Marriage Policies and Gay Marriage

Though many individuals have short political memories, if you're reading this blog, you probably remember the massive media coverage given to the government supported gay marriage issue a few years ago. By coverage, I mean the deluge of slurs and straw person attacks directed against anyone who criticized this new frontier of equality.

The short history: for decades, gays regarded marriage as an oppressive, patriarchal heterosexual institution. Then more gays discovered that marriage has financial benefits, including tax benefits and often health insurance for spouses. In a geological blink of an eye, heterosexuals went from being demonized for supporting marriage to being demonized for failing to support government funded gay marriage.

Given the gay desire for and gay availability of promiscuous sex, gay partners must be careful they don't get ripped off in marriage. Partners gain tax benefits and one partner often gains health insurance, but a potential cost is divorce, where one partner takes a large chunk of the other's assets. Many gays likely engage in assortative class mating to avoid financial pitfalls. Many have open marriages of semi-convenience.

But jealousy happens.

Gays often have excessive self-interest. That interior decorating doesn't get done for free. When physical anthropologist Greg Cochran argues, homosexuality is hell on genetic fitness, what he also states or implies is that gays provide little help to their breeding relatives. Gay estrangement from relatives results from more than intolerance on both sides.

What to do:

1. governments should get out the marriage tax entitlement business (along with most other existing tax entitlements). Marriage tax entitlements are an inefficient way to help families with minor children, especially since many married couples have no minor children. Instead, the government should use tax entitlements and other policies to promote eugenics. Eventually, governments should abandon the marriage business altogether, leaving marriage to private entities. Marriage has great value, but its value should not be based on government policies that encourage divorce and gold digging. Alimony and palimony must be banned.
2. health care within a society must not be based on who your relatives are.
3. "But without government run marriage, a hospital can keep my partner from visiting me as I'm dying." Simple solution: require everyone to put a list of those who can and cannot visit on their government ID and in their medical records.
4. Women are hypergamous, that is, they believe they deserve the partners they consider best, no matter how far from the best those men or women are. Government run marriage encourages women to divorce, legally steal a man's assets, and move in with supposedly better man. It requires men to pay child support when cuckolded. It also grants marriages quickly and with little thought. Private entities, especially churches, are more likely to require counseling and waiting periods before marriage, leading to better marriages and beneficial break ups before harmful marriages occur. Churches should be strict about marriage, willing to tell some couples they are not a good match. Some men are also hypergamous.

Compared to nonwhite invasions and other aspects of cultural Marxism, government supported gay marriage is of minor import. But the debate reeks, partly because it was yet another example of activists achieving their goals by demonizing opposition and excluding the best counterarguments from public consciousness. And also because some Christians incited counter-demagoguery, while maintaining their support for far worse aspects of cultural Marxism. Evangelicals continue to grandstand on gay marriage while lives and societies fall into ruin from ethnoracial diversity.

Activists should seldom be rewarded for despicable rhetoric, no matter which sides they belong to.