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March 25, 2004
On Marriage: None of Your Business
I didn't catch the beginning, but certainly the end of Peter Sprigg's interview this morning on NPR. The conciseness of his answers was surprising. There are certain things he said which are particularly worth noting, in my ongoing drama over the state of marriage in our nation. Spriggs brings up the point of the government interest in marriage vis a vis procreation.
Why tie marriage to procreation?
If marriage had nothing to do with procreation it would be ludicrous for us to be even be discussing the government giving licenses to people to marry or requiring a court proceding for them to end their marriage. Why would we want the government to get involved in people's prvate relationships at all? I would submit the only reason it's a public instituion is because of the interest in procreation and child rearing.
While I have maintained that the state has an interest in the stability of domestic partnerships, and that civil unions are reasonable, I do so with the firm conviction that this is subservient to the goal of serving the needs of children.
From the perspective of Christian Charity, I consider a consequence of this. If we are going to have an internal third world, the state is under no particular obligation to insist on marriage. They may ask, but Christians would demand it in a charitable way. This is what we do for our perserverance, you should too. Indeed as Sprigg notes, there are fairly obvious objective studies that children fare worse with regard to poverty on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale when parents are apart. (We should all revisit that controversy - should you be married to get welfare?). So when it comes to domestic tranquility, the state is more likely to 'pacify' the rabble than insist they get married. Indeed isn't that what has happened to children of single mothers as welfare has been sliced and diced?
On the racial 'parallel':
"Those laws, from the start, were burdening the institution of marriage in the service of a totally unrelated social goal that some people had of keeping the races apart. Now, defining the marriage as the union of one man and one woman on the other hand is not irrelevant to the central purpose of marriage, it is the core of the central purpose of marriage."
Good stuff.
Posted by mbowen at March 25, 2004 12:56 PM
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