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Exploration The Procrustean Marriage Bed by William Merritt No matter how
strongly you believe that marriage can occur only between a man and a woman, you
cannot ignore the fact that marriage is an acknowledgement of the specialness of
a relationship that can never be replaced by civil unions and equal
taxation.
Since the first American worker had the first Social
Security deduction confiscated from his paycheck, the government has frittered
away every opportunity to turn Social Security into something other than a
miserable pyramid-swindle by actually investing Social Security deductions in
ways that workers would have invested the money themselves. All of which suggests
. . .
| | William
Merritt is a senior fellow of the Burr Institute and lives in Portland, Ore.
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Well, it sure doesn't suggest that the government get into the stock market.
The government would do better by stuffing our money under its mattress than by
playing the market. This is not because the government is financially stupid,
exactly. It's because the government has mixed motives that make it act stupidly.
It is not possible for a government that is democratic (even in the good sense)
to invest purely for financial gain.
The moment the government figured out that tobacco stocks looked like a good
bet, somebody would start complaining about subsidizing lung cancer. Current and
future Social Security recipients (i.e., all of us) would be cut out of a portion
of our retirement benefits while the government hunted up some less lucrative but
nicer place to park our money. The same thing would happen with defense
contractors. And pharmaceuticals. And agribusinesses. And petrochemical
companies. And industries that pollute. Or don't pay "living wages." Or exploit
foreign labor. Or aren't American-owned. This would go on until all that was left
were low-performing, Earth-friendly, fair-traded, union-partnered, "socially
useful," do-gooder operations that encouraged racial, gender, and species
equality, but didn't produce anything that anybody wanted to buy, and had no
prospects other than continuing to be artificially propped up by gigantic
infusions of federal cash. In other words, the whole, bleak pyramid scheme would
start all over again. Government involvement in the world of finance would be no
different from what it already is in the world of matrimony.
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| Because states set the
rules for marriage, all sorts of social concerns have been layered onto an
institution that, in private hands, was about the relationship between
individuals. |
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Because states set the rules for marriage, all sorts of social concerns have
been layered onto an institution that, in private hands, was about the
relationship between individuals. States want to protect public health, so people
can't take their vows until they have their blood tested. States want to protect
children, so unhappily married couples can't sit down at the kitchen table and
decide how their divorces are to be handled. States don't want to have to take
care of surviving spouses, so they set out what a person may, and may not,
bequeath in a will. States worry about lovers going off half-cocked, so they
build in a waiting period between the time when people buy their marriage
licenses and the time when they can actually take the plunge. States decide which
people are too young to marry. Or too closely related. For a long time, states
decided whether people were too distantly related, inventing a whole new crime
called miscegenation and making it the state's business to be sure that the bride
and groom were properly color-coordinated.
Along with defining the rules of marriage, states have taken it upon
themselves to define the very nature of the institution, so that marriage can
only be between one man and one woman. Which means that, if you happen to be one
man and several women, or a bunch of guys and gals, or a pair of guys, or a
couple of ladies, you are out of luck. At least, that's the traditional way the
states parcel out who gets to be married.
But as surely as social sensibilities would interfere with government
investment decisions, sensibilities about who gets to walk down the aisle
together are now pressing up against state definitions of marriage and, at least
in some places, the heat is on to let any two people get married, just as long as
they are old enough, don't flunk their blood tests, aren't first cousins, and
have endured the requisite cooling-off period. The country is teetering on the
edge of one of those culture squabbles that will go on forever because both sides
really do believe what they believe and, with states controlling the definition
of marriage, you only get to have it one way. No matter which way the states have
it, they dump everybody into a fistfight nobody needs, and nobody can ever
resolve.
| Men could say "I do" to
each other in all-male churches. Women could take the plunge in guy-proof covens.
A hundred thousand Mormon men, and some much larger number of Mormon wives, could
come out of their closets. |
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No matter how strongly you support the equality of every American before the
law, you simply cannot overlook the fact that, to people who believe
marriage is a sacrament, that's exactly what it is: a sacrament — a joining
together by God of a man and a woman. To try to include unions between two men or
two women is not only an affront to God — it doesn't make sense. To such
people two people of the same sex can't be married, any more than a dog
can be a minister. Ministry doesn't have anything to do with dogs.
On the other hand, no matter how strongly you believe that marriage can occur
only between a man and a woman, you cannot ignore the fact that marriage
is an acknowledgement of the specialness of a relationship that can never be
replaced by civil unions and equal taxation, by joint-property agreements,
changes in inheritance laws, or a sensitive rethinking of who gets to pull the
plug when one of you won't die.
And all of it, the whole unending argument that's about to go careening down
through the generations, is as artificial as the class strife created by unequal
tax laws. If states got out of the marriage business, people would just get
married. And how they got married, and to whom, would be just one more doctrinal
dispute, just one more reason to attend whichever church they went to, instead of
some other church.
Men could say "I do" to each other in all-male churches. Women could take the
plunge in guy-proof covens. Muslims could return to their roots. A hundred
thousand Mormon men, and some much larger number of Mormon wives, could come out
of their closets. Unitarians could start ordaining dogs. And the people who think
that marriage is a sacrament could go to the altar in churches that practice the
exact sacraments that they would have decreed if they had been God.
Religious sects whose members care enough not to recognize each others'
communions and baptisms would be just as free to think of each others' alleged
"marriages" as the blasphemous sacrileges they are, and hold them up as examples
of the perverted ways of every other church in the world, all of which have
fallen into error and sin. The whole issue of who can marry whom would drop out
of the larger public debate, and the rest of us could go back to worrying about
where our retirement money is really going to come from.
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