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Posted by A. B. Dada on December 30th, 2005
I constantly try to find where the lawyers and accountants of the world are putting their lobbying money in order to create laws that make them necessary. In an anarchocapitalist “utopia” these guys would be the first in the soup kitchens. Marriage is one of the most intriguing State licensing scams I’ve ever looked at, and it seems that the religious right AND the liberal left both support more State licensing of marriage, not less.
Marriage has a history of being primarily a financial bonding — either to protect the assets of one family (inbreeding) or combining the assets and powers of two families (betrothing). Even before this, marriage had been a way for a bloodline to continue, and in some rare instances marriage was done in order to keep a way of thinking alive. The Mormons allowed polygamy for generations, some say in order to create more believers.
In the past 100 years or so, marriage has become a tool of the State. It allows the State to better tax their citizens, it allows them to keep control of the household and it allows them to keep outside beliefs way outside the mainstream. I can’t believe that Christ followers would ever use the State to mandate the policy of marriage, and as one can see, giving the democracy any power quickly leads the democracy to corrupt your original intent.
Marriage, to me, means one man and one woman. That is for me — my life. I can’t and won’t tell anyone else what they should believe. If 5 consenting adults want to marry each other, I have no power to tell them not to.
It is my belief that I am mandated by the Bible to marry one woman, but I would not enforce this belief on another Christ follower. There are some sins in the Bible that are quite impossible to truly understand based on conflicting stories — and I’ll leave it at that.
As we see more laws added to the books to cover marriage protections, we still see the reality of what government does best: it corrupts the good intentions and creates a world where only those approved by government can get the necessary license to do something, even if it is completely voluntary and hurts no one.
The best thing that government can do is to get out of the bedroom and get out of trying to instill morality. They are human, after all, and they are no better than you or I. This means that they also have no reason to tell us who to marry, especially if our unions are successful.