Instapundit hates Married people (not really)

The man, the myth, the legend “Instapundit” (whose wife has been very very nice and linked to me on a number of occasions by the way) has laid out one of the many libertarian arguments that makes me just smack my head and shake my head and say “I used to be that person.” So on to what’s causing my head to have a big red spot today.

The solution to all of this, of course, is to separate marriage and state. There's no reason why the government should be involved in this sort of thing (the origin of Tennessee's statute requiring marriage licenses, it turns out, was a desire to ensure that county clerks got fees, not exactly an overwhelming justification) and there's no reason why people's private living arrangements should be part of public debate. That's my take, anyway.

Here is the problem with this line of thinking. In yee old times before the “modern” Era we had much more flexible standards on what is and is not marriage. If you co-habitated with a woman long enough BAM you get married. But a funny thing happened on the way to Libertopia Multiple wives showed up at the door asking for benefits. While not germane to his initial comments on polygamy, what is germane is that this was a problem to the state. They had no way to be sure who was and wasn’t married.

Don’t think that’s a problem? Look at Social Security. Look at the Federal Pension System. Look at the military retirement system. To save the government from losing money to any Susie sob story who claimed so and so was really her husband, the government began to demand standards. They demanded that the process get smoothed over and made clearer and more transparent.

Look now at your many many large companies (which incidentally if your gay rights groups really cared about gay’s civil rights to marry they would have worked with on the issue there…but they don’t care about that) that have pension and benefit plans that are tied to spouses. You end up with a serious economic problem.

Businesses and employers need a guarantee, and the government is the best party to provide that role. Now there are other alternatives like say a marriage corp. which sets standards that everyone knows are “respectable” enough to justify saying “this counts as marriage to us” but then we come back to the same road