A couple of weeks ago, the Life, Liberty, Property community website exploded with a discussion about marriage and the role of government in protecting, defining, and sanctioning it. For guys who tend to engage in a lot of preaching to the choir, we sure managed to create a fracas between the *no marriage at all* folks and the *marriage is a man and a woman, and where’s my child tax credit?* camps. I think I’m going to make a post about abortion to see if I can get an even bigger rumble started (actually I got a loooong post outlined that’ll be up when I don’t have finals to study for).

Introduction
Marriage is a lot of things to a lot of people. It’s biological, it’s social, it’s cultural, it’s religious, it’s economic, it’s legal, and oh boy is it political. At its most basic level, marriage is about paternity certainty and male investment in mother and child. Of course, given that in some ways the very purpose of every living organism is to reproduce, marriage can’t help but insinuate itself into every aspect of our social lives. And, being such an expansive concept, marriage overlaps with a lot of smaller social issues.

Therein lies the problem. Deconstructionists, postmodernists, nihilists, and the like will try to tease apart these various aspects of marriage, declaring that it’s ‘really about property’ or ‘really about legal rights’ or ‘really about male domination of females’. It’s only a short step from there to ‘How can we keep gays/polygamists/Arkansan sheep farmers from those rights? That’s not equality.’ And in their sad, deluded way, they’re right. About the individual rights anyway.

What they’re wrong about is the nature of marriage itself. It’s amazing that ‘the Party of Science’ has failed to incorporate the basics of evolutionary biology into their conception of marriage…well maybe not so amazing considering their many logical inconsistencies. But I digress…a basic observation much older than Darwin himself is that the more altricial (hard to raise) the infant, the more monogamous and involved the father. Humans are the most intelligent, the most destructive, the most dexterous animals in the world. We’re also the most energetically expensive, altricial infants in the known world. And it shows in a variety of neurologic and hormonal features of the human male. Human males are intrinsically better with infants than our counterparts amongst the great apes. In fact, we’re some of the best in the entire mammalian clade. We’re clearly predisposed to monogamy biologically.

And no matter how many social embellishments you add on, the fact remains that marriage would never have originated without babymaking. In fact, the brideprice (where the groom gives money to the bride’s family) and dowry (where the bride gives money to the groom’s family) are rooted in the energetic and material expense of raising a family. Which one occurs depends on the circumstance: The brideprice serves as proof that the groom can provide for his future bride and future offspring, a test of sorts. The dowry on the other hand, is the bride’s family’s way of acknowledging the expense of starting a family, and providing the seed money to start it themselves.

Although one could go on and on for hours, anyone with a healthy respect either for evolutionary biology or for the importance of family in the success of a child can see that the complexity of the social nature of marriage stems from the biological realities of reproduction whether we’re discussing legal rights of spouses or economic policies regarding families relative to single people.

The Problem
The problem with a defense of marriage through legal and political means is twofold:

1. Such a stance is at odds with the minarchist position, which is fundamentally built around the individual and freedom of choice without interference either positive or negative
2. The exposure of marriage on so many fronts leaves it open to deconstructionist attacks as briefly mentioned above

Minarchy and Marriage
The classical liberal position is one in which the philosophical perspective centers around the individual rather than society at large (which is merely a thin disguise for veneration of the state). Furthermore, the classical liberal position is that for an individual to be free, he must be able to do as he wishes so long as no direct harm comes to another. The flipside of this, of course, is that the state and/or society should have no direct role in the choices the individual makes. Marriage is fundamentally an agreement between two individuals; an agreement of sexual exclusivity, mutual fealty, and dedication to the rearing of their progeny. Marriage is a choice; two free individuals approach the altar, and two free individuals, one carrying the other and both slightly drunk, cross the threshold into the honeymoon suite.

The first problem is that government sanction and/or protection of marriage is essentially interfering with an individual’s choice, positive though the interference may be. In this way, marriage is no different from social welfare in that the state somehow subsidizes a person’s behavior. The second problem is that no individual has more inherent rights than another. Yet when the state sanctions, protects, and subsidizes marriage that is exactly what it proclaims; it gives preferential treatment to those individuals who make a certain choice. The third problem is that because state interference is largely positive, it negatively impacts those who didn’t make the choice to marry. As has been discussed at length, positive interference by the state of any kind represents a reduction of liberty.

We are thus left with the conclusion that state-sanctioned marriage simply does not fit in the classical liberal scheme.

An Indefensible Position
The more complex an idea, the more open to attack it is. Each component, each statement is another potential weak link. With marriage, that weak link is readily localizable to the political components both social and economic in nature. The problem is that once the state is allowed to grant preferential treatment to married couples, it must defend its decision to do so. Although the preceding section discussed the problematic nature of state-sanctioned marriage from a minarchist position, it must be remembered that Leftists are opportunistically individualists. Marriage happens to be one such issue where it suits them to drop the Statist cloak, if only for a time.

Leftists will reduce marriage down to economic privileges, whether shared tax forms or pooled bank accounts and assets. Or down to legal privileges such as the ‘next of kin’ designation available to the spouse but not to the ‘life partner’. Or even the 5th amendment spousal inclusion. They will then make the valid argument about the lack of equality before the law. Unfortunately, the way their nihilistic minds work is that instead of removing the preferential treatment, or making accordances for it through civil unions, they should redefine marriage to include same-sex couples.

And by allowing government to define the word and the concept of ‘marriage’ in the first place, we’ve given leftists the ability to change that definition both politically and culturally.

The Solution
The solution is a simple one. Get the state out of marriage entirely. No privileges, no tax breaks, no legal protections. Not because marriage isn’t important or valuable. But because it is too valuable to leave in the all too corruptible hands of government. We take our philosophy from the founding fathers. And the historical progenitor of that philosophy was distrust of the state. They distrusted it because it was an inevitability that the state would stop serving the people it was created by. And thus that the more power the state had, the larger a hammer that could eventually be wielded against the people. The state is an evil, albeit a sometimes necessary one. Perhaps because of this it has been a hallmark of our philosophy that the more beloved the ideal, the less involvement of the state we’re willing to grant. By giving the state a role–no matter how small–in defining marriage, we’ve exposed a sacred concept to the same depredations that we fear would happen to our liberty and our property.

Save marriage. Get the state out of it.