Happy Marriage

I mean, gay marriage. Has apparently gone down to defeat here in Tejas, by 75% to 25%. (Hey, don’t blame me, I didn’t vote.) We’ve hashed over this topic before on the LRC blog, but I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I sometimes wonder if we are putting up too much of a fight on this one. Why not give this one to them–costs us little, and we can save our ammo for the real battles. The complaint that gays marrying “weakens” normal marriage sounds awfully wussified–it ain’t hurting my marriage.

But there are disadvantages to caving in to the lefty-gay lobby on this one. As I see it, gays have two primary motivations for wanting gay marriage. One is the efficiency and convenience of establishing a consensual two-person regime where there are automatic, default, and established rights such as co-ownership, support-rights upon termination of relationship (“alimony”), inheritance presumptions, medical visitation and consent proxies, and so forth. This is understandable. The other motivation–the primary one, it appears to me, for most gays–is to use the power of legal institutions to force mainstream heteros to treat gays as of “equal” status to hetero unions. Even this is a bit understandable, but not justifiable.The primary advantage, to my eyes, to keeping marriage heterosexual is that it maintains an obvious, significant legal discrimination against homosexuals. The advantage of this is that it will make it difficult for gays to try to add themselves to the roster of “minorities” who deserve anti-discrimination and affirmative action protection of the law. After all, if it’s legitimate, and routine, for states to deny homosexuals the status of “marriage,” then it must be okay to deny them the protection of anti-discrimination laws. If marriage law can legally discriminate on the basis of sexual preference, then private employers can, too. No doubt the gays view it the opposite way: if they can have gay unions treated legally the same as hetero ones, then that removes one barrier to their arguing for inclusion in antidiscrimination laws. To me, this is the chief danger of gay marriage: it makes expansion of antidiscrimination law more likely. (Despite the fact that homosexuals blatantly discriminate among themselves–in hiring and promoting fellow gays, etc.)

In my view states ought to offer civil unions that offer most of the practical deficincies gays complain about–allow any two or more people to establish a contractual civil regime that defines their rights vis-a-vis each other. If this is done, it takes most of the wind out of the gay activists’ sails. They will then not find it as easy to camouflage their real agenda–using the law to force Christians to treat them as equals; and as a stepping stone to outlawing even private discrimination against gays.

(Incidentally, I agree with Texas’s attempt to refuse to be forced into accepting homosexual marriage status conferred in other states; but one problem with the new Texas constitutional amendment is that it appears to prohibit civil unions as well, since it prohibits recognition of relationships “identical or similar to marriage,” which it defines as “the union of one man and one woman”. So the Texas law would appear to prohibit the recognition of civil unions, which I regard as a violation of the individual right to contract.)

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11:32 pm on November 8, 2005