If you want to protect marriage, ban it!

Do you know why the first marriage license was issued in the United States? Historically, holy matrimony meant just that, a union sanctioned by the church, witnessed by God. However, the racist inclinations of America's past gave rise to a concern about race mixing. Marriage licensing was a way to socially engineer an outcome considered desirable by the conservative, family values crowd of a bygone age. So great was the paranoia and racism in those times that government was used as a tool to undermine free association and human liberty. This was certainly not the only time, but while slavery, Jim Crow laws and poll taxes have gone the way of many of histories distorted, anti-liberal bad ideas, marriage licensing is a sad and tragic relic of a less humane and unsophisticated time. Today, this tool of oppression is again being wielded to prevent free association and the expression of human freedom with the same motivations and excuses concocted years earlier to justify this un-American practice. Whether to promote an anti-black or an anti-gay agenda, the negative effects on our society and our shared humanity are the same. As America debates the question of gay marriage, I suggest to pundits on both sides of the issue that they are fighting for the wrong cause. Legal sanction or suppression of gay marriage should not be the desired end, but rather an end to the practice of looking to government for the legal foundation of marriage. This is the real conservative position. For almost the whole of human history, the church has been the keeper of this sacred authority as it rightfully should be. The modern desire to socially engineer a society desirable to those that hold the levers of power has undermined this authority and weakened the role of the church in American life. It is by the rules of God, as interpreted and implemented by each denomination, that should govern marriage, not the whims of the political elite. If the Unitarians interpret marriage differently than the Catholics, then so be it. There is no advantage gained by uniformity. The interest of the state in marriage should only be in the mitigation of contractual disputes just as it does for every other type of contract, both written and verbal. This will also end the institutional bias of mother over father and care giver over provider that today permeates our family courts.