Libertarianism and Same-Sex Marriage

I'm a libertarian, and I'm a supporter of same-sex marriage rights. George Weigel of the National Review Online is neither, but that didn't stop him from politely explaining why I, along with every other libertarian, should oppose gay marriage:

“Gay marriage” in fact represents a vast expansion of state power: In this instance, the state of New York is declaring that it has the competence to redefine a basic human institution in order to satisfy the demands of an interest group looking for the kind of social acceptance that putatively comes from legal recognition. But as Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and others argued during the days before the fateful vote on June 24, the state of New York does not have such competence, and the assertion that it does casts an ominous shadow over the future.
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And that is an exercise of power that libertarians ought, in theory, to resist, not support.

Yeah, I'm not on board with that. See, among libertarians, there are generally two approaches to marriage:

• The government has no business interfering with marriage.
• The government has no business interfering with marriage, but that train left the station a long time ago, so how about we license marriage in a way that respects the rights of consenting adults to voluntarily enter into contracts with one another.

Weigel, however, is proposing a third approach:

• The government has no business interfering with marriage any more or less than it currently does—at the moment the government is doing just the right amount of meddling, and should continue to meddle at the present level until the end of time.

I suppose it's consistent with their usual resistance to change that conservatives are so often willing to defend the status quo-level of government meddling, but that doesn't make it any less headache-inducing. Non-conservatives—libertarians, liberals, anarchists, Marxists, etc.—don't collectively agree on much, but if there's one thing they're almost always in agreement on, it's that the government is not doing the right amount of meddling.

Back to the article:

Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power.

A humane society will find ample room in the law for accommodating a variety of human relationships in matters of custodial care, hospital visiting rights, and inheritance. But there is nothing humane about the long march toward the dictatorship of relativism, nor will there be anything humane about the destination of that march, should it be reached. The viciousness visited upon Archbishop Dolan and other defenders of marriage rightly understood during the weeks before the vote in Albany is yet another testimony to the totalitarian impulse that lurks beneath the gay marriage movement.

One might have thought libertarians understood this. But evidently some do not.

Wow, really? We're on a "long march toward the dictatorship of relativism"? Libertarianism is as anti-relativistic as it gets. He's the one arguing that the government should sanction one type of marriage and prohibit another, ignoring the question of how the government's involvement is justified at all.^[1]

George Weigel is trying to impose an entirely new definition of libertarianism—one that involves acceptance of morally deviant behavior like licensing of private relationships and state-sanctioned discrimination. Such a radical re-definition would undoubtedly destroy the institution of libertarianism as we know it.

1. Speaking of slippery slopes, Weigel, as required under Rule 4.2 of the Bylaws of Conservative Rhetoric, adds the following:

[W]hy stop at marriage between two men or two women? Why not polyamory or polygamy? Why can’t any combination of men and women sharing financial resources and body parts declare itself a marriage, and then demand from the state a redress of its grievances and legal recognition of it as a family? On what principled ground is the New York state legislature, or any other state legislature, going to say “No” to that, once it has declared that Adam and Steve, or Eve and Evelyn, can in fact get married according to the laws of the state?

"On what principled ground…?" He asks rhetorically, as if the only permissible answer is a blank stare and a brain aneurysm. How about the ground that, while multiple state and federal courts have applied a heightened standard of review to laws that discriminate based on gender or sexual orientation, I'm aware of no court decision suggesting a similar standard should be applied to laws that discriminate based on numbers.
    Also, in compliance with Rule 1.1 of the Bylaws of Libertarian Rhetoric, I'll add that it should be none of the government's damn business if more than two consenting adults want to get married. If Weigel really understood libertarianism, he'd know that the whole "demand from the state a redress of its grievances" thing wouldn't be much of an issue.