Comments Elsewhere

I didn’t mean to sound as if I were coming out in favor of lizard marriage.

The point isn’t that I think the government should recognize lizard marriages (whatever that would mean). It’s that I think it’s a mistake to concede the government any authority over marriage in the first place. If George Bush signed a Presidential decree stating that Citizen Kane is trash and nobody should see it, I would not be outraged by that, either, even though it’s a patently ridiculous claim; I never considered G.W. an authority on film in the first place, and I simply don’t care enough about his opinion to get worked up over it. At the most, it would be an occasion for expressing some contempt about his taste in film.

The people whose opinions about marriage matter are the families (for secular marriage) and the churches (for religious marriage). In either case, the best thing for the government to do is not try to fix up its policy in one direction or the other, but rather simply to butt out and stop acting as if it had any business offering its opinions on what is or isn’t a valid marriage.