In 300 words or less...
Wanna get married? So get married already. Get any kind of married you want. Same sex, different sex, indeterminate sex. Marry early and marry often.
Get married in a church, in a chapel, in a private ceremony of your own devising. Government has no legitimate place in the marriage of free and sovereign individuals.
Get married by the powers inherently invested in yourselves.
The question libertarians ask the gay community is the same they ask everyone else: why do you need a bureaucrat to sanction your marriage?
Yes, government, being government, has coercively inserted its manipulative, prey-grasping insect-like .jpg)
tentacles into places where they don't belong, like into everyone's private relationships.
In the name of social engineering, which no government of a free people has the right to do, politicians have divided people into groups and tossed out "benefits" like a clown tossing out candy at a kid's birthday party.
The candy includes tax, employment, medical, inheritance, welfare and many other benefits.
Straight married people get the candy, Queer as Folk folks don't.
It's wrong, and libertarians know it.
But if you think that making the government grant you the same marriage goodies as straight people get will somehow legitimize you, it won't. It only legitimizes government. You're just telling politicians you want the same dog collar and choke chain that shackles everyone else.
Gay libertarians already understand this.
So while you're fighting for your "marriage rights," why not start fighting for your actual rights as well? Why not fight for freedom? Why not begin demanding, as libertarians do, that government get the hell out of everyone's personal relationships?
Help shrink government back into its Constitutional shell. Then help shrink it some more.
Do that and your marriage will become your own, with no authoritarian strings attached - to anyone's marriage.
Comments
How does a hospital know who gets to make the serious decisions? How do schools know who's allowed to put a child in their car? How do insurance companies know who deserves to collect? That one paper is a lot easier to carry around than 1100. I like the idea that government should be out of the picture, but I simply can't conceive of any other single paper that would cover all those bases without questions....
Be careful. Every libertarian runs the risk of turning into an anarchist by accident, and not even the smart kind. You need to not just say "fight for your freedom" or "the government doesn't belong in my bedroom", those are bumper stickers, the equivalent of "fight the system". Tell the people exactly what the government is doing wrong and exactly what you think gay people should do. You could be saying all marriage should be person, no government recognition for any marriage, OR you could be saying abolish marriage as a government institution and only have civil unions OR you could be saying gay people should stop fighting their causes and just become libertarians. I don't know what EXACTLY you are calling for. You need to be more brave. Anyone can say "fight the system", but it takes bravery to announce "Here is what is wrong, here is what we should all do now".
I'm fiscally socialist,I know what horrible things my party can turn into. Be careful you don't fall into the slogan trap
Easy. You carry around a card in wallet, just like single people or widowed do, that declares your next of kin. What's the problem? Marriage is more than and easy ID card.
A card that defines next of kin doesn't even come close to covering all the rights and obligations conferred by marriage. As I said before, you'd need a hefty stack of legal papers to replace it. Unless, of course, most of our familial law is rewritten in a way that would allow a next-of-kin card to be equivalent to...a marriage certificate. Then, it seems, we'd be back at the same place, with a different word to describe it.
Very uninformed. No, it's not about candy. It's about rights, rights which can't be had any other way unfortunately. Rights like having your foreign spouse live with you. If you think its about the candy then you really don't understand what is going on. This nation inhibits or grants rights based on whether or not one is in a recongized marriage (please note the word rights not benefits or candy). This sort of naive understanding of the issues makes all libertarians look bad, at least look dumb. See the gay marriage issues at www.freestudents.blogspot.com for a libertarian take that doesn't rely on naive slogans.
To CLS – When you say, "This nation inhibits or grants rights" you are correct, but you don't seem to understand the significance of it. No "nation" has the "right" or the power to "grant" rights, it only has the illegitimate, unconstitutional POWER to inhibit rights. Rights are yours, not the government's, which in today's world treats rights like so much candy to be inhibited or granted simply because it can. We all have the innate right to marry whom we wish. Government has the power, but not the right, to obstruct our rights. This is why the article exhorts you, even as you fight with government over the single issue of "marriage rights" to "start fighting for your actual rights" which is the fundamental issue that affects all of our rights. There is nothing naive or sloganistic about understanding where our rights come from. They come from us.
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