My in interested in homosexual marriage lies only in the irrationality of the subject. Marriage is all about reproduction. Without it, you’re left with the equivalent of an intimate handshake agreement on how to divide up the property when one or both parties gets bored. But, as modern insanity goes, it is one of the lesser evils. It does tell us a lot, however, about the people debating it. Arguments for changing public policy, the good ones least ways, contain knowledge of the current policy, its origins, its trade-offs and then the reasons why the new policy is superior. That allows everyone to agree to the facts in advance. Gay marriage advocates dispense with that and instead throw a tantrum, demanding you justify your opposition to their tantrum.
Libertarians suffer from many of the same defects as the Left. My suspicion with them is they are just conservatives with less backbone than the typical conservative. By seeking shelter in the libertarian hut, the lunatics will pass by them on their way to burn some village of normalcy. Libertarians, being useless in the culture war, are not a target of the Left. Say what you will about the Left’s scorched earth polices, they are adept at the conservation of energy by narrowing their enemies list. They eventually get around to you, but for libertarians, it seems like a safe bet. If libertarianism is on the rise, as some people claim, then this theory will be put to the test. One hundred years of warfare will not be undone by a bunch of pot smoking greed-heads.
Like the Left, libertarians suffer from a peculiar brand of myopia. The Left is at war with the past, even their own past. By that I mean they jam history into their narrative, excluding great swaths of it, even their own words and deeds. Libertarians, in contrast, are so narrow minded, they blunder into a retarded utopianism that borders on the comical. They will yammer on about open borders, for example, and then throw in the fact it worked great when we lacked a giant welfare state transferring a trillion dollars from tax payers every year.They like to design machines that work great if we suspend the laws of physics.
I thought about that when I saw this from Karl Denninger. This is one of the newer hobby horses libertarians enjoy riding in public. Their “solution” to the war over marriage is to do away with marriage.
Marriage is none of the government’s damn business. It’s sad that it took the gay screamers to wake people up to this, but if it results in Oklahoma actually doing the right thing it will be about damn time.
Tell me this — why is it that you want the State in your bedroom? I don’t give a **** if you’re straight or gay, just give me one good reason why you’d invite the ****ing government behind your bedroom door. Ever. For any purpose.
But you do, and what’s worse is that if you actually honor a religious, that is, a sacramental marriage irrespective of what faith you follow you have sworn falsely before your God by having the pastor sign a state marriage license.
As is typical of fanatics everywhere, libertarians have no idea why the rules and institutions were created. They seem to think they were either forced on us by some supernatural entity or sprung from random nothingness. The hallmark of the fanatic is a dedicated lack of curiosity about the origins of contrary opinion. Libertarians seem to think marriage was created in the murky past by the religious or by despotic rulers or maybe the leprechauns. He just assumes that society, through the state, has no interest in marriage and that marriage licenses are something new.
That’s complete nonsense. This excellent post on matting patterns of medieval Franks illustrates that policing marriage predates Christianity and the nation state. Human populations have been keeping an eye on mating habits for a very long time, perhaps from the earliest times of human settlement. Other species have ways of dealing with inbreeding like the Westermarck Effect. The best way mother nature has to handle inbreeding is the defective progeny dies off quickly. Humans having the ability to reason through these results, we soon figured out that mothers and sons should not be mating. Whether a natural repulsion developed, followed by the taboo or the other way around, human societies have been policing the mating choices of its members since the beginning. Again, marriage is about reproduction, not sex.
In the Christian world, the church was enlisted in the war on cousin marriage long after authorities took an interest in it. It is not hard to see what human populations would worry about this problem. Every pinhead is a burden. If you get too many pinheads, you end up like Detroit. If you want to argue that this is no longer necessary in modern times, keep in mind that we are taking in tens of million of people from places where inbreeding is still common. Then there is the urban and rural underclass where inbreeding is always a concern. If you don’t have someone policing the hillbillies in Appalachia, you will get get a Scotts-Irish Pakistan in a few generations. Unfettered liberty works great for smart rich people, but becomes increasingly problematic as you move down the social pyramid.
Contra the libertarians, mating habits are a central concern of all human populations. Try this thought experiment. The world is wiped out by some plague and the remained 100 people are all of child bearing ages, equally divided between boys and girls. What are the first priorities of the group? Obviously, the group has survival needs. Food, fresh water, fire, shelter and defense against nature are the first concerns. Establishing a decision making process and a division of duties amongst the members of the tribe would come naturally, if the group is to make it through the first winter. The next thing they will do is figure out how to handle the inevitable paring off, mating a child birth. Again, if they are to survive, figuring this out is at the top of the list.
That’s why libertarians properly belong on the fringe. They deliberately seek to eliminate themselves from serious debate over public policy. The right thing, it seems, is to leave them alone with the copies of Atlas Shrugged.