Oklahoma Republicans are promoting a bill that could make marriage a private institution in their state. The legislation, filed by Rep. Mike Turner, could end all government regulation of marriage and leave the matter to individuals and their churches. The ACLU has called this attempt the first of its kind in the US.
In an interview with Oklahoma’s News9, Turner made a reasonable, liberty-minded case for his proposal, expressing skepticism as to whether “marriage needs to be regulated by the state at all.” He said there is a “realistic opportunity” for the effort to succeed.
I feel like heaving a huge sigh of relief. Finally someone in the actual political realm (instead of commentary from the two old guys in balcony, which is basically what blogging is) is addressing this issue. It’s been nearly 4 years now that I’ve been repeating this argument, over and over, to those for/against gay marriage. During that time I’ve changed people’s minds on the issue, made people realize there are actually more than two options, and found a huge number of young conservatives/libertarians/liberals who all actually agree with me on this.
The state has no business being in marriage.
There’s no reason why they have to be. Any and all of the legal issues that a marriage license now covers would be easily taken care of with a notarized contract. Would it take extra time to figure out how this would affect insurance and life insurance beneficiaries and child custody, well probably yes, but “it’s boring and lot of work” has never been a good excuse, in my opinion, to the let the government have more control over your life.
Find a church, make a commitment, and be done with it.
The commitment you are making to your partner is not more strong because you got the government to give you a piece of paper, it’s just more sticky to untangle yourself (with more government intervention) if it turns out your commitment wasn’t that great an idea after all.
So thank you Oklahoma. I’ll be watching to see how this goes, because the debate is certainly going to be interesting.
Who knows, maybe I’ll move if you folks can get this to work.
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