No, Fellow Patriot, You Can’t Get the State Out of Marriage

Consider you cannot remove the marriage question from the state completely, unless you are willing to also remove probate courts and divorce courts as well and put them back in the hands of the church and not the state. Then you’d also have to completely reform the tax code and tax law, since much of that is also based on marital status. Then you still have the question regarding things like spousal privilege (i.e. you can’t be compelled to testify against your spouse in open court). If folks are going to retain that right, don’t we have to first know what a “spouse” is?

I think many people that are sincerely advocating the state get out of the marriage business don’t really understand the depth of what it is they are asking. You are essentially asking us to return to a pre-Civil War civilization (the first government-issued marriage licenses occurred in the mid-1800s). Therefore, it would take a greater uprooting of our current understanding of Americanism than elimination of sacrosanct entitlement programs would. The state’s regulation of marriage is older and far more embedded than even the welfare state itself. It would be easier to privatize social security than it would be to de-regulate marriage.

Thus, if you really would prefer the state get out of the marriage business altogether, it’s not the simple route to diffusing the hot-button political battle over marriage that threatens to rip apart the Republican Party at the seams. Quite the contrary, it is the most radical and difficult to implement solution of them all. Ironically enough, because the church would have to step in to fill the void left by the state in most of these situations (including divorce and child custody cases), this solution would actually empower religious institutions’ influence over the culture all the more.