David Frum's Dumb Words

Poor arguments riddle this David Frum piece in the Wall Street Journal, but there's a section at the end that deserves mention and comment.

The Marriage Buffet

Many American advocates for homosexual marriage understand all this, and for that reason oppose "civil pacts" and "domestic partnerships" and "common law marriages" just as fiercely as any social conservative does. They want to restore the bright line too--only with same-sex relationships on the farther side of it. But if that has not happened even in Sweden or France, where organized religion is powerless, it certainly will not happen in the U.S.

The much more likely outcome in this country would be the spread of a crazy-quilt of differing systems of "marriage-lite" across the country...

And then there would be the question of federal rights: immigration, Social Security, federal tax law, and so on, just to make the whole problem more complicated.

[...]

The result of a national trend toward same-sex marriage would be that the young people of the country would be presented with 50 different buffets, each of them offering two or more varieties of quasi-marital relationships. In such a world, the very concept of marriage would vanish.

Mr. Frum seems to be advocating an anti-federalist concept of marriage. Marriage (and by extension, our society) can only work if it is nationally defined and enforced. It would be too hard for people to track who gets what benefits where, who has to do what to get recognized as legitimate, etc.

Replace all the references to "marriage" with gun laws (or free speech, or business regulation, or any number of commonly-accepted "federalized" laws) and see what happens. Very little. His "point" remains unchanged: the utility and practicality of such a diverse variation of laws would erode the nature of the act we are attempting to regulate. Mr. Frum's contemporaries may have different arguements regarding the social impact legalized gay marriage may have on the US, but his central point is the difficulty, gosh darn it, in retaining control over the process and the people involved in it. As his essay's subtitle says, "When it comes to commitment, a lot of options is not a good thing."

I find that attitude utterly contemptible. This is no man who respects freedom.

It would become impossible to tell young people "Don't have children outside of marriage," because they would not even know--until it was too late--whether they were "inside" a marriage or not.

Only if your parenting skills are as dismal as the public education system! This is dogshit masquerading as reason.

The solution is to get the government out of marriage and stop treating married couples any differently than other people.

UPDATE(11/24/2003 12:39am)
On the other hand, we have the much better comments of David Brooks making the conservative case FOR gay marriage in the New York Times:

...even in this time of [marital] crisis, every human being in the United States has the chance to move from the path of contingency to the path of marital fidelity — except homosexuals. Gays and lesbians are banned from marriage and forbidden to enter into this powerful and ennobling institution. A gay or lesbian couple may love each other as deeply as any two people, but when you meet a member of such a couple at a party, he or she then introduces you to a "partner," a word that reeks of contingency.

You would think that faced with this marriage crisis, we conservatives would do everything in our power to move as many people as possible from the path of contingency to the path of fidelity. But instead, many argue that gays must be banished from matrimony because gay marriage would weaken all marriage. A marriage is between a man and a woman, they say.

[...]

The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

Via Radley Balko.

Posted by Drizzten at October 19, 2003 12:15 PM