The Non-Solution and the Other Non-Solution.

Karen Clark at Family Scholars Blog posted the following as an off-shoot of a longer discussion under a previous blogpost there.

De-institutionalize: Is this a solution to the problem or a non-solution that will lead to more problems?

Karen quoted the concluding paragraph from Amanda Litman's article, “Should the Government Get Out of Marriage”:

If the government no longer marries people, it cannot control who can and can’t get married, so the argument about gay marriage becomes irrelevant–the legal rights and protections of “marriage” are no longer at stake. Domestic partnership may still have conditions and qualifications, but the “sacred institution of marriage” loses its legal definition and with that the legal requirements necessary to enter it. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up for discussion.

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Fitz jumped in with comments, here and here.

I added a couple of comments, too, here and here.

I said:

The imposition of the SSM idea would amount to the replacement of the marriage idea in our laws and culture. That would mean de-institutionalization of marriage.

SSMers — including those who have already commented earlier — have rejected the very notion that marriage is a social institution — let alone a foundational social institution of civil society. They reject the core meaning of marriage because they deny there is such a thing as a coherent meaning for society. In their view there are no essentials that distinguish the type of relationship (or types of relationships) they have in mind from the rest of the types of relationships that populate the broad nonmarriage category. For them, the SSM idea is all about private motivations and not about marriage as a public type of relationship in our laws and culture. They concede that SSM, at law, would not be a sexual type of relationship.

We might as well take them at their word because their argumentation and their rhetoric is consistent on these points.

So, defenders of marriage, and well-meaning supporters of SSM, and those sitting on the fence, be forewarned that the SSM idea is promoted as just another way to de-institutionalize the time-tested, foundational, and most pro-child social institution we have.

What it would institutionalize, via the arbitrary exercise of governmental power, is the supremacy of gay identity politics over all other considerations that a just society might have. This will corrupt all that it touches; the argumentation and rhetoric of the SSM campaign has already revealed that their words are not empty words but scarcely vieled threats to society.

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I won't be blogging for awhile so I will leave the discussion to the others.