The Most Important And Pressing Issue Of Our Time

http://anti-gnostic.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-most-important-issue-of-our-time.html

I speak, of course, about gay marriage.

(See: The Libertarian and Conservative Case for the Abolition of Marriage Laws, via Serge's blog.)

I'm being sarcastic, but on the other hand, the question of which sexual unions society will regard as legitimate and worthy of legal protection is pretty fundamental.

What Peter Reith (the author of the linked essay) argues for, intentionally or unintentionally, is theocracy, at least for those who want it. The Church will decide whether you get to break the marriage contract, adopt babies, inherit from a family member, or collect child support. Now I may be in total agreement with this, but it violates the charter of every secular, democratic State out there, and for good reason, from the State's perspective. Reith's presumed point--the secular State should give up its monopoly over the courts--requires the State to sign its own death warrant.

I think libertarians like Reith want to have their cake and eat it too. They enjoy the prosperity afforded by the secular State's economies of scale but want it to carve out religious enclaves and everybody can just get along. But we all pay taxes, we all pay insurance premiums and we all have to deal with other people's bad outcomes. Monogamous heterosexual, polygamous and homosexual unions have consequences. Hence the citizens make policy choices among the various options. Substitute the State for whatever social structure you like: Amish plantation, Hebrew township, Somali clan, Muslim caliphate. In every one of those places, somebody is going to end up beyond the pale.

The only reason we are having this debate is because we are numerous, even antithetical cultures all under the same State. The debate will ultimately be resolved by the State as final arbiter because it has the most guns. It's pretty easy to predict that the State will extend legal validity to homosexual and other unions because it wants as many constituents as possible. And here is where Reith's argument gets slippery.

If there were no laws on the books regarding marriage – and ever man who wished to marry a woman had to either create their own institution for doing it, redefine marriage to mean something arbitrary or marry in an established religious institution – I submit to you that the following would happen:

...c. Marry in established religious orders with their own body of private church, synagogue or mosque laws governing marriage – thereby making it extremely difficult to actually lead to a situation wherein people would marry who had no intention of staying married, or who thought that the civil laws would somehow sanction their later change of hearts. Would we still have people leaving their spouses? Yes. Would they be able to benefit financially and otherwise from this immoral decision on the basis of civil laws which protect the right to divorce? No. They would, in fact, if ever their vows turned out to be worthless, lose all credibility in said religious community – which would be strengthened by the loss of such elements from their midst.

Thus, by restoring full responsibilities for the regulation of marriage to individuals and churches, we would restore the grand sense of overwhelming obligation that a man and woman ought to feel before what is supposed to be a mighty institution. Surely this serves the development of strong families, secures faith, and ultimately leads to the patriotism of a people who love their country because it gives them the means to be self-governing men and women?

What is "said religious community" and "their country?" A place where homosexual unions have equal dignity with heterosexual unions? Polygamy? Concubinage? If it's not, then Reith needs to come out and say it: the pluralist State has got to go. He apparently doesn't want to venture anywhere near such an outcome, so he switches to a positivist perspective: the State could and should grant this aspect of the right to self-governance. Don't we already have that? Why wouldn't I just secede instead?

Ultimately, it appears Reith is just trying to buffer the State's legitimacy by enlarging its tent. This is, I would say, a very Roman perspective.

Roland Broseph niccolo and donkey Thomas777

I'm reminded of the libertarian debate on immigration. The libertarians assume increasing individual sovereignty via open borders will weaken the State, while refusing to acknowledge that open borders enables the State to increase its constituency. Reith is taking the same approach here. I may be attributing too much to this, but I think certain libertarians do realize that the abolition of State power means a lot fewer rights for the State to hand out like candy. They ignore or fear that the wide-ranging pluralism they admire and enjoy is due not to the exercise of individual sovereignty but the protection of the secular State. Ultimately, rights really do come from the barrel of a gun. Absent the protection of the State, illegal immigrants are trespassers, homosexuals are deviants. This prospect horrifies what Steve Sailer calls the "liberaltarians," so they argue covertly not so much to abolish the State as to reform it.

I don't see a reason why the modern state shouldn't recognize every contract between individuals, whether two or three or fifteen, and just drop the word "marriage." The best argument the gays have is that modern marriage is already a debased institution. I say, let gay "marriage" happen, let even other things come about, accelerate degeneracy.

Of course, the activists wouldn't settle for this. They want the "rights" that married couples have, even outside the enforcement of contracts (to adopt children and to naturalize foreign spouses, to name two examples). The desire to "accelerate degeneracy" is so much chic nihilism.

Gays have the right to adopt in Sweden, I think the State legalized gay adoptions a couple of years back. So far, not one gay couple have adopted a child, because all of the unedumacated foreign countries refuse to give up their orphans to faggity Swedes. Some of them go to India or Ukraine in search of surrogate mothers.

I'm divided when it comes to the gay question. I work with a couple of gays, men and women, and they're just as average and normal as everyone else. Of course they could be eating each other's shit behind closed doors, but then there is no shortage of degenerate idiots among the heterosexual majority either. I remain undecided when it comes to gay marriage, most likely because I have no gay relatives or close friends (that I know of), so their problems don't affect me.

I didn't present it as evidence. It's merely something that factors in on my opinions of gay people and this is how most people work, gays included. I don't know anything about the over-the-top flaming homos with a political agenda. I do know something about some of the everyday people who happen to be gay and knowing them makes it hard for me to consider them and their choice of partner unnatural. These are not people who are "hedonistic" and "bent on self-destruction". Maybe they are that way out of the workplace, I don't know as I don't associate with them on my free time. Then again, there is no shortage of heterosexuals with very damaging, hedonistic, "care-free" lifestyles. In our wonderful, modern age, few straight people can accuse gays of low morality. Simply being straight doesn't make you a morally upstanding person. Homos could have been homos without the degenerate behaviour. Western blacks could have been blacks without turning into niggers. But live in a society where the majority gradually accepts more and more of what it once considered to be unnatural and this is what you'll get. Considering the low morality of modern Joe Blow and his heterosexual dick, I find it hypocritical to single out gays who want to marry as debauched destroyers of society.

All this imho of course. I'm not going to pretend I actually know shit.