Maybe you've heard this before. I've heard it with reasonable regularity in the debate over "same-sex marriage". "Why is marriage a matter for the government? The government should not be regulating marriage. It should be a matter for churches." The thinking is that marriage is a "spiritual thing" and, as such, government should have nothing to say about it.
I would hope that my normally intelligent readers would see immediately the problem with this type of thinking. It is two-fold. First, the government does have a vested interest in marriage. One aspect has to do with protecting privacy, private property, that sort of thing. Recognizing that married couples fall in a different category than simple friends or even close friends, married couples need to have a different legal standing. Another has to do with protecting society in general. Marriage is the best-case scenario for children. Children are the continuation of society. Therefore, it is a good idea for the government to regulate marriage. But the other side -- the second notion -- frankly makes zero sense. If marriage is a "spiritual matter" with no ties to government ... if marriage ought to be a church (whatever church you care to name) thing rather than a government issue, then what do you do with the non-churched? You would have to conclude, for instance, that two atheists wishing to marry wouldn't be allowed to do so because they deny "spiritual matters" generally and the "church" specifically. That makes no sense. Further, marriage would lose all definition because churches have a broad range of definitions. The Church of Love and Sex (not the actual name, but I've read about several of these) would encourage everyone to marry everyone. The Mormon church might be amenable to polygamy. There are churches that do not recognize same-sex relationships as "marriage" and those that do. So by leaving it without an overarching definition, it acquires no definition ... and becomes meaningless.
You may not wish to comment to someone the next time they suggest this approach of "leave government out of it; it's a church thing." But you should take note in your own mind, "That makes no sense." There may be sticky questions involved and we may disagree on the answers, but that one is not one of them. That one makes no sense.
2 comments:
Good points Stan. The minute we place the government, made up of other human beings, as a different entity altogether, and not part of the society at large, all kinds of weird things can happen.
It's like "corporate greed", another case of assigning a non-human entity the problems of the humans within it.
(I suspect that a hint as to where to look for alternatives to the question of health care reform might lie in there someplace.)
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