A libertarian weighs in on the marriage debate. It's not the most entertaining piece we've read today, but it attacks the issue from a different angle (we thought all the angles had been exhausted long ago). Link. Excerpt:
Perhaps the commonest mistaken idea about marriage is that it is a contract. It is not; it is an institution. One may enter into it as it is, or stay out of it, if one cannot muster the strength to assume the responsibilities and obligations it imposes. However, one cannot modify, or agree to modify, those responsibilities and obligations to satisfy one's own preferences, desires or interests. This is as true for a real marriage as it is for its legal parody. Obviously, once there is a marriage one needs to make all kinds of practical arrangements by means of more or less explicit contracts or reliance on more or less prevalent customs. However, these arrangements are incidental to the marriage; they are not the marriage itself. In fact, to the extent that there is freedom of contract, the contracts incidental to marriage as a rule are available to those who want to live together without the commitments, responsibilities and obligations of marriage.
The inanity of the legal marriage in the Western world today is that it has very nearly become, as Shaw predicted, 'no more onerous nor irrevocable than any ordinary commercial deed of partnership' ”“ a prediction that already erroneously presupposes that marriage is a contractual arrangement. In a purely formal sense, to be sure, the legal marriage still is an institution that one can enter into 'as it is'. However, no one can know how long it will remain 'as it is' while everybody can know that at any moment it will be what the ruling opinion (the opinion of the rulers) declares it to be. Thus, in entering into that institution, one commits oneself to nothing more definite than obedience to whoever rises to power in the State. Apart from that, the legal marriage is no more than a nexus of incidental revocable contracts. It is not a marriage at all.
It was not always that way. The legal marriage started out as the secular authorities' formal recognition of the act of marrying ”“ an act over which they had no jurisdiction, no legislative power. That recognition was a prelude to the State's involvement in enforcing the obligations of marriage, but it did not immediately challenge the pre-eminence of the Church in matters relating to marriage. At some time, however, the enlightened decided that the State could serve as well as the Church as the guardian of the institution of marriage. The legal wedding ceremony, witnessed by a representative of the State, was set up as an alternative point of entry to the institution of marriage, then promoted to an essential condition for the legal recognition of marriage. In the process, in many countries, the Church lost its role as the guardian of the institution of marriage. Church weddings, now devoid of any legal significance, became a ceremonial sideshow in which the priest merely is a hired extra, no longer a witness to the seriousness of purpose without which the event becomes a lark, if not a farce. Under those circumstances the vows of marriage are merely private declarations of intention, implying virtually no commitment that one could not simply repudiate or contractually attenuate.
Of course, unlike the Church, which regards human affairs 'in the light of eternity', the State is only the organisation of prevailing ruling interests. Whatever it touches is transformed into a means for gratifying those interests. Marriage is no exception. To the extent that marriage became an institution defined by the laws of the State it ceased to be marriage in the true sense of the word. Its substance was altered beyond recognition while its shadow took its name.
