On a day when traditional marriage won Maine, I go to the Atlantic and read people arguing that social issues are sinking the GOP in the Northeast. One commenter said:
“I don’t see how the GOP gets out of its current position of being a pointless rump, a discredited regional party associated with the lunatic fringe Christianists.”
While the Tax Payer Bill of Rights lost in Maine, traditional marriage won, but it is the social conservatives who are holding back the party in the Northeast?
In a post on the Atlantic, Megan McArdle describes her relatives in Wayne County, New York and uses this anecdotal evidence to back her case that social issues are losers there. Let me return serve and say that my wife and her family are from Wayne County . . . my in-laws still live there and about all they like about the GOP are the social issues.
The small churches that dot Wayne County have no use for new-fangled marriage and McArdle really should give my friend the pastor with a doctorate in physics a call if she wants to talk about it. Of course, anecdotes are not data, but since the pro-life message is a net winner at the Presidential level and traditional marriage a big winner at the ballot box anecdotes are all the dogmatists have.
Anyone doubt that traditional marriage is more popular in Maine than the kind of small government libertarians favor? I am actually a very small government guy, but isn’t it obvious (30 odd wins in a row) that marriage is more popular than spending cuts?
Put massive spending cuts in social programs on the California Prop ballot and see if it can pull the percentage of votes gained by Prop 8. My guess is that such cuts would do well to hit 40 percent of the vote and it would be a mostly white, rural vote at that . . . a group that also voted for Prop 8 just missing the allies in other communities that saved real marriage.
I am not happy about that, but that is the way it is.
Isn’t the real point that pundits want a GOP that does not shame them in front of their fellow pundits?
Joe or anyone: What is the evidence that abandoning social issues would drive up GOP numbers? I am an eighth generation or so Republican (back to Lincoln in West Virginia!), but I would walk on a pro-choice party. A graduate of Regent University was just elected governor of Virginia in historic fashion and the results prove that social conservatives must go!
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November 5th, 2009 | 11:36 am | #1
I am trying to visualize “a very small government guy” in my mind, and all I can come up with is a diminutive G-man. :-)
November 5th, 2009 | 12:24 pm | #2
There was this child with a hammer…
November 5th, 2009 | 2:07 pm | #3
I don’t see how arminian(libertarian)decisional theology has anything to do with the recent elections?
November 5th, 2009 | 4:15 pm | #4
A small government philosophy would remove government from the licensing of marriages and return it to the Churches. The bad news for Conservative Evangelicals is that this would mean Gay marriage would be legal in every state that had a liberal congregation. Ironically, the typical small government proponent (non-libertarian) wants – needs – a big government to uphold their social agenda. A typical libertarian proponent doesn’t want or need big government in any aspect of their life, which reminds me of James Madison’s essay on “Property”:
“In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.
“In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.
“He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.
“He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.
“He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.
“In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights…
“If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property; which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that acquires their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, the influence [inference?] will have been anticipated, that such a government is not a pattern for the United States.”
November 5th, 2009 | 4:36 pm | #5
I live in Monroe County, right next door to Wayne, and love McArdle as I do, she’s completely wrong about this. Socially, Wayne County is quite conservative (as part of the more generally conservative Western NY and Southern Tier areas). Even Monroe, though far more moderate than Wayne (due to the city of Rochester, which is very liberal), still has its “red” political tendencies (like a Republican county exec and legislature), and gay marriage, even in a city with a significant gay population, would not be popular, due largely to the significant minority population, which tends to be socially a bit more moderate to conservative.
As for Maine, there aren’t enough social conservatives in the entire state to have swung this vote away from gay marriage. There aren’t even enough Republicans–if we can assume that more of them would be pro-traditional marriage folk–to have done so.
November 5th, 2009 | 4:43 pm | #6
R. Hampton,
Actually, my expectation is: The philosophy that says “remove government from licensing marriages” would say “get rid of the idea of licensing marriages”.
Same-sex marriage wouldn’t be legal–marriage wouldn’t be a legal category at all. Same-sex marriage would become, in the law’s eyes, like same-sex cohabitation.
November 5th, 2009 | 7:32 pm | #7
Jugulum,
Both same-sex and opposite-sex marriage would enjoy the same legal status that covers one being a member of Netflix or the NRA (in this hypothetical scenario) — private organizations that are not sanctioned by the government but are Constitutional protected by the Freedom of Association Clause.
November 5th, 2009 | 7:50 pm | #8
Put that way, I agree.
November 5th, 2009 | 10:12 pm | #9
If you get the state out of marriage, a stay-at-home mom and her kids get the shaft in a divorce, because the man can basically claim any property that doesn’t have explicit joint ownership on a title as his own (if he is smart, he will make sure the house and all bank accounts are in his name only), and he doesn’t have to pay a dime in alimony.
Never forget that the purpose of marriage law is to give economic protection to women and children in the event of divorce.
November 5th, 2009 | 11:08 pm | #10
“Never forget that the purpose of marriage law is to give economic protection to women and children in the event of divorce.”
The libertarian would leave to the Church the responsibility to require a binding contract between the parties to be married stipulating protections for women and children in the event of divorce (assuming that said Church would even allow/recognize divorce) Legally binding contracts between private citizens and/or organizations are recognized by our Judicial system.
November 6th, 2009 | 10:29 am | #11
Neither church nor state creates the marriage; the man and woman’s vows before witnesses make the marriage. Government’s obligation is to recognize legally this reality. The church may give its own sanction to marriage, but that does not make marriage a responsibility intrinsic to the church as an institution; otherwise we cannot account for the existence of marriage prior to its foundation two thousand years ago or, today, outside the community of faith.
Marriage is not a contract, despite the views of the libertarians to this effect. It is a covenant between a man and a woman whose very contours are set by the Creator. As such, no one — neither church nor state — has the authority to alter (or, better, pretend to alter) its intrinsic structure. Any pretence that marriage law is capable of changing the definition or marriage is an egregious example of the state overstepping its competence.
November 6th, 2009 | 4:32 pm | #12
If you’re going to ask the judicial system to enforce marriage contracts, guess what? You just got the government back into the marriage business.
Getting the government out of marriage means no marriage contract, express or implied (i.e. common-law marriage). You can’t have it both ways–you can’t say “Get the state out of marriage!” and expect the state to enforce financial obligations on a man who leaves his wife and kids after twenty years of marriage. The two are mutually exclusive.
November 6th, 2009 | 6:45 pm | #13
Fearsome Tycoon,
That’s a fair point, but binding arbitration can provide the enforcement of legal contracts without governmental intervention.
November 10th, 2009 | 10:12 pm | #14
[...] Reynolds, writing at the Evangel blog, wonders about that prediction that Christians would become a fringe political force if they stuck with their position on same-sex marriage. This after Maine, of all places, [...]
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