[extropy-chat] Gay marriage in Spain, a world of change

[Matthew Gingell]

On Jul 20, 2005, at 5:07 PM, Mike Lorrey wrote:

> Racists and bigots have never opposed marriage licenses for  
> interracial
> couples, that is what government marriage licensing was invented  
> for in
> the US, to control miscegenation.

I can't parse this in a way that makes sense to me: Racists didn't  
want to withhold marriage licenses from mixed race couples, which is  
why marriage licenses were instituted in the first place? What?

> That gays want to demonstrate that
> they are chattel of the state, rather than demand a return to the
> historically proper marriage law for free persons:

In Libertarian Wonderland we'd all be free to marry our guns and we'd  
never have to worry about being oppressed by the Post Office, but  
until the revolution comes gays, just like everybody else, have to  
live within the system and institutions which already exist. Would  
you argue that it's fine to exclude woman from driving on state  
financed roads, or that objecting to such a policy is illegitimate,  
because we shouldn't have state financed roads in the first place and  
that belief trumps any objection one might have to how existing roads  
are regulated?

> no licensing for
> free persons, is evident, as I've stated multiple times in the past:
> there is only ONE THING that gays will gain with marriage licensing
> that they can't replicate with regular contract law, and that is the
> heritability of social security benefits.

This is obviously untrue... it's just so obviously untrue I don't  
understand how you could possibly believe it or why you would assert  
it. Just to name a couple of falsifying examples, spousal privilege  
isn't obtainable by civil contract, neither is special consideration  
of your partner for immigration purposes, and neither are a wide  
range of income, estate, and other tax benefits.

> You don't become more free by demanding more chains.

If you want to argue on libertarian grounds that government should  
get out of the marriage business entirely, I can respect that. If you  
want to argue that marriage is a bogus institution and therefore it  
is acceptable to withhold it from whatever despised minority you feel  
like excluding, then I can't.

Matt