Some people rely on religion to keep them on the straight and narrow. There's nothing wrong with that if it works for them, but even people who aren't religious should have a sense of common decency. Somebody said a long time ago that common sense is no longer common, and I suppose you could say the same thing about common decency. It's probably our own fault, our generation that is. Even those of us who weren't hippies kind of trashed the old fashioned values of our ancestors. While some of those values deserved to be trashed, it appears that, in the process, we threw the baby out with the bath water. So now we live in a culture where anything goes and nothing is sacred. I never was one to blindly follow the conformities of society anyway, and now, since there is hardly anything left to follow, it seems more appropriate than ever that I make up my own rules. So my opposition to gay marriage doesn't have to be based on religion or anything like that, all I need is my own internal sense of right and wrong, and that internal sense tells me that gay marriage is wrong. If other people want to do it, I have no way of stopping them, but that doesn't mean I have to approve it, or vote for it, and it certainly doesn't mean that I have to do it myself.
You know, the concept of the state getting totally out of the marriage business is not my original idea, I read it in some Libertarian literature time ago. It didn't make much sense to me at the time, but that's probably because I never thought that gay marriage would ever become a reality. Now that it is, I'm starting to see the logic behind that old theory. Not that it's ever going to happen, but if guys like Plato, Marx, and Hegel can come up with pie-in-the-sky utopian visions, why can't the rest of us?
With this plan, people could still get married through their church or any other voluntary institution, it's just that the state wouldn't have anything to do with it. If any number of people wanted to own their property communally, they could just sign a contract to that effect, and it wouldn't matter if they were sleeping together or not. The state would enforce the contract, not because it had anything to do with marriage, but just because it was a contract. There wouldn't be any more tax breaks for being married, but that's about all that would change. I think the main reason for those tax breaks in the first place was that somebody decided it was good for the country if people got married and had a bunch of kids, but that's no longer true because there are already too many people in the country and the world. I think it was also based on the idea that the wives wouldn't have to work and could stay home and take care of the kids. Nowadays they just dump the kids in day care and go off to work and, if both partners make good money, they end up in a higher tax bracket anyway.
On a different, but not totally unrelated subject: You have told me several times that you've always had a problem with people telling you what to do, be it your parents, your teachers, your preachers, your bosses at work, or the government. Well, not always the government. When the government wanted to send you off to war, you said "Hell no, I won't go!" Now the government tells you that you have to buy health insurance, live next door to colored people, and be nice to those gays, and you don't seem to have a problem with that. I suppose those are things that you would do anyway, whether the government told you to or not, but I said the same thing about all those other authority figures. I remember saying something like, "I would follow a competent leader anywhere, as long as it was someplace I wanted to go anyway." Would you like to spin this one around for awhile?
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