Marriage is a religious issue and the state (and the courts) should stay out of it. Glenn Beck gets it and he is right. Having just typed such a vile sentence you will now excuse me as I go wash my hands and throw up (not necessarily in that order) .
Hat Tip: Alice Linsley
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I think you are really wrong about this one. Interestingly, the editors of National Review have just put up their editorial on the subject, referencing the ultra-libertarian position that the state should just get out of recognizing marriage altogether: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/245649/case-marriage-editors
I will add that concept of marriage is ontologically prior to the concept of a family. Genetic descent is not family--as the rising tide of out-of-wedlock births over the last fifty years has demonstrated. Marriage is an arrangement of civil society wherein the biological parents of a child are responsible for, and, more significantly, have the authority to raise that child. Consider for a moment the consequences for children if there were no marriage. Would there be any reason why the biological parents of a child should have any right to parent said child? The state, having abolished marriage as a legal category, does not recognize any societal value in the emotional relationship, living arrangement or choice of partner(s) anybody has, but yet, another human being has been produced and something must be done to integrate that child into society. A society without marriage necessarily divorces genealogy from child rearing means that both the responsibility and, more significantly, the authority to raise that child would fall on the state. At best, the situation would resemble the situation where the Department of Human Services oversees the parenting of the child and interjects itself whenever it feels that the parents are not doing a good job. We have this already in households where there have been allegations of abuse; think about how lousy of a job DHS does now, then imagine if this were to be extended to every single child. I suspect that if this were tried, the state would just cut out the middleman, and require biological parents to turn their offspring into the newly-established Department of Children to be raised in some sort of government facility.
Ultimately, we want the state to recognize the traditional definition of marriage, because in so doing, it is implicitly recognizing that there is a unit of civil society called a family that occupies a sphere of authority against the state. The idea that the only two categories of society are the individual and the state is an idea that will necessarily lead to totalitarianism (because the alternative, anarchy, is unstable because people will always organize). Rather, there is another layer--that of civil society, form by individuals coming together and through shared custom organizing themselves so as to make living in close proximity to one another without violence possible. Civil society is at once the partner of the state and the protector of individuals against the state, which otherwise would overpower the individual (like a Leviathan, Hobbes might say).
Declaring that the state should stay out of marriage is NOT liberal (in the classical sense). Rather, it empowers the state because it means that the state no longer recognizes this construct of civil society, and, because the state is what it is, it will take unto itself those functions that formerly belonged to the family.
I'm on the side of those who say the government should have no role in marriage. The whole creation of the Bill of Rights was to acknowledge that certain facts of human nature and society pre-exist any and all government. The freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, etc., are all recognized not only as things that precede government, but because they precede government, "Congress shall make no law" abridging them.
And it's made explicit in the 9th amendment that "the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Marriage (and non-marriage and other states relating to the relationships between lovers and families) is clearly a right's issue that pre-empts the state's attempts to make laws governing it.
Our government, and our concept of rights, was founded on the idea that the federal government had no authority to infringe on issues of human society that exist independently of that government. Marriage clearly exists independently of the government, and therefore the government has no role in it.
If the state has no role in the institution of marriage, then it has no say in inheritance disputes.
I never vomit when folks agree with me. I'm grateful for their wisdom.
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