Homosexual Marriage and the State

A judge ruled recently that homosexuals have a right to state recognized marriages and declared a law in California denying such recognition unconstitutional. Members of homosexual organizations are generally pleased by the ruling, and members of political groups favoring traditional, especially religious, approaches are generally outraged. There may be appeals or new actions in legislatures , and the outcome is not easy to predict.

Irrespective of all that, the ruling is wrong, though not for the reasons conservatives are using. Homosexuals clearly have a right to marry. They can perform any marriage ceremony they want, with any meaning they like, presided over by any willing person they choose, and it is nobody’s business but their own. The ruling is wrong because no one, neither homosexual nor heterosexual, has an inherent right to have his marriage recognized by the state. One can easily imagine a hypothetical country where the government was completely silent on the question of marriage – leaving the question of what is and is not a marriage to the various religious organizations and/or the general opinions of society and writing its laws without reference to marriage at all. Such an arrangement would violate no one’s rights.

One can of course counter that, while this may be true, once the government recognizes some people’s marriages, it must recognize all people’s marriages. However, this argument is rarely pursued consistently. People who want the government to recognize marriages between two homosexuals do not generally also advocate recognition for marriages between parent and adult child, between brother and sister, or among those in relationships involving more than two people. Yet a consistent acceptance of the argument would seem to require that.

The actual fact is that the issue of recognition is not one of rights. Governments recognize different things as marriages in different periods and places for reasons usually based on the mores of the time and the relative power of those demanding and opposing recognition. The question belongs not in a court of law ruling on rights, but in the dreary dogfight we call the political process. Besides, to the extent marriage involves something deep and personally important, recognition by the government is irrelevant anyway, except for pragmatic concerns.

The main pragmatic issues relating to government recognition of marriage, apart from those concerned with raising children, have to do with taxation. Under present law married people can file joint tax returns, pass property to a spouse without gift or estate taxes, leverage Social Security tax payments to obtain credits for a spouse, inherit a spouse’s retirement plans under favorable conditions, make IRA contributions for a non-working spouse, and receive other breaks. Advocates of recognizing marriage between homosexuals argue that without such recognition homosexuals are treated unfairly. This, however, ignores the nature of taxation. Taxation operates under the law of the jungle with the government as the predator and the taxpayer as the prey. Saying homosexuals have a right to the less severe treatment the tax collectors give certain heterosexual couples makes no more sense than claiming that renters have a right to the less severe treatment the tax collectors give certain people with a mortgage. In deciding what and whom to tax, governments are guided by an assortment of political and pragmatic concerns, but rights and fairness are not among them.

Closing the Library

It is fairly standard procedure for state and local politicians, whenever faced with having less money available than they want to spend, to resort to the old trick of closing the library, i.e. selecting something they do that many taxpayers actually like and benefit from and announcing, reluctantly, that they will have to cut way back on it unless they get some sort of tax increase. The people running public school districts are masters of this. They usually greet any shortfall in their budgets with dire warning about having to lay teachers off, stop patching roofs, and quit serving milk in the school cafeterias while remaining utterly silent about possible cost savings from eliminating frivolous or unproductive activities and reducing the number of administrators, co-coordinators, counselors, third deputy activity directors and other bureaucrats who never enter a classroom.

Sad to say, this sort of thing usually works. The politicians and bureaucrats make their threats. They receive a sympathetic chorus from the press, complete with outrageous sob stories if possible, and generally after a while get their way. Not enough taxpayers are astute enough to ask what fraction of the budget the library (or the city park or the fire department or the state police or whatever has been selected) makes up, what alternative cuts could be made in other departments, and what cost savings would be possible through increased efficiency, elimination of “services” that add no value, and reducing headcount in the various administrative and bureaucratic areas instead of among the people who actually do the work in those departments that actually do something useful.

Exceptions to this become more likely during times when the taxpayers are also feeling the pressure of economic difficulty. Thus one of the good things that can come out of recessions is a chance to cut back on the cancerous growth of state and local government. When recessions bite hard enough, the closing the library gambit may not work. Governments may have to make hard decisions under scrutiny and trim down at least a little of their fat and cut back a bit on their reach. One of the worst things about the so-called stimulus of the federal government is that it is preventing this from happening enough during the current recession by subsidizing state and local governments so that they will not face hard choices. Indeed, large parts of the stimulus would be better labeled the No Bureaucrat Left Behind Act. This will have the effect of preventing needed pruning of state and local governments and making the eventual recovery less robust and the nation less prosperous.

Hot for Teacher

There were a few stories in the local news a while back about women, often teachers or PTA officials, having sexual relations with underage schoolboys. There was a bit of criticism over the light punishment these women received relative to what a man convicted of child molestation or statutory rape would expect and of complaints of an unfair double standard. However what is actually unfair is that there is not more of a double standard, a reasonable double standard based on obvious and relevant differences between male and female sexuality.

In the first place, while male perverts can and do molest girls of all ages, a woman can have sex only with a boy capable of erection and ejaculation, which requires her underage partner to be an adolescent rather than an actual child. Since most adolescent boys are physically stronger than most women, and since, excluding the really bizarre and unlikely, the boy cannot participate involuntarily, there is typically no question of assault in the normal usage of the term. Finally, there are risks, emotional factors, and opportunities for exploitation in an older man’s seduction of an adolescent girl that usually are not present in an older woman’s making herself available to a teenage boy ( starting with the obvious fact that a boy cannot become pregnant but by no means limited to that). Indeed in many cases the horny little bastard , aka the alleged victim, is likely simply to feel that he got lucky. I think most men who can remember life and the guys they hung out with at age fifteen or sixteen would agree.

The laws of a few years ago were about right. Women caught with teenage boys should be ridiculed, fined about a hundred bucks or so for contributing to the delinquency of a minor or something similar, and sent on their way. If they work at schools, firing and blacklisting would be appropriate. Treating them with the severity shown to male child molesters or seducers of adolescent girls is inappropriate and wasteful of taxpayers’ money. Some of these women may be seriously messed up. They may deserve the public’s contempt and be fair game for its ridicule, but they do not belong in the pen. Even the best prisons are very unpleasant places. Citizens have an obligation not to send people whose acts are not seriously criminal to them.