A Simple Solution to Gay Marriage

I am going to officially go off the reservation on the issue of gay marriage. I will probably lose my membership card in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, but given that Conservatives these days have been abandoning their principles faster than Bill Clinton orders the rib special at Cracker Barrel, who cares?

I have a simple solution to the gay marriage conundrum.

Get government out of marriage altogether. Stop issuing marriage licenses. Stop giving tax breaks or incentives to married couples. Treat marriage as a simple social contract. Stop pretending that government has a role in something that is principally a religious or cultural ceremony.

Government long ago stopped really caring about the preservation of marriage. What is the penalty for divorce? Adultery? We have in fact, all but abandoned any pretense that the vows exchanged between two people are actually enforceable.

Several years I went to a wedding for a cousin. It was the standard Methodist wedding ceremony. Standard vows, standard Bible readings., standard invocations. They had dated off an on for at least five or six years, and most of us in attendance had the collective thought “it’s about damn time”.

Thirteen months later, they were divorced. Nice obedience to the vows. Apparently, they didn’t have the same dreams. You mean that they didn’t figure this out in the previous five or six years? (Isn’t that what dating – and the engagement – is all about?). If marriage was so important to the government – where were they in making sure these two people didn’t get married?

So my solution is this: the government should get out of marriage altogether. Abandon any pretense of a role it thinks it might have. Stop doing a half-assed job of trying to do a job it doesn’t want to do correctly.

In fact, government does a fair bit of harm to the notion of marriage. Welfare destroyed the black middle class in America because it tore black families apart. No-fault divorce gives carte blanche to the wandering eye. The treatment of a second earner’s income (typically a woman) at the spouse’s tax rate (typically a man) means that every dollar the wife earns is taxed a far higher marginal rate than her husband’s, diminishing the return on working outside of the home—and artificially placing the entire family into a higher tax bracket.

Government treats marriage not as a covenant, but as a contract. And as any lawyer will tell you, contracts were made to be broken. So let’s go the Full Monty and make “marriage” nothing more than a simple contract relationship between two (or more) people.

And get government out of the private lives of law-abiding people.