Gay marriage

Sent tonight:

Glenn,

I would like to address your comment earlier today that "Personally, I favor gay marriage, but I think it would be much better if it were adopted through political, rather than judicial, channels..."

As a libertarian, I think you should be asking yourself why marriage should be addressed through government at all. Isn't the real answer simply to remove government from the equation and let churches and other private organizations decide who should and who should not be married? This would have the further benefit of allowing individuals the choice of whether to recognize a marriage or not. If a gay couple decided to get married I could decide on my own whether to recognize the marriage. They could see themselves as married, I wouldn't have to, and everyone could be happy.

Thinking about this further, if we allow private organizations to decide who they want to marry, it could perhaps result in a marketplace for marriages. It is possible that some organizations could elect only to marry those couples that had been together for t least a year or had fulfilled some other type of requirements/prerequisites while other institutions -- Las Vegas springs to mind -- might marry them on the spot. A likely result would be that some marriages might be perceived as more serious or worthwhile by the public than others. (This is likely already the case as far as Vegas marriages go, especially ones that involve celebrities)

As a libertarian I believe that one of the most pernicious effects of government is its division of people. So many prominent issues are decided in the public sphere, rather than privately, that we draw battle lines and view each other foremost as Republicans/Democrats or red state/blue state rather than simply Americans. With so much at stake -- and so many aspects of our lives controlled by government -- this ongoing struggle for the reigns of power becomes more significant every year.

The best solution, it seems, is to leave those functions to government that the private sector absolutely can not account for, such as national defense. Marriage, I would submit, does not need the government to survive, and indeed may prosper even more without it.

Best regards,

Colin