Gordaen's Blog

“What’s government got to do, got to do with it?” … too much!

Marriage is supposed to be the bond between two people, to live forever and ever, to receive a bunch of gifts from family and friends, and to have a lust-filled two-week getaway. Well okay, maybe it means a little something different to everyone, but normally it is considered a spiritual bond between two people, the specifics of which depend on those two people and their religion(s).

I think that pretty much eliminates it from the realm of “the government should be allowed to control (and subsequently ruin) it.” Not that the government messes everything up, they do some stuff right like showing Americans how to properly manage money… no wait… like showing that violence is not the answer to all problems… no wait… by encouraging conservation of natural resources… no wait… like spending billions on missions to Mars so we can continue to ruin our planet, knowing we have a backup. See, I knew they did something right…

By now, if you haven’t realized that I tend to diverge from my point continuously, uh… I do that. My point is that marriage should not be controlled by the government. A government marriage grants certain privileges (which means those privileges are denied to those who cannot be married… but that’s another point entirely). To take a simple example, a male and female who have decided to live together forever and not be married quickly find trouble when they bear children. Guess what, the dad has to adopt the children to be a legal guardian! If the government really believes that uniting two people as the foundation of a family is the correct thing to do, then that act should be kept separate from marriage. The way it is now, the government forces non-religious people to marry (a religious act) in order to receive those privileges. That’s about as far from “separation of church and state” as you can be.

Come to think of it, the only other really important time to say, “I do” is when asked “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me God.”