In European history marriage originally was little more than a legal agreement between two families who arranged their children’s marriages. In the past this combined with celibacy essentially meant that your family arranged your sexual habits. Although we are long past that point, and have far more freedom marriage these days in even the civilized country is wrapped up in red tape and laws.
A marriage country today in the civilized world piles on a lot of regulations and rules. Many people today seek external prenuptial agreements to save them from the ridiculous requirements for divorce. Because of the bindings of a marriage contract, in divorce, the highest earner has to sacrifice their private property. This is no secret, yet I am surprised so many get married under these conditions. Personally, I think it is very backward for one party of a divorce to get a gigantic handout. This usually being a woman, maybe women should raise the question: “Are we really that worthless that we need this kind of help?”
The other kind of regulation on marriage is explicitly not allowing gay marriage. For some reason, the Government, and a large portion of the public are actually stupid enough to believe that marriage is a building block of society, and they have the right to interfere with the lives of others. Personally, I don’t think it is just the freedom of gays that these people are against. These people are against freedom in general, but specifically: freedom of contract.
I know I am not alone when I say: “Hey! How about we put anything we darn well want on a contract!” If me and my wife to be want to put a clause in that demands a commitment, say a specific monetary commitment when one of us is out of work, we should be allowed. Likewise, if a homosexual wishes his contract to be with another homosexual, it is not the business of anyone else to interfere.
Under a system where freedom is protected, it is always a good measure to make sure contracts can’t be invalidated by the whims of the public. Freedom itself is an idea that started with the idea that the individual was sovereign – not the Government or the Church.
It is a really bad idea to allow the Government to meddle with contracts on principle. Let’s say you have a contract with a telephone company (and you probably do), and the executive of that telephone company does a favor for a friend in the Government, and his friend has to do something for him. So he gets the Government to meddle with your contact, binding you to the phone plan for the rest of your life. It would really suck wouldn’t it?
Interestingly, a lot of the conservative morons say that heterosexual marriage itself is a principle that is part of society. However, freedom is the principle of any society that is just. Conservatives know this, just listen to them babble on like they do in America. When the principle of heterosexual marriage involves violating the principle of voluntary contracts in a free society, the Law of Non Contradiction, courtesy of my good friend Aristotle comes in.
Clearly, Government intervention violates voluntary contracts and association in any case. The conservatives will back be me all the way if I’m opposing cash for clunkers, the healthcare debate, and more. However when it comes to marriage, suddenly they are all shouting to be pragmatic, and to put principles on hold for a while. Suddenly, they are the group who believe the constitution is nothing more than a list of suggestions, and that freedom is subservient to their whims.
For many years Ayn Rand complained that the creature destroying capitalism was the Christian conservatives defending it, weakly, as they clearly do. However we live in an age of Wikipedia experts on her philosophy (and everything else), who don’t really understand what she really meant by this. What she meant I have left well expressed and clear. The morality of Christianity is altruistic, oppressive, and backward. Evil can’t be used to defend anything that is good: self-interest and capitalism. Any moral code that demands a certain level of positive rights is antithetical to negative rights.
I think that is the other interesting point that can be said about Objectivist ethics compared to all others. The Objectivist ethics bare no contradiction with the laws of a free and individualistic society. I mention this because I meet many libertarians who say that Objectivist’s are too moralizing. However I can’t blame the Nihilists for being Nihilists when most of the field of ethics is a pile of patronizing rubbish. I can blame the Conservatives though, they made a choice to contradict their own rhetoric about freedom and refuse to correct it.
In fact, maybe we should question the title of these so called Conservatives against gay marriage. Their arguments are all based around it being a building block of society. Despite that they may hate socialists, they themselves want to impose their grand design on society by ‘protecting it’ through a ban on gay marriage. Clearly if you want to fight the socialists, you don’t want to join the conservatives, as they are clearly socialists as well. There is nowhere to run, now.
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