Government and the Marriage Business

posted at 2:23 pm on May 28, 2009 by Doctor Zero
[ Culture ]    printer-friendly

Pepperdine law professor Douglas Kmiec’s suggestion that marriage should be replaced with neutral “civil licenses” has already drawn agreement from Ed, and a disagreeing post from Pundette, in which she quotes Robert George’s defense of traditional marriage as an essential component of a healthy society. Having written extensively in defense of marriage myself, I wanted to add my own thoughts on the idea of “getting government out of the marriage business.”

I wrote earlier that I believe society has a critical interest in promoting opposite-sex marriage. It provides the best environment for raising children, it celebrates the ideal relationship between women and men, and it creates nuclear families that supply the building blocks of authority for a democracy, in which authority is supposed to flow upward, from family to community to state to nation. There is also a strong economic argument for the traditional family, which accumulates lasting wealth in a unique fashion. Even a low-income family can provide significant economic benefits to its members: making sacrifices to put children through school, fostering an attitude of reliance on self and family instead of the state, building social networks that can benefit every member of the family, and gathering property and other assets that can be passed down between generations. Hillary Clinton’s famous book on child-rearing had it exactly backwards – it doesn’t take a village to raise a child in America, but it takes strong families to build a decent village. A backbone of solid marriages and families gives a society the strength to accommodate the people who never become married, or never have children. We’re not going to get above the replacement birth rate of 2.1 without a significant number of families that have three or more children. You’re just not going to get there with artificial insemination, and you sure don’t want to get there with a horde of children raised outside of marriage. The first reel of “Logan’s Run” was not a blueprint for a happy society.

The idea of getting government out of marriage has a certain libertarian appeal, but we’re nowhere near the overall state of libertarian social and economic freedom that would make this a winning argument. Why should marriage be the only aspect of society the federal government isn’t deeply involved in? Besides, the assertion that following Doug Kmiec’s suggestion would “get government out of the marriage business” is mistaken. Erasing marriage as an official concept, and replacing them with legalistic “civil unions,” would not reduce the involvement of our massive centralized government, any more than it has been able to keep its nose out of legalistic civil contracts between automobile companies, their bondholders, and their labor unions. Changing the language surrounding the relationship between men, women, and children will not make divorces any less messy or painful. No aspect of society has ever been improved by making it less exalted. You can devalue marriage by declaring it to be equivalent to same-sex relationships, polygamous associations, and lifelong buddies who decide to enter a “civil union” to enjoy its tax advantages… but none of these things will improve marriages.

Ed writes that “the advent of no-fault divorce, in which one party can abrogate the marriage contract without penalty or consideration of the other party, has completely destroyed the notion that the government plays a role in protecting the integrity and well-being of the family.” I can’t imagine how anyone sees that as a reason to make things worse. The no-fault divorce revolution Ed references occurred less than fifty years ago. Are we supposed to accept that a mistake made in the 60s and 70s has produced an immutable new social order that can never be changed or improved? Did the awful social devastation of the last fifty years really invalidate the accumulated wisdom and tradition of the previous two thousand years? Somehow “progressive” social theories always seem to mean “everything is doomed to get worse, and all we can do is try to manage the decline efficiently.” If a review of social trends over the last half-century leads you to believe no-fault divorce was bad for women and children, just wait until you see what non-existent marriage does to them.

The argument in favor of separating government from marriage is made as if the central government was not already legislating morality in hundreds of different ways. Much of the titanic super-state is justified on moral grounds, or because its activities are supposed to be good for society. What’s the point of pumping trillions of dollars into economic “stimulus” and rescuing companies that are ‘too big to fail” if we simultaneously withdraw the respect and legal approval of the state for the one thing most likely to keep children from living in poverty? When we have seen Barack Obama out of office, and passed whatever laws are necessary to ensure the president of the United States is never again allowed to manage an auto company, force banks to accept government funds, appoint Supreme Court justices on the basis of their racial wisdom, or use “progressive” taxation to “spread the wealth around” in the name of social justice, then we might have a more reasonable discussion about whether government should be involved in marriage. For the time being, anyone who wants to beat the defenders of marriage with the libertarianism or federalism clubs is going to find themselves holding a wet noodle instead of a cudgel.

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