Marriage and Procreation: Avoiding Bad Arguments

Well, I wouldn't call them bad arguments. In reading this article, I believe the arguments suffer from being the type of slippery slope that one may go down in a moment of need but wind up in a more precarious place. The battle to protect marriage, it seems, is fraught with slippery slopes. But from what I can survey the slopes are political in nature, not necessarily intrinsic to marriage itself and perhaps the best way to avoid them is to understand how government is a dangerous set of slippery slopes. In the end I believe we can see that the slippery slopes of marriage and government are not at all coincidental.

The article articulates what is the most often used of the unwieldy arguments used to defend marriage.

• It is sometimes argued that the state’s interest in marriage is simply to ensure that as many children as possible are raised in “an optimal setting,” and that this interest justifies “restricting” marriage to opposite-sex couples. 

The precarious position one is left to defend when using such an argument is how and why "the state itself has created marriage—for the extrinsic purpose of child-rearing". In fact, it did not create marriage. Nor, the article argues, is the rearing of children the central end of government involvement. Because then the state is roped into any number of statistical anomalies that encourage child rearing to the same degree of rigor as it does with marriage.

As we have come to understand marriage at Opine, clearly marriage is something more. Op-Ed has long cautioned against overstating the importance of marriage as a way to nanny citizens into optimal child rearing. Its not a bad goal, but it has a nanny-state drawback. As with this article, Op-Ed has noted that the value of marriage in rearing children is evidence to the value of marriage rather than the central goal.

What is that central goal? Liberty, if you ask me. But not liberty to do anything you want, no, it is liberty to do something very specific. It is the liberty to engage in a natural behavior for which we have a nearly universally human social and government construct for.

And by "government" I don't mean federal recognition. By government, I mean the marriage itself is a government entity over the family. It recognizes the process which people create and raise new humans as the culmination of our right to engage in something so human as procreating. Something so human as procreating to create a family.

That is no different than the sense of "community" one might read in that article. But I believe that part might be understated, they are tip-toeing up to the idea that marriage unites and governs, and should be recognized as our naturally inherent way to create something, take responsibility and nurture it.