Some thoughts provoked by the imposition of “gay marriage” on the people of New Jersey by the state supreme court, on the grounds that no substantial government purpose is served by limiting marriage to man and woman:
- The move treats marriage as a creation of positive law that can be freely defined to be whatever the lawmaker thinks will advance his purposes. It does not treat it as a natural relationship with concrete details specified by a combination of natural function and particular cultural ideals and circumstances. The court thus presumes that marriage doesn’t precede the legal system, it’s created by it.
- That view doesn’t account at all for the position marriage has actually held within the legal system, let alone within human life generally. For example, marriage is said to be a fundamental right, one that the state cannot infringe upon. How can that be so when its existence and nature is a pure matter of positive law subject only to general requirements such as equality?
- If even marriage is no more than a creation of positive law then it seems the same would be true of all social institutions. The court seems to believe that social order is 100% the creation of the legal system. How can that possibly be so? Does the legal system create itself? Isn’t a view that makes the legal system and therefore the state the source of all social order totalitarian? Am I the only one who finds this alarming?
- The decision substantially completes the trend toward the legal abolition of marriage. When everything is marriage nothing is marriage. If the relationship has no natural definition or function, how can anyone say what rights and obligations should go along with it? Isn’t it all arbitrary? Why should anyone care whether the parties live up to an arbitrary self-defined relationship, and why give it any sort of legal recognition?
- The court voted 4-3 to let the New Jersey legislature decide whether to call same sex arrangements “marriage” or something else. Commentators apparently think that concession should defuse the issue for the upcoming election, since people are edgy about gay “marriage” but mostly think it’s OK as long as it’s called something else. I suppose the point is that the people, who know there’s something wrong with “gay marriage” but can’t say what, are only marginally better off than their rulers, who think it’s a basic moral necessary.
Bingo
Greetings from NJ…
I suppose the point is that the people, who know there’s something wrong with “gay marriage†but can’t say what, are only marginally better off than their rulers, who think it’s a basic moral necessary.
Bingo. It is not likely that 40 years ago the average guy on the street would have been any better able to articulate his visceral revulsion at calling something marriage that was so obviously not marriage, than people would be able to pinpoint the line between “marriage” and “civil union” today. But our average guy of old would have felt something about “marriage” that the people (by-n-large) no longer feel about it: that it was culturally, publicly about raising a family, perhaps more than that, but certainly no less. And today, marriage (even the “heterosexual” kind) is generally not about anything cultural or public at all, but rather about two people contracting, while it pleases them, to service each others’ needs. And since “traditional marriage” has fallen to this, i.e., fecund only to the extent that it serves to actualize contract parties, there now remains no rational basis to discriminate. The war against “gay marriage” was lost perhaps with the advent of no-fault divorce. But it is perhaps still a war worth fighting…
Since marriage is so obviously beneficial for raising well-adjusted children, and since children so obviously benefit from having parents of both sexes, and since society so obviously needs to have children so that it can go on being… well… a society, to say that “no substantial government purpose is served by limiting marriage to man and woman” is to say that the there is no substantial government purpose in ensuring the long-term survival and health of civilization. Liberal democracy reaches its final end… by checkmating itself.
Marriage is now primarily
Marriage is now primarily about mutual gratification whether sexual, financial, emotional, or whatever. Since straight couples routinely sodomize each other within marriages, why shouldn’t gay couples be allowed to marry?
I don’t understand “primarily”
Mutual gratification and sodomy aren’t the things that make marriage basic socially any more than social climbing and rock climbing or for that matter wife beating. Those might be the most striking features of a particular marriage as well.
If marriage were not more than those things, if it did not have a natural function that trumped personal interest and was basic to social order and the continuation of human life, it would not matter as it does. It could not even serve additional goals like mutual gratification adequately.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
“It could not even serve
“It could not even serve additional goals like mutual gratification adequately.” Thus, the high divorce rate? Also, how many churches require couples to vow childbearing?
The demand for “gay
The demand for “gay marriage” doesn’t come from nowhere. The tendency over recent decades has been toward the abolition of marriage as an institution. I don’t see why the trend should be continued and brought to completion.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Mr. Kalb wrote:
“The
Mr. Kalb wrote:
“The decision substantially completes the trend toward the legal abolition of marriage. When everything is marriage nothing is marriage. If the relationship has no natural definition or function, how can anyone say what rights and obligations should go along with it? Isn’t it all arbitrary? Why should anyone care whether the parties live up to an arbitrary self-defined relationship, and why give it any sort of legal recognition?”
If marriage is no longer a central social institution, worthy of legal recognition, then what about parenthood, children, and child-rearing?
We are witnessing a cascade effect in a vast social experiment, the consequences of which aren’t clear.
The statistics, however, show the big losers are women and children. In the absence of marriage as a defining social institution for young males, women continue to want children and a “relationship.” They end up with children (usually in poverty), a series of “relationships,” and an assortment of child-support orders. I’ll leave out for the moment the child care issues (when the generation of responsible grandmothers disappears, true chaos will ensue).
In the absence of marriage as a defining social institution, one can expect a variety of fairly virulent social dysfunctions involving children, schools, young males, and women. Turn on your television after the election, and you’ll see a story (or stories), nearly every day, about one or the other of these dysfunctions: school shootings, child poverty, failing schools, “dead beat dads,” over-crowding in prisons, taxpayer funded abortions, overwhelmed welfare departments, child “kidnappings,” child abuse, and on and on.
It’s all of a piece.