Supreme Court fallout: Gay marriage pressure back on Obama

MelonCollie on December 9, 2012 at 12:01 AM

Robert George, Sherif Girgis, and Ryan T. Anderson. “What is Marriage?” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy vol. 34 (Winter, 2010): 245-287.

From pages 269-271:

Why does the state not set terms for our ordinary friendships? Why does it not create civil causes of action for neglecting or even betraying our friends? Why are there no civil ceremonies for forming friendships or legal obstacles to ending them? It is simply because ordinary friendships do not affect the political common good in structured ways that justify or warrant legal regulation.

Marriages, in contrast, are a matter of urgent public interest, as the record of almost every culture attests – worth legally recognizing and regulating. Societies rely on families, built on strong marriages, to produce what they need but cannot form on their own: upright, decent people who make for reasonably conscientious, law‐abiding citizens. As they mature, children benefit from the love and care of both mother and father, and from the committed and exclusive love of their parents for each other.

Although some libertarians propose to “privatize” marriage, treating marriages the way we treat baptisms and bar mitzvahs, supporters of limited government should recognize that marriage privatization would be a catastrophe for limited government. In the absence of a flourishing marriage culture, families often fail to form, or to achieve and maintain stability. As absentee fathers and out‐of‐wedlock births become common, a train of social pathologies follows. Naturally, the demand for governmental policing and social services grows. According to a Brookings Institute study, $229 billion in welfare expenditures between 1970 and 1996 can be attributed to the breakdown of the marriage culture and the resulting exacerbation of social ills: teen pregnancy, poverty, crime, drug abuse, and health problems. Sociologists David Popenoe and Alan Wolfe have conducted research on Scandinavian countries that supports the conclusion that as marriage culture declines, state spending rises.

This is why the state has an interest in marriages that is deeper than any interest it could have in ordinary friendships: Marriages bear a principled and practical connection to children. Strengthening the marriage culture improves children’s shot at becoming upright and productive members of society. In other words, our reasons for enshrining any conception of marriage, and our reasons for believing that the conjugal understanding of marriage is the correct one, are one and the same: the deep link between marriage and children. Sever that connection, and it becomes much harder to show why the state should take any interest in marriage at all. Any proposal for a policy, however, has to be able to account for why the state should enact it.

INC on December 9, 2012 at 1:41 AM