And by that, I don’t mean “religious marriage.” I refer exclusively to civil marriage.
I haven’t done a post on gay marriage in a while, but I came across an interesting article about it (hat tip Dainel Breban on Twitter) entitled “The freedom to marry: a liberal value that conservatives should shun.” I’ll note that my position, like Barack Obama’s, on this issue has “evolved” so I wouldn’t necessarily agree with all of my past posts on it.
Firstly, my position on gay marriage is that marriage is something that should be completely outside of the government’s power. The “civil marriage” part of marriage could be covered by contract law. I refuse to support any alternative to that. Because the author of that article is arguing against “gay marriage” and for “traditional marriage” (i.e. government operated straight marriage), I disagree with her premise.
She argues that gay marriage necessitates the increase in the government’s power, and I might agree with her if the only options entailed government-run marriage, which I don’t believe is the case. I will now attempt to refute some of her arguments.
1. “Gay marriage” really means “genderless marriage.”
2. Genderless marriage means references to gender must be removed from the law. Words like “bride,” “groom,” “husband,” “wife,” “mother,” and “father” must all be replaced with genderless terms such as “partner,” “party,” and “parent.”
My argument is simply that any gender references in the law are unnecessary anyway, assuming the government is at its proper scope.
3. Removing gender references from the law removes the recognition of natural bonds between mothers and fathers with their children. These natural bonds are replaced with legal, artificial, and therefore subjective, bonds.
This is where things get interesting. Following from what I just said, there is no need for the government to recognize (or create) any bonds. That allows for “bonds” to form naturally, which Ms. Thieme is arguing wouldn’t happen if gay marriage was legally recognized (if I understand her argument) because the government-created bonds would replace them.
In addition, something Ms. Thieme seems to be saying is that gay parents (and, by extension, all adoptive parents) don’t have “natural” bonds with their adopted children. That just seems absurd to me, and I’m sure people who have adopted kids would agree with that.
The basic problem with her argument is that she is fine with the government defining what constitutes a “natural bond,” as long as she agrees with what that definition is.
