By Cindy Gobrecht
There is an old saying that marriage is like flies on a screen door — the ones on the inside want out and the ones on the outside want in. This seems to be true in the debate over gay marriage. I wrote in my blog about a new law in Oklahoma that was proposed to end the legalization of marriage by privatizing it to avoid the federal laws causing states to legalize gay marriage.
I write about how I agree with this, because I believe marriage is a sacred rite, and not something that should be regulated by the government.
Apparently, I am not alone in my feelings and, in a new twist over the debate, I have found a Christian couple that refused to have the government “legalize” their marriage. They opted not to get a marriage license because they felt that the government should not have control over their marriage. They had a marriage presided over by their pastor and witnessed by family and friends. They created their own contract, not unlike the contract used in Jewish wedding ceremonies, signed and witnessed by the attending pastor.
They did not go down to the country clerk’s office to get the government’s permission for something that (they believe) is deeply personal, between and man and a woman and the God of their faith.
As I reflect on this, it reminds me of how African-American slaves created their own ceremony to sanctify what was then an illegal union by “jumping the broom.”
In a recent article by Jeffrey Tucker he equates marital laws in the U.S. as a form of eugenics. These laws were instituted to control who could legally procreate. The laws outlawed interracial marriage and to this day in some states a clean bill of health is required for marriage-as Tucker puts it, “To plan the gene pool just as socialism planned the economy. The ambition was to wipe out undesirable recessive genes in one generation.”
So maybe it is time to get the government out of our private relationships. Maybe it is time to take a stand-like my Christian friends and say “no” by opting out of legalizing marriage at all. Maybe we could then opt out of the thousands of intrusive laws that tell us what to eat and drink and put in our bodies and who we can do business with and what kind of written consent you need to have sex and on and on and on……
We are only as free as the laws of the land allow us to be.
Cindy is the former chair of the Libertarian Party of Sacramento County. Her blog can be found here .
It’s great that straight people are stepping forward to take on abolition of a monstrous set of laws that you were responsible for creating in the first place…
Collective guilt, eh? So, if I’m somehow responsible for everything that any straight person has ever done, then I guess you’re responsible for everything any gay person has ever done, right?
Give me a break. What’s next? “Libertarians” advocating reparations for slavery?
This sounds great until the homophobic next-of-kin are challenging your dead partner’s will. Of course, given cultural norms, such a challenge would have a much lower likelihood of success for a hetero couple, allowing you to convince yourself that LGBT folks were just imagining the fact that their lover died alone in a hospital bed.
It’s great that straight people are stepping forward to take on abolition of a monstrous set of laws that you were responsible for creating in the first place, but casting blame on the victims of exclusion who have suffered for thousands of years under the tyranny of normative family values is both cruel and dishonest.