Guest Post by Robert Jursik – a refutation of Steve’s post:
Rare it is that I would find myself on the contrary side of anything in GraniteGrok, populated as it is with genuine New Hampshire Patriots always ready to contend for individual freedom. Nor would I expect to argue against the formidable Steve MacDonald, with whom I have been happy to rhetorically stand elbow-to-elbow in the grand work of re-claiming limited government for all. Yet, here we are, diverging at last over the question of marriage, and the state’s authority to regulate it.
Steve expresses support for HB 569, a proposed statute sponsored by nine libertarian-leaning Republican State Reps that would accept the term "domestic union" as the legal equivalent of marriage. It would attempt to deftly avoid the question of extending state recognition of homosexual marriages by removing government authority over the topic altogether. His claim is that "HB 569 creates real marriage equality and removes any state-based religious prejudice." However, it does no such thing and it deserves rejection.
To assert that HB 569 "removes state-based religious prejudice" is to presume that current government regulation of marriage is mired in it. Yet, New Hampshire – along with every other state in the union – has certified Justices of the Peace to perform marriage ceremonies outside of any religious construct and has also permitted judges to do the same. To participate in religious marital ceremonies is and always has been the prerogative of the parties and has never been a required ingredient in state regulation.
Nonetheless, the state has always insisted that marital…
…unions must exclusively be between heterosexual couples, and it is here that the true purpose for marriages is found and needs to be strenuously defended. The sponsoring State Reps, Steve, and I are fortunate to live and work in the greatest democracy ever founded on earth – the only nation in history to be created by a philosophy. The keystone of all democracy is a sincere confidence in the ability of citizens to make rational judgments about their own government: its breadth, its composition, its power, even its very existence. This confidence, as it is manifested throughout our founding documents, was caused by our recognizing common concepts of individual virtue. For instance, prohibiting the infringement of the state into the rights of the press is based on our concept of the virtues of honesty, truth and personal integrity. To put it simply, in a democracy, good government can only result from good citizens.
Throughout the history of civilization, these virtues have been taught by a variety of institutions. They have been communicated by schools, churches, towns and states, neighborhoods, and the arts – and all have succeeded to one extent or another. Yet nowhere, and under no other circumstances, have these critical individual virtues been better communicated than within the incubator of civilization: the family. The family is the molecular unit of society, the place where all of us first learn the imperative concepts of love, sacrifice, discipline, patience, courage and all the other principles that make society possible. Without such a communication, or to rest these virtues’ maintenance on the bruised reeds of schools and neighborhoods, is to risk the loss of democracy itself – and thus our government and way of life.
It is not difficult to imagine that as the true objective of the radical leftist – a complete re-arrangement of the body politic along rationalistic codes, the replacement of traditional virtue with moral equivalence and an endless dependence on the tender mercies of politicians. We are therefore treated to a sorry parade of anti-family liberal ideas: abortion on demand, prophylactics in schools, pornography in the airwaves and, yes, state recognition of homosexual marriages. Weaken the traditional substratum of chastity and marriage and you inevitably weaken the family – and then everything else. Nor is this valid under religious doctrines alone; no civilization long survives when forced to install contract law over flesh and blood.
HB 569 is not, after all, an instrument of ending religious prejudice but rather the initiating of a new prejudice, a statist religion. It is an abdication of the government’s proper authority to advance ideal behaviors and restrict inferior, dangerous ones. The appropriate response to the left’s ceaseless attacks on families is a corresponding affirmation of those traditional virtues which can best result from them – not a cowardly retreat from the battlefield. That affirmation can only occur when the legislators make the correct philosophical connection between family and democracy. HB 569 discovers that connection drowning in the sea – and throws an anvil around its neck.
