The Middle is Always Evil

Gay marriage is one of those fluffy, football issues that I usually try to avoid at all costs. But seeing as how it was legalized in California just yesterday, and since it is one of the first issues I am asked to comment on whenever discussing policy with the average Joe (or Jane), I will comment on it here, and I will do so in a composed tone of finality that I reserve only for things that I wish never to discuss again.

When considering the question of gay marriage, there are two popularly accepted positions in the marketplace of ideas:

There are those who would have gay marriage completely legalized, with homosexuals retaining the full legal rights that straight couples now enjoy; in the most practical sense, these individuals would like gay couples to be able to obtain a marriage license with the same ease as a straight couple. This is the view generally held by liberals, and is therefore the viewpoint of most everyone I know and converse with on a regular basis.

On the other side of the fence, there is a movement to rid the country of the marriage of gay couples by means of a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. This would be entirely accurate according to every cited definition on Dictionary.com, and thats a lot of citations. This position is commonly held by the religious right, as well as by the politicians that attempt to appeal to and appease them. Pictured right is the notorious Baptist pastor Fred Phelps, arguably the most vocal (and assuredly the most controversial) activist in the campaign to end what he views as a morally reprehensible bastardization of a sacrament of God.

Both of these views are wrong, and it is truly a sad statement about the political culture in the United States that these positions are accepted to be opposites, when, in reality, they have more in common than not. The first platform mentioned above seems to be the position of most people today; they declare that they stand for equality, for “gay rights,” as well as many other abstract platitudes that are essentially meaningless. There is no real label that you can place on these individuals, because they come from a broad political spectrum. Yes, there are gay conservatives who fall under this umbrella too, like this blogger, who goes by the name of GayPatriot; he is a conservative, and he seems downright sensible when it comes to most things, writing in one post:

The greatest enemies of gay people are not social conservatives in the West who may question (what they call) our lifestyle and oppose legislation benefiting us, but Islamic theocrats who execute gay people in jurisdictions where they predominate and seek to destroy the nations with political systems which allow us to live freely.

However, in a completely different post, he advocates for the same position on gay marriage that is usually held by liberals. So we can’t call everyone in favor of gay marriage liberal– not all of them are, as you can see. The only word that can be used to describe them is statist. What are they really after when they demand the right to get married?

They’re after marriage licenses. A little piece of paper issued by the State that says: Joe Shmo and John Doe are married now, because the State so decrees. That’s all. Surely this is not the sacred rite that religious nut-jobs like Phelps have sworn to defend. Surely, all this fuss couldn’t be over a little piece of paper, could it? Just what is a license, anyway? According to Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary , a “license” is

a formal permission from the proper authorities to perform certain acts or to carry on a certain business, which without such permission would be illegal.

It would be illegal for you to get married if the State didn’t give you permission first. The argument that gays, lesbians and their sympathizers are currently having with the religious right is based on an entirely false premise. They should not be saying what they are saying, which is something to the effect of: “Please, Mommy State, let me and my lover get married, it would be so kind of you if you let us! Pleeeeease,” they should be saying, “Government, unless I am initiating the use of force against another person, it isn’t your business what I do. Ever. And if I want to get married, its between the person I’m marrying, the person marrying us, and me. That’s it. I don’t want your marriage ‘license,’ and I certainly do not need it to make a promise to someone that I will be with them and only them, forever.”

This attitude should not be isolated to gays and lesbians, it should be the attitude of all adults. As a society we need to reexamine our ideas about marriage, and what it means. Instead of asking ourselves, “Should the government allow these two individuals to form a union together?”, we should be asking, “Should the government ever have a say in the private affairs of individuals for any reason?” The answer, of course, is an emphatic no.

Frame the issue in terms of economics. If two people voluntarily choose to engage in trade with one another, it is no one’s business but their own. What they are trading, and how much they want for it can be decided by no one but them, since only they can accurately determine of how much value any given thing is to them. Whatever arrangement they come to in the end is a private matter, not to be regulated interfered with by anyone, and that includes the government. That’s nice, isn’t it? But how does it relate to marriage as a legal institution?

All voluntary human relations are trades, exactly like the one mentioned in the previous paragraph. Take the following as an example: one man sees value in another man, and believes that his own life would be benefited in some way by that man’s presence in it, and so he seeks to spend time with him. If the second man, in turn, sees value in the first, he will (probably) enter into a relationship of some kind with him. Both these individuals find the relationship to be beneficial, otherwise they would not participate in it; they would seek elsewhere. The conditions of their relationship are theirs to decide, and cannot rationally be determined by anyone other than them, since they are the only ones who can accurately determine of how much value they are to one other. Like any other mutually voluntary trade, it is their private matter, and it is not to be regulated, approved or disapproved of, considered, or even acknowledged by the government. This means that when two people, seeing great value in one another, decide that they would like to make their relationship permanent and monogamous, and they come to an agreement, a contract, if you will, about the conditions of that that relationship, the government not only does not have the right to regulate, sanction, and/or approve of said contract, but any regulation, sanction, or approval would be unnecessary in the extreme, for such a contract already has all the authority it needs: the sanction of willing participants. By issuing (or not issuing) a marriage license to the individuals in question, the government is implicitly stating that it can determine the value and legitimacy of the marriage better than those involved, and by allowing the government to do this, the individuals in question are admitting, not only to themselves, but to the world, that they need the government’s sanction on their marriage, because their own is not enough to make it legitimate.

What about divorce, you say? There would be no way to divorce someone if the government doesn’t regulate the institution of marriage, you say? Poppycock, says I. If a willing participant in a contract chooses to void it, the terms of severance are (or at least, they should be) stipulated within the contract itself. If someone does not abide by these stipulations, it is then the proper role of government to enforce them. This would be the case with any business contract between individuals. Marriage should not be an exception.

Remember that the government’s only claim to existence is the protection of its citizens from those who would force them to act against what they believe to be their best interests, or: the initiation of force. The government should, therefore, hold no power whatsoever over those who do not initiate its use. This, of course, means that the “opposite” of the liberal platform on gay marriage is not an opposite position at all, it is just another variant on the same statist measures of control over individual’s lives– which brings me back to the purpose of this post.

The fact that we are presented with two different forms of statist control over the lives of private individuals as opposites– one of them upholding “moral values,” the other upholding “equality”– while neither of them are upholding anything but the destruction of the human spirit, along with the fact that the only issues that seem to be important to anyone these days are issues such as this, is a sad reflection on the political culture of America today. You can blame the mainstream media all you want, but the media is the effect, not he cause of the problem, which is something much deeper. I believe that the root cause of our culture’s current state is that Americans– all Americans, irrespective of party leaning, irrespective of any racial, economic, or any other kind distinction that you can draw between human beings– (for the most part) have no driving philosophy that guides their lives. Most hold no real standard for what is good and evil. Is it any wonder that we have such pragmatic politicians, like John McCain and Barack Obama, men who, unable to stand on any real principles, value compromise above what is right and wrong? It isn’t them, its us, America. Like the media, politicians appeal to what they think you want to hear. If one were to listen to either of these men talk for even ten minutes with this premise in mind, one would come to the conclusion that Americans don’t want to be too liberal– and they definitely don’t want to be too conservative. Americans want to play for both teams, it seems. The only problem is that the teams that they are playing for are owned by the same company: Serfdom INC., and every game is rigged. No matter who wins, we lose. Soon, Americans are going to have to realize that it isn’t about “left” versus “right,” its about right versus wrong; it isn’t about “liberal” versus “conservative,” its about freedom versus slavery.

We reap what we sow, America, and until we, as a nation, really examine our lives and our values, until we stand up for the culture of our heritage, the culture of our founding fathers, the culture of independence, of freedom, of the rule of law, we will continue to earn presidential candidates like Obama, and presidents like George Bush, and this cultural famine will not stop. It will kill us, and there’ll be grass growing in the streets.

Later.