Marriage is always a great topic to visit in New Hampshire. It irritates so many people on so many sides. But if we ever put it to a vote of citizens, New Hampshire would join the ranks of every other state to define “marriage” as a union between one man and one woman. Which is why the left would never want to allow that. And bigotry or inequality has nothing to do with it. And it certainly has nothing to do with love.
Love, as it turns out, is not a state’s interest. There is no ministry of love. No state department of love. No state director of love. And no one in their right mind would want the State organizing, defining, taxing or regulating it. Love is not a state’s interest.
And the idea that you “can’t help who you fall in love with” is total rubbish. Of course, you can. I haven’t fallen in love with anyone since I got married 18 years ago unless I count falling more in love with my wife. People fall in and out of love all the time. They can help it. So what the gay marriage lobby means to suggest by this is that sex is love and that you can’t help who whom you want to have sex. But neither of those things is true either.
Sex is not love. People who make that mistake are doomed to various forms of loneliness and misery (or in cases of addiction an emptiness they can never fill until prison). And people who can’t help whom they want to have sex with are typically jailed after as few as one instance. Where their want conflicted with someone else’s “not want” or “not want as much” whether either of them thinks they are “in love” or not, or whether they can help it or not.
Is it likely that there are people who can’t help with who they want to have sex? Of course.
Does it matter to me if adults are having consensual sex because they want to, are in love, or because they think they are? I’m not all that interested, and I’d prefer that they leave me out of it.
What I am interested in is the ancient and timeless right to property. The lawful and orderly sharing, exchange, or distribution of same. The state has some interest in protecting that, and in ensuring the legitimate execution of any legally recognized contract between two or more persons for that purpose, no matter how certain or confused individuals may be about why.
So the state does have some interest in marriage, but its only interest is the contract and the property. Be it of person (in the case of protecting citizens from some form of abuse–including abuse by the state) or the product of that person’s labors in all its manifestations. That their property is secured from theft or misuse and disbursed legally upon their death.
To that end the state recognizes contracts. Between two people or thousands. And there is no shortage of them, including those for people who think they are in love or “in sex” and wish to define property rights through some form of union.
Marriage, for its part, is a religious contract that is recognized by the state (thank you first amendment), as a commitment to the sharing and distribution of property. But Marriage is a rite, not a right. It is defined by faith, not the state. (Sorry again gay lobby.) There is no right to Marriage.
If it helps, Heterosexuals are denied the rite of marriage too, for centuries. That is why couples who can’t help who they fall in love with, elope. They seek means other than religious Marriage to join in an eternal union of property rights, for at least as long as the sex is good, or until Divorce do they part. And to facilitate this desire for a contract, even way back when it was just the heterosexuals looking for an alternative, the state acknowledged non-religious unions courtesy of judges, Justices of the Peace, captains of sailing vessels, and other non-religious contracts, collectively known as civil.
The state views civil unions on the same terms as the rite of marriage. They are entitled to the same property rights. Same options when it is time for divorce or distribution of assets in the event of death. Heterosexuals have long accepted this. They did not write their legislators. They did not storm state houses crying for equal rights where none existed. They did not insult or assault people who felt certain that a civil union, in the eyes of the state, serves the same purpose.
It is time for the homosexuals to grow up and do the same?
Unless of course, the leaders of the Gay Lobby have some other objective in mind when they demand the rite of marriage?
