SAGE McLAUGHLIN writes in response to the predictable news that a lesbian couple in France “married” purely for financial gain:

It is entirely reasonable to expect that same-sex “marriages” will be used by everybody from college roommates to business partners, in order to extract financial benefits or as simply a catch-all arrangement to make the division of “shared” property more orderly. This has always been one of my main practical objections to it.  Rather than encouraging a view of marriages as “a loving commitment of two people,” it encourages the use of civil marriages in order to prevent a subpoena to testify against a person, to share insurance benefits of various kinds, and so on and so on. It is very easy to see young college-aged people who are temporarily sharing a space doing exactly this (young women more so than young men, naturally), or unscrupulous professionals seeking to evade regulations of all kinds.

Two things, as I see it, are certain to result from this:

First, a great many of the common protections afforded to married people will be forfeited in order to prevent abuse by people who are not in any real sense “married.”  This will answer, too late for many people, that most stupid of questions, “How will this affect my marriage, after all?” Attempting to redefine the essential nature of a thing will always come with a long list of practical consequences, and anybody who believes that their own marriage will remain just as it is, before the law, is a damned fool.

Second, the government will be incentivized to become more, not less, involved in two people’s decision to marry—and eventually the decision of several people to marry—treating every single marriage in much the same fashion as marriages between Americans and foreign nationals are treated now, with onerous interviews and probing by bureaucratic functionaries to determine the “real” reasons for the couple’s humble request, which may in the end be denied.  As always, liberalism’s promise of greater individual freedom will result, by and by, in a more intrusive state and a less free people.

That in the end is what this is all about, by the way.  A recent thread dealt with the meaning of anarcho-tyranny.  Here is a fine example.  Allow everyone to simply do whatever he wills, on the promise that it will not really affect anyone, and sooner or later the state becomes obligated to police normal and law-abiding people ever-more thoroughly, just as when the free reign given to homosexuals unleashed a terrible blood-borne contagion, and before long normal people in many localities were required to undergo tests and report their HIV status as a precondition to being permitted to marry by the state. And here I thought what I did in the bedroom and whom I decided to marry was no one’s business but mine.

Please follow and like us: