Kuro5hin surely isn’t the first to have said this, but it was the first one I saw this morning, so I’ll conveniently quote them:
If you look at it from a strictly religious point of view, most married
Christians/Catholics/Et.Al. surrendered their right to complain about
marital sanctity the moment they signed a marriage certificate and made
the state a third party in their two party union… No level
of government has any business being in the marriage business to begin
with. Since many have taken the step of including the government, they
must now be subject to the decisions made in that venue. A government
of the people has a responsibility to all of those people to provide
equality in all areas of responsibility.
The problem with the wrangling over gay marriage is the word
“marriage.” Marriage as an institution has certainly diversified in the
past few decades, but there are many people who strongly believe that
marriage is a religious institution. For the courts (or any other
political body) to change the definition of marriage, then, feels like
meddling with core religious doctrine.
It’s obvious (to me at least) that the state’s relationship to marriage violates the Establishment Clause. It fails just about every test
set up by the Supreme Court. The state simply cannot deputize clergymen
to be civil servants empowered to issue what are, essentially, legal
licenses. (The Court has found,
for example, that the state cannot delegate to churches veto power over
granting of liquor licenses: the Massachusetts law struck down by the
Burger Court “substitutes the unilateral and absolute power of a church
for the reasoned decisionmaking of a public legislative body acting on
evidence and guided by standards, on issues with significant economic
and
political implications,” Larkin v. Grendel’s Den – a great local institution :).
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts should restrict itself to issuing
civil unions and get out of the marriage business altogether. Chief
Justice Marshall tried to waffle the issue and call the practice “civil
marriage.” Let’s concede marriage to religious institutions and let
them decide for themselves what a marriage is. Let government regulate
the institution of civil partnership.
