Ed Kilgore detects a new trend.
Now that the Christian Right has been reduced to the sputtering defiance of Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal or to the sullen silence of many others, one can hope that conservative acceptance of same-sex marriage will follow as rapidly as it did for the public as a whole.
But then there’s another possibility, signaled [recently] by Rand Paul in an op-ed at Time:
Perhaps the time has come to examine whether or not governmental recognition of marriage is a good idea, for either party.
Since government has been involved in marriage, they have done what they always do — taxed it, regulated it, and now redefined it. It is hard to argue that government’s involvement in marriage has made it better, a fact also not surprising to those who believe government does little right.
So now, states such as Alabama are beginning to understand this as they begin to get out of the marriage licensing business altogether. Will others follow?….
[T]he questions now before us are: What are those rights? What does government convey along with marriage, and should it do so? Should the government care, or allocate any benefits based on marital status?
And can the government do its main job in the aftermath of this ruling — the protection of liberty, particularly religious liberty and free speech?
We shall see. I will fight to ensure it does both, along with taking part in a discussion on the role of government in our lives.
Well, the idea of “privatizing” marriage carries all sorts of unsavory associations, such as previous efforts to avoid racial discrimination laws via “private clubs” and “segregation academies,” and even to avoid African-American voting rights via “white primaries” understood as private arrangements.
Beyond that, since conservative social policy in this country has become heavily associated with the practice of attaching all sorts of benefits—especially tax deductions and credits—to married couples with or without children, how is that supposed to work if marriage no longer exists as a state-defined status? What are reformicons supposed to do?
I’ve noted this before, though I’m still not sure what to make of it. There’s long been a libertarian argument for “privatizing” marriage, which I also have never quite gotten. I agree with the Cato author that marriage is fundamentally a civil contract. This is, at one level, what the LGBT community has been fighting about, since the act of getting married confers all kinds of rights and privileges on each spouse. There’s also a religious component to marriage – Catholics consider it a sacrament – that one may or may not participate in. If the religious folks want to argue for a complete separation of the two, that’s fine by me as long as that means that the religious-not-civil/”government” marriage no longer confers any of the legal benefits that civil marriage does. Treat it legally like any other domestic partnership and see how they like it.
The possibility that concerns me is that there will be pressure on state legislatures to elevate religious marriage to some higher status than civil marriage, or conversely to deprecate the value of civil marriage. One way or the other, they don’t want to be the same kind of “married” as same-sex couples. Again, I don’t get it, but it seems to me this is something to watch out for. The conservative iconoclast State Rep. David Simpson has called on Greg Abbott to convene a special session to end marriage licensing in Texas. Abbott has already ignored pleas from other social cons to do a special session to re-outlaw same-sex marriage, as if that were possible, and I doubt Simpson’s request will find any more sympathy. You can be sure this will be an issue in next March’s primaries, however. I don’t know what the final form of this mania will look like, but the outlines are clear. The Rivard Report and Newsdesk have more.
I think this movement is part of a larger libertarian push to end state licensing of hairdressers, taxi driving, even lawyers. The thinking is that state control is stifling innovation and enterprise.
There still would be some need for (government?) recording the fact of a marriage.
Also, I don’t see the religious/civil dichotomy as being synonymous with disapproval of gay marriage. Many European nations have this system, and include gay relationships. And many glbt marriages take place within religious denominations or churches which are open to performing them.