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.