We libertarians pretty much all agree that marriage shouldn’t be controlled by the state, and we love our handy “separation of marriage and state” phrase. (We pretty much support the separation of everything and state.) But here’s my question, and maybe it’s one that’s been answered before: how would this be implemented?
The current tax and benefits structures moderated by government or answerable in some way to government make marriage a hot economic and political, as well as social issue. That, after all, is the main reason so many people are putting so much time and money into getting gay marriage legalized—because legal marriage comes along with various perks. So would separating marriage and state require first the elimination of these perks? If so, doesn’t that make it impossible to do? I’m not talking about Galt’s Gulch—I’m talking about how we would actually privatize marriage in our lifetimes.
To take an analogy I’m familiar with: college accreditation. Accreditors are not government entities, but private organizations. This supposedly keeps the government from interfering with the educational freedom of schools. But because accreditation opens the door for government funding, only those accreditors that are officially recognized by the Secretary of Education are allowed to grant accreditation recognized by the Department of Education. Is this the model that privatized marriage would follow?
If so, that would hardly cure the problem, since it would shift the debate up to whether the government recognizes certain marriage-accreditors. If the Church of So and So, which accredits same sex marriages, received official recognition from the State of California, then gay marriage would be “legalized” for all intents and purposes—and therefore that decision would be the subject of protests, wouldn’t it?
Has anyone written on how we would get there from here? If not, could someone, please?
