Category: Marriage
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Why Not Privatize Marriage?
Being a conservative, I advocate limited government. Big government leads to big trouble as we fight endlessly, acrimoniously, and fruitlessly over all sorts of issues that we really ought not be fighting over. As one of my slogans has it, "The bigger the government, the more to fight over." The final clause of the First Amendment…
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Same-Sex Marriage: No Surprise Conservatives Lost
Four reasons off the top of my head. 1. Conservatives don't know how to argue and persuade. In the main, conservatives are not at home on the plane of ideas and abstractions where one must do battle with leftist obfuscation. Conservatives are often non-intellectual when they are not anti-intellectual. I am talking about conservatives…
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Elizabeth Anscombe, “Contraception and Chastity”
An untimely meditation by a brilliant mind. A powerful antidote to the confused suggestions of the age. Excerpt: If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here – not…
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Happy Wife, Happy Life
I borrow this fine line from Dennis Prager. (I just now heard him say something that I would put as follows: a Jew can no more lose his Jewishness by the assimilation consequent upon bearing a name such as 'Dennis' than a Chomsky can preserve his Jewishness by bearing the name 'Noam.') But I digress.…
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Same-Sex ‘Marriage’
A couple of articles that I may or may not have time to comment on. Ross Douthat, The Wild Ideas of Social Conservatives James Jacobs, Is Homosexual Marriage Even Possible? Here are my entries on marriage and 'marriage.'
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Spencer Case on Same-Sex Marriage
His latest NRO column. Spencer tells me that "I've been mulling writing something like this for a very long time. I think this is reasonably good at expressing what I want to express, but I wouldn't have picked the title and sub-head." Related: The Infertility Argument for Same-Sex Marriage There are a number of good…
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The Wise Live by Probabilities, not by Possibilities
The worldly wise live by the probable and not by the possible. It is possible that you will reform the person you want to marry. But it is not probable. Don't imagine that you can change a person in any significant way. What you see now in your partner is what you will get from…
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The Terms of Our Surrender
This Douthat essay is especially relevant in the wake of Mozilla CEO Eich's resignation.
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Tony Flood on Governor Brewer’s Capitulation
Commenting on a NYT piece on Brewer's capitulation to the anti-liberty forces of political correctness, long-time correspondent Anthony Flood writes: “Religious liberty is a core American and Arizona value,” Governor Brewer philosophized, but “so is no discrimination.” The syntactically challenged governor, or was it her ghost-writer?, evaded the implication that, should the two conflict,…
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Marriage, the State, and Slippery Slope Arguments: An Objection Considered
A Reader Objects "First, if your justification of state involvement in marriage is the production and protection of children, then I think you open yourself to intervention of the state beyond what a limited government conservative should be comfortable with. If protection of marriage by the state for such a goal is the standard, many…
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Why Privatizing Marriage Cannot Work
Francis Beckwith explains. As I see it, the right place to start this debate about marriage, same-sex 'marriage,' and privatization is with the logically prior questions: Is state involvement in marriage justified? and What justifies the state's involvement in marriage? The only good answers are that (i) state involvement is justified, (ii) because of the…
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Liberals as ‘Diversity’ Fascists
I refer to contemporary liberals as LINOs, liberals in name only. Why? See here: I couldn’t believe it. I was trying to discuss traditional marriage – and the state was trying to stop me. Incredible, in a 21st-century European country, but true. I was invited to speak at a conference on marriage last summer, to…
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A Question About Marriage
For many years now I have been an occasional reader of your blog, and I greatly appreciate your insight on many subjects, particularly your criticism of the Left. I am, I hate to admit, an aspiring academic who is taking on enormous debt to finish a Ph.D. in sociology of religion, and am immersed in…
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A Cure for Infatuation
Marriage is an excellent cure for infatuation. It is also a test whether the infatuation was something more. If the marriage lasts and deepens, then it was; if not, then it wasn't. To be infatuated is to be rendered fatuous, silly. Not that infatuation is all bad. A love that doesn't begin with it is…
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Better Unwed Than Ill-Wed
The title is mine to the following observation of Paul Brunton (Notebooks, vol. 5, part I, p. 106, #240): It is true that men who are lonely or young or romantic are likely to marry a young woman with whom propinquity has brought them in touch. In such cases he puts an illusion around the…