New York having become the latest US state to legalize same-sex marriage, you might like to look at a couple of arguments against this trend. They come from George Weigel. This is one of them:
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.
It is a totalitarian temptation to try to remodel reality against the grain of what is possible or what is wanted by people, but there's something which states do, including non-totalitarian, liberal-democratic states, and that is to reform old laws to reflect changing realities when the changes in question are for the better. Just states should only protect old institutions when they can be defended as morally superior to the alternatives that might replace them. Weigel's assumption here, which he neither defends in general nor argues for in the case at hand, is that older must mean better. But when it doesn't, yielding to or facilitating change isn't necessarily totalitarian.
Weigel also tries to use the old meaning of marriage to his advantage:
There is a curious rhetorical fact that has usually gone unremarked in these debates, but which is worth pointing out. That what the New York state legislature approved has to be described, not as marriage, but as "gay marriage" or "same-sex marriage" is itself a verbal indicator that what is being done here is counterintuitive. We all know, or thought we knew, what marriage is, and to add the qualifier "gay" or "same-sex" is a tacit admission by the proponents of the practice that it requires an appeal to authority to enforce what seems strange, odd, not right. The verbal tic of "gay marriage" or "same-sex" marriage is thus itself a rhetorical warning sign that what was done in Albany was an exercise in raw state power, the state's asserting that it can do X simply because it claims that it has the power to do so.
This is just plain silly. The qualifiers 'gay' or 'same-sex', to go with 'marriage', are required so as to register that a type of union not previously recognized by the law as marriage from now on will be. To that extent, they also register that the meaning of the word 'marriage' is being extended. But it is no more a sinister signal of arbitrary power than if a law providing for such-and-such procedures to cover adoptive parenthood were to include the word 'adoptive' before the word 'parenthood'. Weigel may be against same-sex marriage and have some real reasons for being against it, but the bare use of qualifying adjectives doesn't prove, as he implies it does, an illegitimate use of 'raw state power'. (Thanks: LM.)
