The below thread on Big Love and the Slippery Slope has gotten a few responses from commenters to the effect that “the government should get out of the marriage business.” In this post, I will argue that people expressing this opinion are underestimating the importance of traditional marriage in our society. I will attempt to show that promoting marriage is one of the relatively few things that a good government should do. I will also argue that this is one of the reasons that the Church has entered this discussion.
I am by nature an old-fashioned Liberal conservative. I believe government should be severely limited and should only involve itself in the most important societal goals. I believe in the Jeffersonian model of limited government: “A wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” — Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801. Jefferson and other founding fathers had an extremely limited view of government. They believed in paying for police an army, protecting the borders and not much more.
It would be a threadjack to comment on all of the areas that government enters today that it should not. But suffice to say that if I had my way government would do many fewer things than it does today.
So, I have sympathy for people like Clark Goble who have a libertarian view of government. They say government should stay out of the marriage business because they believe government should stay out of lots of things. I disagree, but it’s a decent argument. I have much less sympathy for the people who think government should be involved in many, many things (such as paying AFDC costs to single women so they have more and more babies and placing higher tariffs on goods so we start trade wars or providing prescription drug subsidies to wealthy seniors) but yet cannot find a place in government for promoting and protecting marriage.
This post is aimed at both the libertarians and the liberals. My argument is that promoting and protecting marriage should be one of the central goals of good government.
The primary purpose of government should be to protect society physically and promote the health of people in society so it continues to function through future generations. This is why almost all of us can agree that taxes should pay for police protection, border protection and some kind of army.
We cannot all agree, however, on what it means to protect the “health of society.” In Europe and Canada, most people agree that this means the government should pay for all health care. In the United States, the majority of people don’t accept this model. And one of the reasons they do not is that, in effect, many people have accepted a privatized health care promoter: the family. This is why there are literally thousands of laws promoting the traditional family: because it is good for society and lowers the amount of money we need to pay in taxes to promote the “health of society.”
Doubtful that traditional marriage and traditional families promote the general welfare? Then you need to do some more reading.
Various studies in the last five years have shown a direct relationship between two-parent, mother-father households and lower crime rates. Single-family or non-traditional households result in higher crime. See this link for more details.
Other studies show that both parents and children live longer, are happier and that societal costs are lower in an environment that promotes traditional marriage. There is a long list of costs to society from the breakdown in marriage: more prostitution, more physical abuse, higher drug use, more crime, higher levels of infant mortality, more need for social welfare, higher education costs and need for more remedial education, and on and on. See this link for details on the studies.
This is one of the many reasons so many of us are fighting SSM. Family law studies have shown that the idea of the non-traditional family is a radical departure and that as a society we have not sufficiently studied the impact on children. One bipartisan study looked at the evidence and called for a nationwide five-year moratorium on the adoption of SSM and other changes in traditional marriage so more facts could be considered. This bipartisan study (not produced by the radical right wing) showed that society has moved rapidly from a “conjugal” view of marriage to a “close relationship” view of marriage which has opened up the possibility of radically defining marriage and negatively affecting children and future generations.
It is for these and many other reasons that the Church has continually and repeatedly issued statements on this issue. Modern prophets have often talked about the importance of the family since the beginning of the Restoration, but starting with the “Proclamation on the Family” in 1995, the Church has taken the unusual step of making it position, very, very clear. Please visit this web site to see the repeated references to this issue. In 2004, there were two announcements on SSM. The Church’s position has not changed or softened: “we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.”
It is worth pointing out that this is not a debate that the Church has to enter. Our position easily could be that the only marriages that are viable are the ones performed in temples. Therefore, we don’t really care what people do to marriage because it doesn’t affect us. Instead, the Church’s position is actively concerned with society as a whole, which is exactly how the Church of God has always acted when it is on the Earth. We are, in effect, modern-day Noahs warning the world of calamities to come unless we change our ways. And that is the humane position to take.
So, based on this evidence, should good government be in the marriage business or not? Should marriage be promoted by government and should government protect traditional marriage to protect society? The obvious answer is that it should if we want to avoid the calamities mentioned above. From the libertarian perspective, we are in effect privatizing needed government activities and keeping taxes lower. From the modern liberal perspective, we are doing the humane thing: we are promoting polices that make people are happier, help them suffer less abuse and keep them healthier.
Edward Gibbons identified two of the causes of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as:
1) The decline of the nuclear family
2) The acceptance of homosexuality
People in nuclear families want to make the next generation better than they, themselves, had, both temporally and spiritually. Thus, religiosity increases the health of the civilization, and lack of religiosity and nuclear families hastens its decline. What legacy do we want to leave our grandchildren?
I predict the Proclamation on the Family will be added as a new section to the Doctrine and Covenants sometime in the near future.
What about the fact that with the government in the marriage business, it could ultimately allow same sex marriage, then within a few years of that start penalizing institutions who won’t allow it by, for example, cancelling the tax-exempt status of the Church?
Here’s how it plays out- the Congress passes the “Marriage and Family Act of 20XX” on the authority of its commerce power, with the rationalization that discrimination in marriage against same sex couples has a detrimental effect on commerce between the states by causing upset citizens, putting peoples job benefits in doubt from one state to another, etc. This law basically states that it shall be illegal for any governmental entity associated with any state, county, city, municipality, etc., to deny a marriage application on the basis of the sexual orientation or gender of the people wishing to enter into that arrangement. And to the extent that Churches or other organizations are performing valid marriages under the law, they are also beholden to this requirement (thus, the situation where a couple was married by a justice of the peace and then sealed in the Church would still allow the Church to perform its relious ceremony and disallow same sex participants without any legal repercussions).
A few years later, the IRS, seeing all the tax-free revenue of the Church, decides to revoke the tax-exempt status of the church based on the fact that it continues to discriminate in marriage with regard to sexual orientation. The Church sues, and eventually a ruling similar to that in the Bob Jones University case issues from the Supreme Court. (I discuss this at length: http://fowlesview.blogspot.com/2004/11/same-sex-marriage-impact-on-private.html
The new civil rights movement, so to speak… Only now we wish that goverment had never had such a role in marriages. The solution in my opinion is to get the goverment out of marriage, and that is obviously in disagreement with what Geoff has concluded. But he’s still a great guy and all.
I hope the proclamation gets added to the D&C.
Geoff, the better questions is which government should be involved in marriage, federal or state?
Answer: State
Reason: Federalism
Much of this analysis strikes me as on point. But it leaves out one enormous, complicating factor: the costs of having government controlling marriage. The verb in that last statement makes all of the difference. When government steps into a situation it does not usually employ a light touch. And that could become a problem.
A government endowed by the people with the power to define marriage as between a man and a woman is also a government endowed with the power to define marriage as … (insert your fear of choice here). I wish that we could have a government that only performed the good without risking any bad. But I don’t think we can.
Government is essentially a tool. G. Washington compared it to fire: “a troublesome servant and a fearful master.” We cannot pretend that government is a tool that we are certain to keep under control. Let me emphasize that this is not a brief for gay marriage. But it is a warning that if we create a government powerful enough to control marriage, we can never be certain that it will always do what we want. In sum the potential cost of using government to achieve our ends is creating an institution that will bring about the destruction of the family, all on its own.
That’s not a cheerful thought. But if we don’t keep it in mind, we aren’t really serving the interest of the church, our society, or the family.
Jordan, the way societal trends are heading these days, I don’t discount the possibility of your scenario in our lifetimes (meaning the next 40-50 years). My answer is:
1)The government today is involved in marriage and calls for it to not be involved in marriage are quixotic because it won’t magically happen.
2)So, given that the government is involved in marriage, if we are concerned about the Church’s survival, the best thing we can do is promote policies that conform with Church policy, which also happen to be ones that support government involvement in marriage. These policies, along with some interesting demographic trends toward more religiosity in future generations, will hopefully get society back on track.
3)Promoting traditional marriage is the right thing to do in today’s environment, and government should promote what is right and just.
One should note that from the beginning Washington’s vision of government was in conflict with Jefferson which led to some big conflicts within Washington’s cabinet over this. (Jefferson being one of his more famous advisors) I have to admit that I favor Washington’s pragmatism over some of Jefferson’s untempered idealism. This is one reason why, I suspect, I’m not a libertarian. Although pragmatically I think that the Jeffersonian strain of American origins is a necessary and important check on the excesses of government. Which is why I have libertarian tendencies at times.
But I’m most definitely not a libertarian. For instance I favor big government spending on basic research. I think that government’s role ought to be involved where public individual actions won’t pragmatically be able to get involved. Thus to take an exterme example, I think it silly to even imagine that governments should not run roads, shouldn’t post speed limits, shouldn’t have safety regulations. While I think regulations should be as small as possible, I think my view of “small as possible” is significantly larger than what most libertarians would agree with. There are simply too many things that individuals won’t do or won’t do effectively. For everything else I definitely favor getting the government out of it.
With regards to marriage, I don’t mind the state being involved in promoting marriage via things like tax breaks and the like. I don’t think though the state should make marriage a state function. So in a sense you’re missing the ultimate position I’m taking which isn’t a libertarian one. (The libertarian would object to any social engineering by government)
LDS Patriot in #4 makes an interesting point. In my view, the federal government should be small enough that its involvement in social issues would never be an issue because it would be perhaps 1/100th of its current size. But the reality is that we have a federal government that regulates education policy, regulates businesses, regulates social policy and involves itself (amazingly) in rescuing people who have decided of their own free will to live in places where hurricanes regularly land. So, in an ideal world, state or local governments would only be involved in marriage policy. But in our current environment, the federal government needs to be involved as well.
BTW – it seems odd to me that suggest my view is so different from yours whereas my position seems to be exactly what you outline in #6. I think getting the state out of marriage would be a good thing (as would most 19th century prophets, including Joseph). And I tend to give their views of the constitution a significant voice, even though I recognize their misunderstandings and limits. But as a practical matter the government will never get out of marriage, in which case we have to lobby to make the best of the situation we have, which is to ensure SSM doesn’t happen.
Clark, in the early days of our republic, many people just lived together without being married by anybody and were recognized as being “married.” Today, that is not the case. Your marital status is essential to literally thousands of different rules and regulations. And, interestingly, you can’t get baptized unless you’re married by the government. So, society as a whole — and the Church — are heavily invested in the idea that a marriage must be recognized by the state to be valid. The reason is that marriage is a basic societal good and should be promoted. The only way you can “promote” marriage in the ways you suggest is to make marriage a governmentally recognized function. There is a basic contradition in your answer.
Clark, re: #9, I admit that I assumed your answer was a libertarian answer because I didn’t know your reasons for opposing the government being involved in marriage. So, based on my response to #10, how can the government “promote” marriage without being involved in marriage?
I think I mentioned several Geoff (#11). Tax credits being the obvious example. But there are other encouragements ranging from control of education to advertising.
The problem where I run into big qualms is in government telling people who can or can’t take care of bodies, arrange for medical care, or the like, all based upon what the government decides is a proper marital role. And it is there that I think the homosexuals have some very valid qualms, although clearly the issue is much larger than SSM. For instance if I was estranged from my parents but not gay, I don’t see why I should be able to legally designate my roommate or a friend to control my medical wishes and funerary arrangements independent of my parents. This to me is an example of government regulation and involvement that is inappropriate and which can even trump my religious wishes.
Say for example I became a Mormon and my parents were furious anti-Mormons. I wish to (a) have my body parts donated to science and (b) be buried in my temple clothes, have the grave site dedicated by my bishop and (c) have a funeral in my chapel. I am single, die, and my parents take over and invalidate all those wishes. Is that just?
(Forgive me if I’m illustrating an ignorance of the law here – I’m going on the assumption that the parents can)
Geoff (#10), I think the situation early in our Republic of keeping government out of marriage was the ideal situation. The reason it became involved in marriage was complex. As you say though, at this stage marriage status is essential to thousands of rules. The question then becomes, as I mentioned above (#12), which of those rules based upon state marriage are just?
I certainly don’t deny marriage is a good that should be promoted. But I think we can all think of excesses, both here and in other countries. I’m here thinking of countries where say divorce was illegal or very difficult. Missionaries would convert people technically living in sin but considering themselves married. How do deal with such situations was difficult. Now clearly that doesn’t apply to the United States at this time but it does highlight the problem when the state gets to decide who is or isn’t married.
The ultimate problem is that the state then uses marriage to assign rights in a fashion that is often unjust.
It is one thing to promote marriage, which I think we’d all agree as a good. It is quite an other to limit rights based upon that. And we can think of many examples even in recent history. I gave a few in (#12), but the other obvious example are mixed race marriages in the 1960’s.
Straight people continue to do a fairly awesome job of weakening and breaking the nuclear family. Unless I’m wrong, it isn’t the gay people behind the advertising, pushing the consumerism that puts a financial strain on the family. It isn’t gay people creating circumtstances where two income families become more and more necessary. It isn’t gay people who cause a divorce rate of, how high is it now? Most of the non-married, cohabitating couples I know aren’t gay. With straight people like these, I don’t think the nuclear family has much to fear from homosexuals. Keep your focus on the gays, otherwise, you might notice how much straight people are mucking it all up.
Geoff asked,
how can the government “promote” marriage without being involved in marriage?
Clark responded,
I think I mentioned several Geoff (#11). Tax credits being the obvious example. But there are other encouragements ranging from control of education to advertising.
You are (I’m sure inadvertantly) raising a huge first amendment problem. In order to award tax credits, the government needs some criterion to determine whether somebody is married. If marriage is not to be a state function, then you are implicitly leaving it up to churches. Thus, whether somebody gets a tax credit would depend on whether they have gone through a particular religious ceremony. The same problem would apply to education and advertising. If you promoted marriage via either mechanism, you would be promoting religion. Can’t do it.
sorry, forgot to add.
There are things the government can do to protect the family that have nothing to do with religion. Things like affordable education, affordable housing, financial counseling (before it’s too late), more stringent regulation of advertising, for example. I think Big Business is a far greater threat to the family than any of this SSM stuff. Big business wants people to spend money, and people don’t spend much money when they are at home enjoying the simple pleasures of family home evening, and other family activities which cost little money.
It is worth pointing out that this is not a debate that the Church has to enter. Our position easily could be that the only marriages that are viable are the ones performed in temples.
No, it is not so easy. What do you do with new converts who were married in another church? Under your scenario, I see three possiblities:
1. Send them to the temple immediately,
2. Force them to split up for a year until they can go to the temple, or
3. Excommunicate them for adultery.
The obvious answer is to simply recognize the other church’s marriage as valid. But that opens another can of worms. Whose marriages do we recognize. Obviously, we could not recognize marriages performed by the FLDS, for example. We would have to develop some kind of list of “approved” religions whose marriages we recognize. And that still does not deal with converts who had previouly refused to submit to religious authority.
We could also require them to remarry under LDS authority, but outside the temple. Perhps doable, but it would generate much ill will by stigmitizing “married” nonmembers as adulterers. Much simpler to have a single entity (the government) make the decision and piggy-back on it.
Last Lemming (#15), that’s a good point, except that I don’t think the criteria should be the government deciding. In other words I think the government ought encourage marriages that are de facto marriages that would include for instance, the common form of marriage in the 18th century that I believe Geoff referred to.
Noting that now we’re discussing an ideal and likely unobtainable solution, I think one could easily separate out encouragements from rights. The obvious way is to give credits to children being raised by an adult man and woman who are their parents. That is, put the emphasis on children.
I’d add that I agree with hplc that there are lots of things the government can do independent of marriage regulation. I think teaching personal finances and interpersonal skills in school are an obvious way. But I also think there are other things that probably would have a stronger effect.
Hplc (#14), agreed that heterosexuals do plenty of things to hurt marriage. If you look at the links above on marriage, most of them discuss things that unmarried heterosexuals do and the negative effects on society. My personal goal — which I believe to be the Church’s goal also — is to promote marriage to help make up for some of the mistakes in the past, which indeed were primarily perpetuated by heterosexuals.
HPIC,
It was LBJ’s Great Society and the liberals appointed to the Supreme Court, and the pill which caused the breakdown of marriage. Growing up in the 1950’s, every mother on the block was “stay-at-home”, and virtually all my female teachers were “Miss” not “Mrs.”.
Now, I’m sure to be attached as a misogynist – but would our society be better off with 75% of Black children in intact families, and a 10% divorce rate?
GeoffB: “The primary purpose of government should be to protect society physically and promote the health of people in society so it continues to function through future generations.”
The problem is that this runs contrary to the purpose of government stated in the Declaration of Independence:
The purpose of government? To secure the rights of people. Nothing in there about “promot[ing] the health of people.”
Yes, I am a libertarian. (And a Libertarian.)
this was a joke…right?
Why not make everything an optional two-step process. Everyone, no matter what religion or lack of religion joins in a civil union. This is the government part of the process for tax benefits etc. Then religions can have marriage. Want to have a Catholic marriage? Make sure you qualify under their rules. Want to have a Buddhist marriage? Make sure you are following their rules. Anyone that would qualify for a marriage certificate now would qualify for the civil union certificate. Laws, such as insurance benefits and medical decision making, would apply to civil unions. Rules for entering the temple would go along with an LDS marriage. A couple that was baptised after entering into a civil union and being married in an Evangelical church would only have to be married in the temple.
Geoff B, you are essentially making an argument that the market of human relationships does not regulate itself and that it requires government regulation in the form of incentives and deterents in order to produce the “desired” outcome which you take to be an objective good. Of course, there are some losers in your market regulation, who, though they may have better educations, jobs, and values, you take to be inherently worse parents than thier heteronormative counterparts.
The problem is that most market regulations are designed to weed out inefficiencies of the market. However, you do not do this. You only selectively pick out a few correlations to inefficiency, not causation.
Rather than regulating marriage, you should be regulating the production of children. As far as I can tell, all of your arguments are based on the raising of children and the type of households that they are raised in. This is problematic for two reasons: First, it doesn’t give any reason to prohibit marriage for SS couples that have no intention of having children. Second, you are regulating marriages which are only loosely linked to the environment of the production of children. In order for your argument to really work, you need to talk about how the government needs to regulate the inefficiencies of the production of children. Following your logic, individuals should need to obtain lisenses in order to raise children so that the government can properly “promote the health of society”. The government should regulate what sort of parent-child relationships are allowed, not what sort of adult-adult relationships are allowed.
R Biddulph,
You are correct. You do sound like a misogynist. You are also a reductionist. The SC is not the invisible hand of cultural shifts that you think it is. Nor is it generally thought that the 50’s were really that great…hence the sixties.
“…promoting marriage is one of the relatively few things that a good government should do.”
ROTFLMBO!!!
“In Europe and Canada, most people agree that this means the government should pay for all health care.”
“Most” of us don’t think this, nor is it how things work. We all pay for it ourselves, by paying taxes and health care premiums. Per capita it works out to much less than Americans pay for health insurance per capita. The government acts as the “middle-man,” as an insurance company would in the U.S. Why we funnel it through these channels is because we do believe that physical and mental health are important enough that EVERYONE in society should have it protected–even those who both find themselves without family and find themselves not in the top 70% of the population in terms of income. (Yes, these people do exist, despite what some would like to believe.) (And anyway, how is your family going to help you if they have no money either and you need heart surgery??) Everyone deserves good health.
It seems that the argument of the post is basically gov’t should regulate marriage because traditional marriage is morally right and won’t lead to societal decay. Seems like people want gov’t to be involved just in case the gays or whoever outnumber us one day!). But I think this post is basically saying gov’t should regulate morality; and I don’t think it should.
I’m am more convinced that gov’t should regulate marriage just for order’s sake. Legal issues like custody, taxes, estate issues, etc. are inseparable from the family and require governmental attention. Since those are my only reasons for favoring state regulation, extending the right to marry to consenting adults is not a problem.
I think my biggest problem with this post is that any objective study/analysis regarding why it would be bad for gays to marry is speculative. Gays can’t marry and can’t enjoy the benefits of marriage, so we can’t really say with certainly (from any study) what impacts it would have. It doesn’t seem quite right to deny someone a benefit just because it might be bad for society.
BTW, a lot of these societal ills associated with the decline of the traditional family (prostituion, abuse, etc.) are the same one’s that Brigham Young warned were associated with monogamy. Ironic, I think.
Trailertrash #22, no, it wasn’t a joke. Please read the attached studies.
Mike, #21, I’d like to hear some more substantive comments from you. I respect your opinions (although we often disagree).
Trailertrash, #24, your argument is a non-starter because marriages that often do not involve children at the beginning eventually later involve children. The primary issue is marriage.
Baptist #26, making fun of people’s arguments is not a very good counter-argument and certainly not convincing to anybody.
Canadian #27, I appreciate your coming on M* to contribute, although your comment is off-topic. I would love to discuss Canadian health care with you in another forum, and would leave you with something to ponder: if Canadian health care is so good, why are their two-year waiting lists for knee and hip replacements and why do Canadians flee south constantly for health care?
APJ, #28, I would respectfully submit you need rethink your statement that: “But I think this post is basically saying gov’t should regulate morality; and I don’t think it should.” All government does is regulate morality. Is it right to steal? No, it is against the law, and we should regulate that. Is it right to dump pollutants in drinking water? No, we should regulate that. Is prositution OK? No, we should regulate that. “Victimless” and crimes with victims are both regulated by government all the time, and it is a basic fallacy (but one that is asserted all the time) that the government should not regulate morality.
I would humbly submit for all the libertarians (yes, Mike, this means you) that there are very few, if not zero, crimes that are victimless. Every act has repercussions that affect society in one way or another. Every time a john pays a prostitute he is keeping that prostitute in a business that hurts her, is perhaps giving money to pimps and perhaps indirectly keeping a drug dealer in business who sells drugs to the prostitute. Every time a teenager smokes a joint, he is keeping some network of dealers in business and affecting his parents, neighbors and friends (if you have had any drug addict relatives, as I have, there is no way you would see drug addiction as victimless). All of these morally reprehensible crimes have effects on society.
So, when it comes to marriage, we need to examine what effects on society traditional marriages have. Are they positive or negative? Clearly, marriages where children can be raised by a mother and father are far preferable to any of the alternatives. Study after study has shown this. I refer to many of them above in this post. So, if we allow marriage to be destroyed by tearing down the definition of marriage (any two people can marry or any group of people can marry and on and on) we are having effects that will ripple through society. Crime will go up, drug abuse will go up, child abuse will go up, prostitution will go up, health care costs will go up, and on and on.
Geoff,
Before we can continue, you need to specify what you mean by “promoting marriage.”
I don’t care if government wants to provide tax incentives for socially beneficial arrangements. I’m fine with it if the government wants to provide certain legal protections to special arrangements that would otherwise be purely contractual.
What I object to is marriage licenses and scoring political points over who gets to have one.
If government wants to recognize that my arrangement with my spouse is beneficial to society be giving tax and legal protection packages, fine. But Congress can just butt out of my marriage ceremony. That was a private affair between me, my wife, and the Lord (with friends and family present). The state legislature was not invited, neither was Congress. Their opinion on whether my temple marriage was legitimate was neither asked for, nor wanted.
As if I need the US government’s permission to obey my God …
Members of Congress and the state legislature may wish to “steady the Ark.” But I have no obligation to congratulate, or even recognize their efforts. Government’s current assumption of the role of gatekeeper to marriage smacks of priestcraft as far as I’m concerned.
You have no proof that changing the definition of marriage will have a significant effect on the stability of our society, and I think it’s absurd to think that altering the definition will have a greater impact than everything that currently damages the family, damaged it in the past, and will continue to damage it in the future. This definition of marriage stuff is all a big fear game, a scare tactic, a subterfuge that effectively draws attention from things that are actually harming the family right now, to something that might harm the family in the future–if there is much of the family left to harm by that time.
I think this family debate is important, not because SSM really threatens it, but because of the studies you cite, showing that a nucular family is the best bet for providing a stable, nurturing environment for children. But I think you are proposing, or asking for policy changes which will have very little effect in rolling back or even slowing the deterioration of the nucular family.
The only salient alteration of the marriage you mention is the switch from a “conjugal view” to the “close relationship view.” Unfortunately, a straight relationship can be either, just as a same-sex relationship can be either. So it’s just too easy for me to see this post and similar discussions as driven more by homophobia than by a genuine concern for the family.
The government could promote the conjugal view of relationships, could enact policy which reduces the financial burden on families in or close to poverty, could make or promote marital and financial counseling services, and a number of things that never need make any mention of straight couples, same sex couples, etc. It just seems to me like there are a hundred things breaking the family apart, and for some reason, this thing, this same sex marriage thing, which doesn’t exist in most of the country, gets all the press and takes all the blame. Please tell me why I should devote attention to it when all of these other problems are already in place?
Seth R, your marriage license was most likely issued by a state or local government, not the U.S. Congress, so I think a lot of your rhetoric in #30 is misplaced. Local governments have cared about marriage ever since local governments first existed. The ones that care the most about protecting and promoting marriage between men and women are the ones that have done the best to create fair and just and healthy societies (study the early history of Rome and then compare it with its long and horrific decline). As far as the federal government is concerned, in my ideal world, the federal government would be so small that it wouldn’t be involved in the marriage business except in the most general way. But given the current size of federal government, and the fact that it is involved, absurdly, in just about everything, it should indeed be involved in promoting traditional marriage in any and all ways that contribute to creating a healthy society.
HPLC, I would encourage you to read the studies I link above and then we’ll have something to discuss.
By the way, I fully endorse what James Dobson is trying to do in Colorado.
Though I rarely see eye to eye with Focus on the Family, I think they’ve actually got the right idea on this one.
For the news article, go here:
Dobson under fire for backing partner rights
Geoff, did you actually read my comment.
I mentioned the state legislature.
Seth, re: #34, you mention the US government or Congress four times and the state legislature once and say: “But Congress can just butt out of my marriage ceremony.” Congress is not interested in your particular marriage ceremony, but the state and local governments are. To the extent that Congress is interested in marriage, it is at a different level than local government’s interest.
RE: #33, I agree wholeheartedly and posted on this here.
If the government’s only involvement in marriage were to solemnize and record, it would be simple enough to just get out of that business and leave it to churches and others. But government instead regulates all kinds of things based on marriage — as to private persons and businesses, sometimes as required by government, sometimes on their initiative. Most notable are the benefits – tax breaks, dependent health care, etc. – that are provided based on marriage. At present, that limits the availability of those benefits to opposite-sex spouses, and thus (in a grossly generalized theory, obviously not in fact) to those who can bear children (which explains limits on marriage by siblings, etc., that would make little sense in the same-sex context). Thus the benefits are justified based on the need to promote childbearing and to protect children. Once the childbearing tie is eliminated by allowing same-sex couples to wed, first the limit and then the justification for the benefits disappear. At that point, if a friend or relative needs medical care, why not just divorce my wife (who can qualify for benefits at her job) and marry him? And if my employees can do that, why would I offer (how could I possible afford to offer) spouse benefits at all? The ultimate result of allowing same-sex marriage may be to eliminate many of the government-bestowed benefits of marriage.
Geoff B (#32) “I would encourage you to read the studies I link above and then we’ll have something to discuss.”
I went through that stuff. That, on top of what you’ve said, is why I said what I’ve said. I remain convinced that this is fueled largely by homophobia; geared more to keep gays out of marriage than actually help marriage. With SSM marriage, we just don’t know what’s going to happen. And that makes it a boogey-man, really, the unknown that serves as a locus for our fears. Define marriage all you want, but you’ve offered no evidence that such definition will actually do any good. Gay people I know already consider themselves married. They already redifined marriage. I think they won that round.
Oh come on Geoff! So how many times would I have to mention the state govt. to make my post about government in general and not just Congress. Do you have a secret formula I’m not aware of?
Cut me some slack will ya? I know what I meant and I think I’ve expressed it sufficiently. I’m opposed to any government involvement of the type I described, no matter where it’s coming from. Congress has tried to legislate on this issue before, so they are fair game.
Also, it’s not really a response to simply make bold declarations that “Rome fell because of gay people!”
That doesn’t really jive with the reality that many of us are living in and your going to need more ammunition to back it up than the force of your own opinion and a couple pet authors.
Sorry, not just “because of gay people.” “Because of declining family values” might have been a more fair representation, since we’re being nitpicky today.
HPLC, we do have a record of what has happened with gay marriage in Europe since it began to be legalized. You can read more about it here. If you are truly interested in learning more about a real-world experience with SSM, please read Stanley Kurtz’s many articles on the subject. The conclusion: marriage is disappearing in Scandinavia and it is directly linked to the legalization of SSM. Out of wedlock births are approaching 60 percent or higher. It is having a devastating and harmful impact on those societies. We know exactly what will happen with SSM, and it is not good.
On another note, hplc, given that this is a site that supports the policy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, can you please point me to an official Church policy that supports your claims?
Geoff, the problem is not necessasrily that Scandanavia failed to officially endorse heterosexual marriage. It could just as easily be because Scandanavia decided to officially endorse homosexual marriage. I don’t want government endorsing either arrangment.
Scandanavia and the US governments both have the same problem. They both think that GOVERNMENT represents the one true arbiter of absolute morality in society.
In that sense, both are woefully misguided.
Geoff B (#40)
Lots of Ifs and buts in that article. The data doesn’t look clear to me that it is the fault of SSM. At one point, he even admits: in places where marriage is already damaged, there isn’t much marriage left for SSM to damage, which is exactly what I’ve been saying.
And here you ask:
“On another note, hplc,… can you please point me to an official Church policy that supports your claims? ”
Thanks for bringing religion back into the discussion. And here I thought you wanted to discuss politics.
I’m disenganing from this “discussion” as you seem more interested in turning it into a contest. Better luck next time.
Seth R, I am officially cutting you some slack.
BUT, I will say that in today’s environment, you will either have government officially endorsing homosexuality (Scandinavia, Spain, Canada) or you will have governments officially endorsing traditional marriage. I choose the latter. Neutrality means a de facto slide toward endorsing the former, unfortunately.
HPLC, this is a site that discusses religion first and politics a distant second. Religion is essential to this discussion, but I can understand if that is something you would refer not to discuss. I hope you continue to read M* and join other discussions.
#29
Sorry for the potential threadjack.
But….where did I ever suggest that “Canadian healthcare is so good”…? I never suggested it was “good” or that waiting lists did not exist, or that some people with money don’t go to the U.S. for care. I was merely correcting your inaccurate description of how most Canadians view the issue of healthcare. Sheesh!
Canadian, here’s why I thought you were saying “Canadian health care is so good.”
You wrote:
It seemed to me you were extolling the wonderful virtues of a plan that covers everyone vs. the mean old United States where we don’t believe “everyone deserves good health.” If we can agree that the Canadian system has some benefits but also huge problems (and if we can agree that there are many, many Americans who far prefer the US system), then we are in complete agreement and yet another example of the great Canadian-American partnership that has been a sterling example to the Western world (I believe we have the longest completely peaceful border in the world and I am thankful very often for the great efforts of Canada in WWII). Oh Canada, eh?
Geoff,
Point taken (re: 29). I guess, in the sense that all laws are based on some moral code, anything a state does could be construed as legislating morality.
But of course, things like stealing or murder or tax evasion have obvious victims and it’s easier to justify laws penalizing them. It’s true like you say that all crimes/bad acts have victims, but if we’re going to deny a constitutional right (life, liberty, and property, which I think includes family autonomy) to a group of people, I think it should be based on more than hypothetical studies. I mean, using your logic, gov’t could regulate everything until we have a perfect, victimless society, which of course is impossible.
A more adequate comparison than your stealing example would be laws that existed prohibiting different races to marry. They were upheld under various justifications. Now, EVEN IF there were empirical studies showing that mixed marriages led to more crime, would that justify a ban on them. I don’t believe so.
My point is that even if it could be proven that legalizing gay marriage somehow led to an increase in some social ill, it doesn’t justify discriminating against gays.
I forgot to mention (though I think it’s common knowledge), that the laws against inter-racial marriage were found unconstitutional and struck down. My mentioning that example was to show that arguments justifying the ban (similar to those regarding gay marriage, though not identical) were not convincing.
The issue about morality can probably best be discussed not as an either/or situation but as a matter of degree. Certainly any point can be recast as a moral claim. But I think when we talk about morality we’re generally talking about things that are really bad. i.e. that cause serious harm.
It might be bad not to brush ones teeth, but clearly the morality involved is different from say reckless driving.
APJ, I think your #46 and #47 make the most common and powerful arguments in favor of SSM. I don’t agree with them, however, for two reasons:
1)Race is something you are born with and cannot control. I grew up in San Francisco and have known literally dozens of gay people. I believe that some homosexuals are “born gay.” However, just because you are born gay does not mean you have to act on those inclinations. You could, in theory, decide to control those desires, just as I control my desires to look at other women. Every person has shortcomings they need to learn to overcome. This is exactly Jesus’ message in the Sermon on the Mount when he asks us to be perfect. Of course we cannot be perfect, but he asks us to move toward perfection and try. The message is not, “do whatever makes you happy” but is instead the exact opposite: “learn to control your imperfections.”
President Hinckley directly addresses this issue by saying:
2)The societal cost of SSM would outweigh any potential benefits by offering a “right” to this group. The destruction of marriage caused by this would, as the Proclamation on the Family says, be a “calamity” for society. The effect on society of inter-racial marriage has been mostly positive, I would say. As I show in #40, there have been societies that have adopted SSM, and the effect in a short time has been calamitous.
Geoff B,
#29- My #24 is precisely to the point. Forgive me, but usually when I read you on this topic it makes me sick to my stomach. Your argument is relies upon a eugenicist logic. You think that the government should regulate what kinds of marriages should be allowed to occur on the sole basis of the quality of children these marriages might produce. The “social costs” are the criteria that determine these. Can you please explain to me why we should allow mentally handicapped children, intersexed babies, and those born with massive health problems to be allowed to be born at all according to the standards you using to determine which children are allowed to be born to which kinds of people? These children are either non-productive to society or cost a great deal in terms of government resources (oh wait, here in the US we think that the families magically produce good health so poor people don’t need health care!).
Basically, your argument is not just a slippery slope to eugenics, IT IS eugenics. It is the same logic that the “pack of wolves” that Kaimi mentioned that said that Mormon children should be taken away from their parents because they might raise them to be Mormon. Your argument is no different…which is why it makes me sick.
Geoff,
I don’t think it’s an either-or situation with a choice between either officially endorsing SSM or officially rejecting it. I’ve already described a third way, and I think it is doable.
Regardless of whether the pro or anti SSM succeeds in getting laws passed, religion in general and our religion in particular will be harmed. That’s right. Even if government passes a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage the way we want it defined, religion will be severely harmed by it. The problem lies in the Separation of Church and State question.
Both liberals and conservatives have framed the “Separation” debate incorrectly. Both assume that the debate is about protecting secular government from religion.
The liberals say we have to preserve enlightened governance from religious nutcases.
The conservatives say that this isn’t an issue because they aren’t “nutcases” and the Protestant ethic is at the heart of what our nation and government fundamentally are.
Two sides of the same thing. Both assume that the question is about what influence religion will have on government (good or ill).
This is wrong.
The Separation is not to protect government from religion. It is to protect religion from the government. I submit that there is something about state involvement in religion that is inherently and fundamentally corrupting and damaging to the religion in question.
Why do you think that the LDS church politely refused to participate in Bush’s “Faith-Based Initiative?”
It’s because once you start relying on the government for handouts, you find it’s a hard habit to kick. Once you start going to Washington, hat in hand, for legitimacy, you’ve already started to lose it.
The churches that decided to participate in the Faith-Based program have sent a crippling subliminal message to their membership and society that will be hard to recover from.
“Our membership is so unsupportive, and our church so weak, that we need handouts from Uncle Sam to stay afloat.”
Likewise, Churches who, like the Southern Baptist Convention, rely on politics to push their moral agenda have sent a similar crippling message.
“We have wedded ourselves to the might of the arm of Babylon and Assyria, and we will live and die at their pleasure.”
Government endorsements are gratifying. Even intoxicating. They can even be accompanied by a sudden groundswell of support, such as the Southern Baptists are seeing. But it is also toxic, addictive, and ultimately fatal. In the end, placing government, government programs, and legal boondoggles at the center of a church’s moral universe will destroy that church.
The LDS Church does not exist and work at government’s pleasure, it does not need their endorsement, and it does not need it’s religious ordinances validated at a courthouse. The precise reason that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not get involved in politics is because the politics are not central to what we do.
The Christian Coalition can play with the ACLU in the Constitutional sandbox all they want. It is the work being quietly done by our faith that will reshape the face of the earth with or without their help.
Seth R, I think you have made an impassioned and interesting argument in #51. I don’t agree with it because it directly contradicts my vision of how we should be “in the world but not of the world” and how we should be politically active in these last days. But I understand and respect your position.
I can’t say the same for Trailer Trash in #50. If I make you sick, I would think the prophet must make you catatonic (see comments from President Hinckley in #49). General Conference must be a horrifying experience for you. I completely reject the eugenics comparison. You have misunderstood and manipulated my argument into something that is unrecognizable to me, and there’s really no common ground for discussion. We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.
Actually, I love President Hinckley and find him to be a moderate voice on this issue (by the way, I would appreciate if you would provide the proper source citations for your quotations). BTW, I don’t think that this statement says what you think it does. It argues that marriage is primarily about raising families, not who should get to raise families. He doesn’t say that gay people shouldn’t be able to have children, as you do. You have grossly distorted his words here.
I have never called into question your allegiance to the church, and I really resent that you would stoop so low (isn’t this against some rule here??). I have never even argued in favor of SSM here, just that your logic is gross and I find it to be a mistaken view of the church’s position.
I actually think that we agree on quite a bit. I am sorry if I have offended you, but I fail to see how we disagree with my characterization of your argument. Every defense you give of the regulation of marriage is because it might create children that you find to be “socially costly”. What is the magical distinction that you think that you are making that is different from eugenics?
Geoff B,
Can you point to a statement from General Conference that invokes the “social costs” argument you have advanced here that SSM should be prohibited on the basis of the problematic children it would engender? I am genuinely curious.
Thanks.
TrailerTrash (#53), the Church has come out against adoption by anyone other than what we’d call a nuclear family. They actually had a statement read in church about singles adopting or trying to have children. I can’t recall an explicit statement regarding gay adoption, but I’d assume based upon their other comments that they’d oppose it.
Seth (#51), that’s a really good point about government hand outs. I’m very, very uncomfortable with allowing government power over religious matters which is what I think state sanctioned marriage does.
Clark, thanks for the info. I can’t seem to find any reference to it on LDS.org, nor do I recall it being read. Can you give a citation for the text?
I understand that it might be inferrred from the text as you describe it that the church prefers that children be adopted into heterosexual families, but it seems that the argument for this is completely different from the one it has to give for single-parent adoptions. For the latter it must argue that single-parents cannot handle the stresses of raising a child alone while for the former it must argue that homosexual families are inherently bad environments for raising children.
Also, the church creating internal church policies about how LDS social services operates is very different from it suggesting that the government regulate what families are allowed to raise children.
It should be noted that many homosexual people have biological children, usually created in previous heterosexual marriages. What is to be done here? This is the class of people that I am most interested in. It seems that the logic of those who oppose gay couples from raising adopted children would also oppose them from raising their own children.
Some difficult mental gymnastics involved with this issue.
While I don’t think government should get out of the marriage business, I think that the way the world is headed we will have no choice but to ultimately disregard the governement’s definition of marriage and just continue the practice as we do it in accordance with the retored gospel.
Granted it may not be at that stage yet in the USA, and you saints there ought to fight tooth and nail to ensure that it never does, but for the saints in some of those liberal european countries, there is nothing else that can be done.
I think it is just one of the trials we have to live with in these latter days. No wonder the most valiant souls were saved till last.
“victimless crimes” include:
Growing wheat on your property in violation of the commerce clause
Performing any work for hire that only those with licenses are ‘allowed’ to perform
Burning a chinese made piece of cloth containing stars and strips on your property
Owning a gun or fireworks or herbs (where outlawed)
Selling something to a willing buyer for above (or below) a government price
Manufacturing glassware into the shape of marijuana paraphernalia
Taking more than $10,000 into (or out of) the country
Videotaping the police or other public figures
Hiring a willing worker for below a government specified wage
Protesting outside a government specified protest zone
Killing wildlife on your property not during government specified ‘season’
Engaging in ANY desired sexual activity with your willing spouse
Hiring those whom you think are the best instead of their race, gender, religion
Shall I list more?
TrailerTrash (#26), I did a brief search but couldn’t find it either. I distinctly remember it in the late 90’s as it was quasi-controversial at the time and was widely discussed. I’ll look some more in the morning.
Krauthammer weighs in on some the issues discussed in this thread and the thread on the Big Love. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601312.html
TrailerTrash, the best I could find off hand was the True to the Faith article which clearly presents the idea that children should be raised in a nuclear family or given up to adoption to a nuclear family. I found several other quotes from Pres. Hinkley to that effect as well. Admittedly it doesn’t directly address your point. But when you combine those quotes with the Proclamation on the Family and the fact the Church will never consider SSM as real marriages, it’s hard to see the position of the church as condoning homosexual adoption.
Clark,
Thanks for doing the leg work on this. For the record, I am not saying that the church condones homosexual adoption. I am simply arguing that the church does not argue that the possibility of homosexuals raising children is an argument against SSM. I find this argument to be quite distrubing for the above noted points and Geoff B’s characterization/distortion of the church’s argument to be problematic and frankly, frightening for its implications.
Oh, in that I agree. They seem two separate issues, especially since in many states homosexuals can adopt without there being SSM.
Still, Trailer, being able (or not being able) to adopt children is not the same thing as being able to spontaneously, naturally create children. Your basic young, healthy, fertile couple is probably going to create children without too much effort, sometimes even in spite of birth control. This traditionally leaves a wife and children dependent on the wage-earning husband, and this is why companies provide health insurance for families. Because gay couples cannot naturally have children, that makes it much rarer for the average gay couple to turn into a family than it would for the average husband-wife couple.
Sara R,
Thanks for your comment. I am not sure, but it seems like we are in agreement.
I recently attended a debate on this issue at a law school. Three school clubs sponsored the debate–the Federalist Society, the Christian Legal Society (these two clubs chose one guest for the debate), and Outlaw, which is the school’s GLBT club (this club chose the other guest for the debate).
Admittedly, the FedSoc has significantly better funding for speakers than Outlaw, but nonetheless there were two speakers for the debate. Cynthia Czyzyk of Equality Virginia argued for Outlaw, and Lawrence Jordan of the Alliance Defense Fund argued for the other two groups.
Ms. Czyzyk (cool name huh?!) argued primarily that there is no evidence that gay marriages would hurt society in the least. She also argued against the slippery slope argument that allowing gay marriage will open the door to polygamy and marrying animals, etc., calling it a red herring.
Mr. Jordan had 2 primary arguments. First, the exact same arguments that are made in support of gay marriage can be made for polygamy. He, in fact, showed that Mormon polygamists made the exact same arguments that Ms. Czyzyk had in her argument. Thus although she may call it a red herring, there are a lot of hopeful polygamists out there (Tom Green?) who would disagree with her. [as for the whole polygamy in Mormonism thing that I obviously had to brush off here at the debate (there were four Mormons in the room of 80 or so people), that is apparently for a different debate]. Second, Mr. Jordan argued that the view of marriage that is sought after by gay marriage activists is not a view of marriage that the US government (or any of its states) has anything to do with. This warrants further explanation, especially since this was his primary argument.
Why does marriage exist? Mr. Jordan argued that the recognition of marriage by the US has nothing to do with solemmnizing a couple’s love for each other. Gays argue that they should be able to be married because they love each other and they can be monogomous too! They argue that laws discriminate against gay marriage because, for example, it is easy for a husband to leave all of his belongings to his wife upon his death–just do nothing (well, he actually does have to do something–die first). A gay person must actually write a will! But Mr. Jordan argues–who cares? Marriage was not created with the intention of diverting inheritances.
Once again–why do we have marriage then? To accommodate for the fact that the interaction of men and women inevitably results in children. He carefully pointed out that this is different from arguing that the purpose of marriage is to make babies. Instead he is arguing that in a society without marriage, but with males and females, children will nonetheless result but the husband would have no legal obligation to the child or the mother. This would create a society that we can see to a degree in “the hood” or fully in many parts of the animal kingdom. Males in the society would procreate to the greatest extent possible, but would not support his children or the woman who bears his children.
Society decided a long time ago that this is a bad thing and instituted a legal obligation upon the males to his children and women who bear his children. This was called “marriage.” Admittedly, marriage doesn’t serve this purpose perfectly–but there is nothing better that would. But that is not for today’s argument.
So how is this an argument against gay marriage? Because it suggests that marriage was created to satisfy a need, but gay marriage does not satisfy a societal need. There is no reason to recognize gay marriage because there is no chance that a gay couple will produce a child, therefore there is no need to obligate the father toward the child.
Now for my comment–I think the argument is a little bit idealest. What about a gay couple that adopts a child? They didn’t produce it, but now should there be a legal obligation to take care of it? And, actually, as I think about it my question is moot–adoptive parents do have a legal obligation toward their adopted child. As long as both partners adopt the child–problem solved!
Yup, the more I think about it, the more I agree. It may sound archaic, and might be a bit idealist, but marriage was created to satisfy a societal need, it does a lot to address that need, and allowing gay marriage would not address a societal need.
Baby steps bring big consequences for our religion. Conservatives in both parties are able to identify with current marriage between man/woman and easily vote the idea into existence as law. We must always look to what the big picture/next step the far-right political grindstone is chipping away at – we need to keep digging for the info. The reality is that the next step is to have marriage recognized ONLY if it is done in a religious ceremony/union – not a civil union. Unless views drastically change, this is problematic for LDS temple marriages (and many other unions) in that our temple marriages would not “qualify” as legal – our religion is not recognized as “Christian” by the Evangelicals driving the marriage issue so hard.