Marriage: Why?

Why does marriage as we know it exist? I can hardly think of a more ridiculous and asinine institution. There are many activities which go completely unquestioned by the American public. Marriage is a major one. As happens in far too many debates, the public discusses two sides of a topic, both of which rest on an underlying assumption which is never mentioned. As Ayn Rand was often fond to point out, both political parties suffer defeat because of the axioms they swallow without questioning. The wrong question: What groups of people shall we allow to wed? The right question: Why should government have a say in marriage?

There exists thorough documentation of the changing conception of Western marriage from its time as a method of social engineering by totalitarian governments, to a spiritual bond between two individuals, to sexual/spiritual bond between man and women, to its highly contested state now. Often, the volatile realization of the concept has been used as a justification for the allowance of gay marriage. The other side responds to this attack with appeals to morals and essentially a structural fundamentalist social philosophy exalting the preeminence of the family. The debate itself is interesting enough, but it is not the one we should be having.

Why need government sanction marriages? First consider the functions of a marriage. Essentially it constitutes a contract between two consenting individuals concerning ownership of assets and rights of visitation. There is no need for this particular contract to be enforced separately under the moniker of marriage. It may be handled like any other contract in our legal system. Indeed, those choosing to be marriage in a religious/spiritual sense could do so and be free of any legal entanglements. The only potentially troublesome aspect of this view of marriage comes as a result of the complete ineptitude of the income tax code. The federal income tax disgusts me on many levels. It should not exist. If it is to exist however, it certainly should not be a means of providing incentives or disincentives for particular behaviors the government is fond of at the time of its writing. Quite simply, remove the income tax or remove this particular moronic provision of the code, and we may safely move forward with “private” marriages.

How would the two most prevalent sides of our marriage debate react to this?

Religious people should not be troubled by this. Surely, government sanctioning of marriage should be completely irrelevant, as the sacrament of marriage is a bond between man and wife witnessed by God. Government approval should be completely foreign to the equation. In fact, the religious should be insulted that government claims some stake in marriage. Government cannot oppose God, nor can it bend his will. Any attempt for it to do so should be seen as an affront to its true nature.

Homosexuals, polygamists, and the incestful should rejoice. They would be free to enter into the same contracts as heterosexual, monogamous, unrelated couples. Since no marriages at all would be of interest to government, there would be complete marriage equality under the law. The ugly age of marriage exclusion in the United States would end.

In reality I doubt the scenario would play out as ideally as it would in a rational world. Statism runs deep. The religious in particular are guilty of using the government for their whims. Having their conception of marriage exist is not enough for some religious folk. It must be the only such option. The desire to dominate all too often intertwines itself with creeds that preach submission to a higher power. Throughout history religions have allied with government to swell their numbers and spread their accepted behaviors. Those in favor of non-standard marriage would also likely reject this. Marriage as a government institution is sacrosanct. People have a sick need for government to validate their choices.

The current system is disgusting. Government has no authority to sanction marriage. It’s just a further example of the undeniable tendency of government to spread its insidious grasp over the daily minutia of our lives. It’s insulting. It’s degrading. It stifles basic freedoms. The solution to the tired, biased debates on the subject sits easily and immediately right in front of us with the change costing us nothing. However, as happens constantly, it will never even be discussed by our politicians. Anyone suggesting it would be laughed at as a nut or feared as a radical. It’s a shame. As long as government holds its ground, no side of the debate will be happy.

Dumb Laws

Most of us at some point have stumbled over to DumbLaws.com or at least heard snippets of its content. The website exists not for any informative reason, but instead to entertain us. We see these arcane laws as reflections of a quaint time in our nation’s past. It amuses us to discover that such laws could ever be enforced or even enacted. But should the appropriate response be humor? Is something more insidious present in these laws than mere naivety? And why do we so easily laugh at past legislation without blinking an eye at our current laws?

Consider some of these ludicrous examples:
- Dominos may not be played on Sunday.
- It is illegal to sell peanuts in Lee county after sundown on Wednesday.
- It is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while operating a vehicle.
- Motorized vehicles are not to be sold on Sundays.
- If you’ve been convicted of drinking and driving you may not apply for personalized license plates.
- You may not slurp your soup.

After reading through some examples one begins to notice a few trends which we may generalize. The laws attempt to legislate morality, are too specific and clearly reactionary, or involve the state trying to protect us from ourselves (really just a subset of legislating morality). What we laugh off as dumb laws we should really despise as tyrannical laws. In all of these cases we see a legislature reaching beyond its proper functions. The humor comes easily when they’re viewed as relics of the past, but we must be open to the reality that people were prosecuted under such laws. The gentlemen handed fines and subject to court appearances for slurping their soup would hardly find the law to be humorous.

It may seem silly to refer to such seemingly minor laws as tyrannical. Surely, the punishments for such infractions were not debilitating and were seldom enforced even that the time of their passage. However, we should not stay our outrage on those grounds. Minor injustices are still injustices. Further, dumb laws leave the door ajar for seriously despotic laws to arise. Once legislatures claim the ability to impose their morality and way of life upon us in principle, they will not hesitate to do so in action. Our overseers forbid us to sell automobiles on Sunday to keep their Sabbath holy, and we begrudgingly accept without serious complaint. When we do so, we accept their premises and give validation to their methods. Then we stand flabbergasted as violent video games are swept from store shelves and homosexuals are forbidden from entering into marriage. We must realize that the acceptance of one leads to inception of the other.

What then are the dumb laws of our age? I’m amazed at the hypocrisy of our elected officials who would scoff at the laws in the DumbLaws.com archives and turn the next day to vote against medicinal marijuana. The great body of laws forbidding personal drug use constitute the dumbest of the dumb laws we’re forced to abide by today. We suffer through the needless prosecution of these laws which will one day be laughed at as relics of a past, simpler, society. I hope however the situation is slightly different. I hope that instead of humor our descendents look upon them with disgust. Instead of laughing their blood should boil at the audacity of a government drunk on power, subjugating its people to slavery under meaningless, unjust laws. I hope that they remember the billions of dollars spent, the thousands of lives lost, and the hundreds of thousands of poor souls who had to rot in prison or pay a fine just to feed the appetite of a legislature’s bloody crusade for their morality.

To all of the victims of dumb laws past, present, and future, I’m not laughing.

Obama: Muslim in Disguise?

A recent pew research poll shows that 18% of Americans believe that Barack Obama adheres to the Muslim faith. Perhaps more shockingly, 43% confess to not being certain of what religion the man follows. These polls reflect increased American uncertainty about the president in wake of the mosque “at” ground zero controversy. Suddenly the question of Obama's true faith seems even more pressing than it had in times past. Conservative media outlets are attempting to use this to whip the public into a illogical fervor about the president's secret Muslim beliefs. Liberals take the defensive, insisting that the conservatives' conclusions are rash, unfounded, and almost exclusively political in nature. Once again both political parties share an identical ideology, surrendered to arguing about the mere petty details.

This situation unequivocally demonstrates to us the wholesale acceptance of collectivism by our dominate political parties. Never is the question asked in the public discourse: Why does it matter? If the public were even to entertain this question it would shake the establishment to its core. Both parties require that the masses' minds remained mired in a primitive sort of tribalism. People must be regarded as soulless vessels filled only with the meaning that their respective labels grant to them.

The Republicans rely on this mentality, despite their supposed defense of individual liberties (how can they exist without acknowledging the individual?), most importantly to support their agenda of perpetual war and the justification that produces for the usurpation of civil liberties. With a rational view of mankind, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon to be Iran, would not be supported by the public. However when individualism is eroded away and replaced by the identity “Muslim”, these wars become instantly justifiable. Muslims are at war with the United States. Muslims are terrorists. Muslims want to destroy our freedom. The equating of “Muslim” with “terrorist” combined with the a collectivist mentality provides the necessary foundation for the Republican platform of perpetual war, a police state, and crony capitalism.

I don't wish to suggest that Democrats aren't equally at fault in this context. One need not look further than any Democrat's opinion of capitalism or big business to see this. However, their faults are outside the scope of this post.

To the question of Obama's religion I give the response: Who cares? Certainly not me. And unfortunately we will not see a free America until the majority holds my position.