Why is that a sad day? Marriage is a commitment between two people. What difference does it make what sex either of those two people are? And just exactly why is that any of your business at all?It's a seductive argument. It's also a quintessentially libertarian argument. Of significant note is that it's an argument at all. We're so used to "debating" liberals that we almost get surprised having to combat opinions that have any rational merit to them. Liberals are infuriating, but eventually taking the time to explain all the ways they are wrong gets boring. Libertarians are in a higher intellectual weight bracket, so let's beat up on someone our own size for a change, huh?
Before we get into this, I'd ask the readers here to take a minute and think about this comment. Do you agree with it? Disagree? Try to craft a counterargument in your own head. If you read this blog regularly it's likely you disagree, but can you explain why? I'll take my stab at it below.
The comment isn't quite an argument, but it's close. An argument consists of a claim supported by evidence. In this case, the claim is that one should not care who gets married. The evidence is that no one who is not gay married is affected by gay marriage. That's not technically evidence, it's more of a claim in and of itself, but it works. We shouldn't expect him to prove a negative. He can't prove we aren't personally affected by gay marriage, but he can challenge us to provide countering evidence and, if none is provided, his original claim holds. Let's take up his challenge.
Let's generalize his statement a bit. What we're talking about is ethics or morality. The underlying principle is that one has complete license so long as they don't directly harm another. That is the core of libertarianism. But what about indirect harm? Does one have complete license if it indirectly harms another?
It is not easy to quantify the effects of morality on civilization. Take Rome for example. It is largely believed that late Rome's decadence led to its fall. We can't be for sure to what degree that behavior contributed to collapse. Maybe Rome was doomed to fall anyway because it was over-extended, and the morality of the people was of little consequence. To know for sure, we'd need many Rome-like examples, and an approach for quantifying morality in ancient civilizations.
Another approach is to make analogies to domains where we can make measurements. Instead of morality, let's look at intelligence. One's intelligence is correlated to one's economic success. Few would contest such a notion, and statistical analysis supports the claim. Here's the key question: does the intelligence of others affect one's outcomes? Does national intelligence affect personal wealth? It would seems so, but the degree to which it does really is surprising. The correlation between average national IQ and personal wealth is six times higher than the correlation between personal IQ and personal wealth. That is remarkable. One's success is more tied to the attributes of the nation than one's own personal attributes. It's better to be a dummy in a smart nation than the Einstein of the idiots. Those of us living in America surely note the phenomenon. Thus, when someone chooses to be less intelligent, it does harm us, albeit indirectly.
To round out the argument, we must make the case that wealth follows national morality in the same way that it follow national intelligence. We can look at history to settle this one. The question should be, did nations that rose to power tend to have strong or loose morals? This is so obvious it hardly needs to be discussed. Look at the great powers of last century. America, Russia, Japan, Germany, England...all rose with strict moral codes. It's amusing that so many Americans these days like to mock Victorian-era prudes, yet those prudes built the advanced civilization they so frivolously disregard today. And in no great or wealthy civilizations in all history was gay marriage remotely tolerated. Even in the closest example, the Athenian empire, where homosexual behavior was common, it was in temporary arrangements between men who still married women and raised children. If gay marriage gives a national advantage, then why was the behavior shunned by nearly every culture and civilization?
Darwin answers the question pretty easily. Civilizations tend not to permit gay marriage because it tends to lower the chances of success. It's as simple as that. Libertarianism and liberalism both assume we live and die as a collective of individuals, rather than as a society, despite all evidence to the contrary. The best they can claim is, but now things are different! It's possible they're correct. Maybe technical advances are so profound that they negate the hard lessons our ancestors learned over many thousands of years of trial, error, and death. It's possible, but it's also very risky to assume human societies are that much different than they ever were.
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