if marriage is “privatized,” government “still has to decide what sort of private unions merit benefits … under this privatization scheme.” We would end up with the “same quarrels over social recognition that we got before privatization.” Government will have to deal with polygamous, polyamorous, and incestuous relationships also attempting to obtain contracts under the new scheme as well as attempts by heterosexual acquaintances to make “marriages of convenience” to obtain things such as spousal medical insurance. Legitimizing these aberrant relationships would only further dilute the meaning of natural marriage as a norm in society.
(2) It would increase the sexual exploitation of children through human sex-trafficking.
Marriage laws that currently regulate the age at which a person can be married protect children from sex-slavery and even from desperate parents from certain impoverished countries who may seek to exploit or manipulate minor children into “arranged” marriages for financial gain. News in London now reports 15 and 16 year old girls are being duped into “marrying” ISIS operatives and are running away from home. This would be easy in the U.S. if marriage were a private contract.
(3) It would overburden courts and side-step legal protections for children and abandoned spouses, replacing them with court ordered damages, penalties and state-coerced action.
If a legislature repealed marriage statutes and did nothing to define or regulate the creation and or dissolution of marriages, then by default, parties would be left only with legal contracts to address child custody, visitation, alimony and property rights. If the parties breached these private contracts, litigation would ensue regarding the intent, interpretation, and enforcement of those agreements — many of which would likely be drafted by non-lawyers with vague and confusing terms. Courts would issue penalties, damages and would have to order private parties to enforce contracts, often with draconian results. Real-life economic and practical hardships would befall untold thousands of single mothers where men to abandon their families – or even take forcible physical custody of small children — where no such contract was in place.
The creation of plural marriage and group marriage contracts would create the legal equivalent of the “Wild-Wild-West.” These “prenuptial-like” marriage contracts would also further undermine the idea of marriage as a lasting, life-long covenant. Instead of keeping government out of the marriage business, this move would do just the opposite. The great irony of marriage privatization is that it would only increase the state’s involvement in the lives of its citizens.
(4) It ignores what’s best for children.
Arguments to privatize marriage, whether made by scholars or politicians, tend to ignore what is best for children. Economist Jennifer Roback Morse, who has strong libertarian credentials, argues that marriage privatization would come “at the expense of children,” and “is a concept developed by adults that will benefit only adults.”
In the common law, whenever children are involved in divorce, custody disputes, adoption or dependency proceedings, the legal standard has always been is the best interest of children involved. With the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex unions, “adult desires” have been allowed to trump what’s best for children. Dissolving marriage law would have the same effect. When men divorce the mothers of their children without these private agreements, single mothers would be left with no laws to protect or support their children.
(5) It would create more social maladies, broken families, and human suffering.
Throughout history, marriage has been always been regulated in some way. In small and cohesive societies, this was usually done through strong social mores and religious institutions. In larger, more diverse and modern societies, marriage has also been regulated through law and public policy. This is part of what separates civil societies from more primitive ones. For this reason, completely privatizing marriage could be a sociological disaster.
Today’s inner cities are “Exhibit A” to the poverty, crime, fatherlessness and devastation that emerges when marriage and family structures are weak, fragmented or nonexistent. This measured collapse in inner cities would move even faster into every area of communities if marriage is legally abolished and reduced to private contracts.
(6) It would cost taxpayer’s big-time.
Maggie Gallagher has called marriage privatization a “fantasy” since “there is scarcely a dollar that state and federal government spends on social programs that is not driven in large part by family fragmentation: crime, poverty, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, school failure, mental and physical health problems.” A study by the Institute for American Values concluded that the cost to U.S. taxpayers from family fragmentation as a result of divorce and unwed childbearing was $112 billion annually.
Sadly, the political left in America feeds on divorce, broken families, and unwed childbearing. Strong marriages and families help break the grip of an ever-growing administrative state, freeing her citizens from poverty to reach their fullest economic potential as creators of wealth rather than being chronic recipients of distributed wealth.
(7) It would grow government.
Government has a compelling interest in defining, regulating, and promoting marriage because of the self-governance it creates when children are socialized in this environment. At the most basic level, marriages — and the families they create — produce social order in homes, neighborhoods, states and nations. Marriage channels masculine energy in socially productive ways, protects women, and increases almost every category of human flourishing. Research is clear that a married biological mother and father is objectively the optimal context for rearing children. Marriage benefits not just those in the relationships, but the businesses, economies, and communities around them. Marriages, and the families that flow from them, tend to produce more productive citizens who create wealth and contribute to society.
The failure of marriages and families has caused the rapid expansion of the welfare state, dramatic tax increases, and has helped increase the national debt. Jennifer Roback Morse argues that “it is simply not possible to have a minimum government and a society with no social or legal norms about family structure, sexual behavior, and childrearing. The state will have to provide support for people with loose or nonexistent ties to their families. The state will have to sanction truly destructive behavior, as always. The destructive behavior will be more common because the culture of impartiality destroys the informal system of enforcing social norms. … A free society needs marriage.”
Marriage is not merely a private, religious institution; it is also a public institution deserving of public recognition and protection, quite apart from any religious or theological argument. Marriage serves not only people of faith but also the common good of society. “Family is built on marriage,” argues Princeton’s Robert George, “and government — the state — has a profound interest in the integrity and well-being of marriage, and to write it off as if it were purely a religiously significant action and not an institution and action that has a profound public significance, would be a terrible mistake.”
Removing the legal recognition of marriage would devastate not just marriage and family, but civil society as a whole.
John Stemberger is an Orlando Attorney who is President of the Florida Family Policy Council.
© 2015 The Stream. All Rights Reserved.
Yes, it’s surprising that on this thread on a conservative website so many are ready to bend over and submit...
When has that been traditional marriage in America?
Even Thomas Jefferson dabbled in divorce law.
To those who object to returning marriage to the private sphere: if you concerns are so valid, why have you been so silent as the rate of illegitimacy among black children now is in excess of 70%? Where were you when communes allowed people to produce feral children?
We don’t worry a bit today that black babies who are born to a single mother will lack for rights of inheritance or medical direction.
The complaints just prove to me that too many social conservatives love big government. I pray that they begin to see that big government is now hostile to the very values they seek to preserve. In fact they want to use government just like liberals do— to impose values on citizens. Let conservatives eschew using government as a proxy for religion.
I think the point is that by taking marriage away from government, you will not have to fight it out to protect marriage in the first place. In order to protect it by fighting it out in the arena of politics, you will need to win every election, you cannot afford to lose one. One Democrat President, One Democrat Congress, you lose. Why give your enemies the stick to beat you over the head with. I would prefer to take that stick out of their hands.
Leave marriage to the Mosques, and the Episcopalians, and the Mormons, and the Hindus, and the church of Satan, and whatever else is called a church?
What good does that do? People can do that today, and they could 50 years ago, and in 1800, but the state still has to define legal marriage for itself, and that is the definition that will dominate the culture of our nation.
This is a battle that we have to win in public, in politics.
Since the contract would be under the same legal restrictions as any other NO MINOR could be legally part of a contract anyway.
Huh?
Even if we win in public, in politics, it will only be temporary. As I stated above, you will have to win them all.
See post 25, and the government cannot, and will not be ‘out of marriage’.
Marriage will always either be legal, or not legal.
Nobody forces you to seek legal status for your marriage, and they never did in America. Marriage without legal status has always been available for anyone, and still is.
my post was in response to the following .
“Marriage laws that currently regulate the age at which a person can be married protect children from sex-slavery and even from desperate parents from certain impoverished..”
Children could no more enter into a contract than a marriage due to the same stipulation of begin a minor.
I see your point, and I will contemplate how to incorporate what your saying into my own scenarios.
Why post it to me, and to post 22?
“taking marriage away from government”
I thought the controversy is over whether the Federal Government should make marriage laws, or whether marriage laws should be handled entirely by the individual states.
Something else that you might consider, should be obvious.
If we can’t win this political battle of stopping marriage between two men, then how in the world do GOP candidates suddenly start winning campaigns based on passing all of these complicated laws and changing marriage entirely from something that humans recognize, into this chaos and collection of fantasies and contractual theories and total religious diversity, and all the other complexity that everyone is proposing?
How do you think people’s eyes will glaze over when all the complications regarding their divorces and child custody, and “civil” marriage law, and “religious” marriage law, and inter-religion marriages, and religious conversions, after marriage, and family court laws, and an endless version of contractual law, etc, etc, and the politicians arguing this in campaigns?
People are not interested in this chaos and the mind blowing suggestions that in the end, are unworkable anyway.
What your saying is, we’re screwed on this.
“To those who object to returning marriage to the private sphere: if you concerns are so valid, why have you been so silent as the rate of illegitimacy among black children now is in excess of 70%? Where were you when communes allowed people to produce feral children?”
Huh? No conservative I know has been silent on these topics; we have been objecting to these every day.
I don’t believe it is the responsibility of the government to care for the poor and disabled, it is the job of the Church.
Marriage is a church sacrament. The government should never have become involved. Follow the money.
Pretty much, unless we can find political leadership that can unravel this.
This didn’t happen accidentally, and we can’t pretend that the left just wins everything because they are so brilliant.
Satan may run the democrat party, but he is also the biggest influence in the GOP.
We have really seen that since 2008, when the Reaganesque Palin was desperately savaged by the GOP, and the pro-abortion/gay marriage/gay military/gay Scout leaders Governor of Massachusetts, Mormon Bishop Romney, was desperately guided into becoming it’s 2012 nominee by the same part of the GOP.
We need to find a way to connect Christianity with conservative voting. The Evangelicals get it, including minority Evangelicals (largely), but that’s it.
This is a religious war, but we need to start fighting it in the streets with revivals and Evangelizing, and within the GOP, and within the democrat party, and within every system and institution in America.
Nonsense.
Of course, but that's a battle we have a chance of winning. The libs can go to churches that do same-sex marriages already. BTW, the article's author is basically wrong. The Supreme Court reapplied civil marriage, they don't have jurisdiction over marriage.
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