Wedding Bell Blues

by Kevin O'Reilly, Free-Market.net

Yet another government institution has come upon hard times lately. While this particular institution’s skyrocketing failure rates have plateaued in the last couple of decades, no one in his right mind thinks it is succeeding. In most cases of a failing government program, conservatives would call to abolish it. This time, though, they want to federalize it.
The failing government program is marriage and the solution proposed by some conservatives is an amendment to the Constitution, which would set an alarming precedent for the federal government’s role in defining what constitutes a marriage.
Traditionally, every state in the union has regulated marriage on its own, and no state allows any “union” by the name marriage between anything other than one man and one woman. Yet the threat to marriage, according to conservatives, comes not from a government institution that has clearly failed to keep pace with how most people today live their lives, but from gay men and women who want in on the deal.
Apparently they are the ones to blame for all the straight people who have failed to make their marriages work.
What has brought on this burning desire to muck up the Constitution among conservatives normally more than content to leave well enough alone?
Gays in Massachussets are suing for the legal right to marry, and a case pending there -- Goodridge v. Department of Public Health -- has set off alarm bells among conservatives, who say marriage is too important a contract to leave to mere individuals. To them, it is all too clear that if the marriage license is expanded to encompass gay unions then marriage itself would collapse altogether.
It is almost, as Tech Central Station contributor and economist James D. Miller has written, as if marriage is a brand whose identity must be protected. To the extent that they admit gay people exist, conservatives suggest that they could achieve all the benefits of marriage through contract. This is hardly true, as many government programs explicitly favor married couples (and in the case of taxes, penalize married couples), but let’s assume it to be true.
Well, so too could straights marry by private contract, without the government’s imprimatur. So why have a public marriage contract at all? Slate’s Michael Kinsley, the Cato Institute’s David Boaz and ifeminists’ Wendy McElroy are just three fine writers who have suggested that the government ought to get out of the marriage business altogether.
The conservatives’ final answer on this is “marriage for me, but not for thee.” The state ought to encourage marriage because of its central role in the perpetuation of the species and as the building block of an ordered, free society. Thus, government-endorsed marriage is like any other form of state licensure: an explicit endorsement of that form’s superiority and importance, a form of regulatory subsidy.
Tim Carney, a writer and blogger for the America’s Future Foundation, admitted as much in a recent essay. “The call for homosexual marriage is a call for active state endorsement of homosexual relationships and the granting of certain benefits,” Carney wrote. “The state does not simply allow civil marriage: civil marriage would not exist without the state. Marriage, by definition, is active on the part of the government, not passive.”
It is quite true that many gay activists see expanding the marriage license to gay couples would equal the ultimate stamp of approval. The conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan has attempted to make “the conservative case for gay marriage” because he feels marriage as a whole would be strengthened by erasing the double standard which casts gay men and women as second-tier citizens.
In another essay, Sullivan writes, “Isn’t it a strange conservative impulse to make taking responsibility something that the government should make harder rather than easier? One of the key benefits of marriage, after all, is that it also upholds a common ideal of mutual support and caring; it not only enables such acts of responsibility but rewards and celebrates them.”
Whether you find such arguments convincing is somewhat beside the point, which is that reasonable people could disagree through infinity and beyond about what values our government should support. Some see extending the marriage license to gays as the corruption of a sacrament. Others see it as simple equity under the law.
Ultimately, what should be asked is whether marriage needs government in the first place. The impulse to love and care for one another needs about as much encouragement as the impulse to breathe. Marriage was around long before Congress or the Constitution, and will likely be here long after. And for those who do favor federal intervention, just think what will become of marriage once Teddy Kennedy and Hillary Clinton get a hold of it.

Kevin O’Reilly writes for Free-Market.net.