Should government get out of the marriage business?

I've read two blog posts this morning that have really got me thinking. One is about Rand Paul's comments on government and marriage while the other is on marriage, children and the building blocks of society. Of course in both posts is the mention of homosexual marriage. Let's get started.

In the Red State post, Rand Paul is quoted for the following:

“I’m an old-fashioned traditionalist. I believe in the historic and religious definition of marriage,” said Paul. “That being said, I’m not for eliminating contracts between adults. I think there are ways to make the tax code more neutral, so it doesn’t mention marriage. Then we don’t have to redefine what marriage is; we just don’t have marriage in the tax code.”

The classical liberal in me agrees with this full stop. I personally am convinced by the evidence (yes there is evidence, non-religious evidence) that marriage is between a man and a woman. I am. However, I honestly don't care, legally, if there are homosexual couples who want to join together in a contract that is recognized by the state. I also don't care if I see those couples in public. I don't think it's marriage. If we disagree then let's have a conversation. No need to be offended if someone doesn't agree with your position. This is my first thought and approach to the issue. There are problems from this though as the author the blog post dives into.

He wrote:

"On the specific Paul proposals: I’ve always thought it was silly to block simple legal contracts between consenting adults, but I think that can be accomplished without re-defining marriage.  The issue of tax-code treatment is more complex.  I think society has positive reasons to provide incentives for traditional marriage – to put it bluntly, a healthy, independent society needs a lot of long-lasting marriages between men and women, with a sizable percentage of them raising multiple children in stable households.  There just isn’t any substitute for that.  It’s a practical consideration, not a moral or religious judgment.

But I’m also receptive to the argument that the State subsidizes and punishes far too much private behavior.  Not enough people understand that subsidies are penalties for the people who don’t receive them.  If gay couples feel that way about preferential tax treatment granted to married men and women, it could be taken as an encouraging sign of progress.  We should make the tax code “neutral” in countless ways.  I don’t see why marriage should go first, but it definitely shouldn’t be the last.

Beyond these matters, the notion of extracting government from marriage runs into a couple of big problems.  Child custody is an obvious example.  Such matters are already difficult.  They would grow even more so, if the government played no role in certifying legitimate marriages.  The separation of law from marriage, until it becomes entirely a matter between private individuals, is more difficult to accomplish than the lovely libertarian simplicity of the idea implies."

I obviously didn't think through my weak position on the marriage debate. Yes, I understand the non-legal arguments for marriage, but I don't think I understood the problems of taking government out of the marriage issue. Aside from those problems, there is also the little sentence in the first mentioned paragraph: I think society has positive reasons to provide incentives for traditional marriage – to put it bluntly, a healthy, independent society needs a lot of long-lasting marriages between men and women, with a sizable percentage of them raising multiple children in stable households.This is something I haven't thought that much about either until recently. I've thought about this because my wife and I have been married for some years and haven't had any children. We keep saying we're just not ready financially. We think children are important for a family but I never thought about the building blocks of a society which is the family; well not just "the" family, but LOTS of families. This takes me to the other blog post I mentioned. The post is from Pyromaniacs.

Excerpt:

"Sitting around a table at a hookah bar in New York’s East Village with three women and a gay man, all of them in their 20s and 30s and all resolved to remain childless, a few things quickly became clear: First, for many younger Americans and especially those in cities, having children is no longer an obvious or inevitable choice. Second, many of those opting for childlessness have legitimate, if perhaps selfish, reasons for their decision.

...

While postfamilialism isn’t nearly as far along in the U.S., American marriage is faltering—and the baby is being thrown out with the bath water. Forty-four percent of millennials agree that marriage is becoming “obsolete.” And even among those who support tying the knot (including many of those who say it’s obsolete), just 41 percent say children are important for a marriage—down from 65 percent in 1990. It was the only factor to show a significant decline. ... On the flip side of the coin, the percentage of adults who disagreed with the contention that people without children “lead empty lives” has shot up, to 59 percent in 2002 from 39 percent in 1988.

...

In his provocative 2012 book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, Eric Klinenberg writes that for the hip urban professionals who make up the so-called creative class, living alone represents a “more desirable state,” even “a sign of success and a mark of distinction, a way to gain freedom and experience the anonymity that can make city life so exhilarating.” Certainly, the number of singletons has skyrocketed: more than half of all adults today are single (a group that includes divorcées and widows and widowers), up from about one in five in 1950."

First of all, I agree with Frank Turk that it's mind-blowing a piece like this is published in Newsweek! Second, the stats are blowing me away too. When I first read it I thought: "Well, the West is in moral decline so this makes sense." From that thought I was on to other thoughts unrelated to the decline of child-bearing marriages. Then it hit me again after reading the blog post on Rand Paul's comments about government and marriage: families are the blood of the society. A society can't exist with a bunch of selfish (hey, it's selfish) individuals who aren't having and raising children. By raising children, no I don't mean throwing the kid(s) in front of the television while the parents are doing something else. I mean giving the children a moral education which is severely lacking in the family; heck, Allan Bloom wrote about it back in the eighties and it was a big problem then, just imagine how big of a problem it is now. We can point fingers all day at the cause of the problem and I know (trust me I do being an IT guy) it's important to find causes but for now I think we can see the problem with our society is a lack of concern for family and we should talk about it privately, publicly and think of some solutions.

As much as my convictions are aligned with Rand Paul, I can't help thinking that the consequences of going through with those convictions might support a lack of concern for the family unit which is essential to building a society. I love the West even with its growing moral problems I think it can be rescued. I guess I'm on the fence as to whether government should get out of the marriage business. Thoughts?

Sources
Newsweek: where have all the babies gone?

Rand Paul: Get the government out of marriage

Stanley Fish's interview with D'Souza on 2016

 An excerpt from the interview: 

S.F.: Some posters were dismissive of the idea of “American exceptionalism.” They wondered what the phrase meant and suspected that it was a rhetorical device enabling the United States to justify actions it would condemn if they were performed by other nations. What, in your view, is so exceptional about America?

D.D.: My definition of American exceptionalism is one of identifying the ways in which America is unique in the world. First of all, America is unique in being a country founded, in a sense, by a group of people sitting around a table. Other countries have been founded by “accidents of force.” America is a creation of thought. A second aspect of American exceptionalism is that while in other countries citizenship is a function of birth and blood, you become an American by assimilating to a certain way of life, a certain aspiration. And third, America has been a kinder, gentler superpower than traditional empires have been. What does the doctrine of American exceptionalism empower the United States to do? Nothing more than to act better than traditional empires — committed to looting and conquest — have done. So that’s American exceptionalism, an exceptionalism based on noble ideas, ideas that it holds itself to even when it falls short of them.

S.F.: You say in an e-mail to me that you don’t think Obama is anti-American. You just think he wants to “downsize” America, take her down a notch. Isn’t that a distinction without a difference? You pose a choice between America’s dream and Obama’s dream; the subtitle of your new book is “Unmaking the American Dream”; you say that the most dangerous man in America lives in the White House, and that those who vote for Obama will be “voting for their own decline and impoverishment.” Aren’t you labeling him anti-American at least in the sense that he desires America’s demise as a super-power?

D.D.: O.K., if the desire to knock America off its pedestal, to redistribute American income to other countries, to shrink America’s footprint in the world, makes you anti-American, then Obama is in fact anti-American. I don’t use that label for Obama because he thinks it would be good for America to play a smaller role economically, politically, culturally and so on. Most everyone else agrees that America should be prosperous, should be strong, should be a force for liberty, should be No. 1 as long as possible. All I’m saying is that Obama stands outside that consensus. So he might be very happy if the world was dominated not by one, but by six countries. He’d be very happy if America, which has 5 percent of the world’s oil, but uses 25 percent, instead used 10 percent, allowing developing countries to use more. These are not inherently evil or un-American ideas — so the slogan of anti-Americanism is not helpful; but they are ideas and an ideology most Americans don’t agree with.

S.F.: The vast majority of readers objected to your main thesis — that Obama’s views are best explained by the anti-colonialist ideology of his father. Some readers scoffed at what they call pop-psychologizing and find your analysis implausible given that Obama spent so little time with his father. Others deemed the analysis unnecessary as an explanation of Obama’s policies, which are, they say, exactly what one would expect from a mainstream, slightly left-of-center Midwestern pragmatist, many of whose ideas are taken from the moderate Republicans no longer welcome in the party.

D.D.: Well, let’s take that second argument first. We have seen in America, within four years, a complete redefinition of the relationship of the citizen to the state. The federal government has made incursions into a whole series of industries that were previously in the private domain. Bill Clinton’s doctrine — that the era of big government is over — has been completely repudiated. So the federal government now has a very active hand in medicine, in hospitals, in insurance, in banking, in finance, in automobiles, in energy. I’m not saying that government has had no role in these institutions before, but the degree of involvement has changed substantively. As for Obama and his father, in the film we interview psychologist Paul Vitz, who identifies two models of paternal influence, the inner city model — my dad abandoned me, he’s a jerk, I want nothing to do with him — and the World War II model — my father’s away, but he’s a hero, a great man fighting for his country and I wish I could be worthy of him. Obama ultimately takes neither of these two models. Instead, he takes a middle route and divides his father into the good father and the bad father. He says, I will not try to be like my father as a man, but I do want to take my father’s dreams. That is the meaning of his book’s title: “Dreams From My Father.” What I’m doing is not pop-psychologizing, unless you want to call Obama a pop-psychologist of himself. I’m just taking Obama’s cue that his father had a decisive, shaping influence on him, and saying let’s take the dreams of the father and look at the actions of the son and see if the jigsaw fits.

I recommend reading the entire interview. Fish's readers ask questions like: isn't the King's College a stupid creationist college? Who funded the 2016 movie? Aren't you (D'Souza) just a dark-skinned immigrant cozying up to the white elite? Obama-rage?

Read the full interview here.