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Saint Paul
Friday, March 29, 2024

Why should the state define marriage?

Andrew Jaspers

Having grown up in an intact, traditional family, I didn’t know what a gift I had received until I got to know a college student who I helped lead through RCIA, who I will call Stephanie. Stephanie was a single mother in her mid-20s, and was estran­ged from the father of her child. Her days were filled with worry and anger over that father, and fear for the welfare of her child when in his custody. My experience with her taught me why the state is right to encourage traditional marriage.

Opponents of the state’s definition of marriage as between a man and a woman typically assert that the state is wrong to privilege any particular form of marriage.  And if marriage was created by the state, this might raise the charge of arbitrariness.  But marriage is either an organic institution prior to the state or it is merely a legal entity.

People of opposite sexes in every society have tended to be attracted to one another, couple, co-create children and raise them. Marriage has been the normative institution for both sexual activity and the rearing of children. Additionally, we can observe that the family has always had a sovereignty that has resisted outside coercion, especially from the government. It prefers to determine itself and settle its problems without the assistance of the “courts and cops,” and generally does so quite well.

The self-regulating culture of the intact, married family can be contrasted with fractured families or those that arose out of noncommittal sexual acts.

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These often bring with them great costs to those immediately concerned and to society.

The most benign, separated family ideally arrives at mutually acceptable terms of child visitation, support and property division. However, the ordinary case is of two parties asserting competing positions on all of these questions.

Thus, courts are needed to arbitrate the terms. And the noncompliance with these terms often requires the state to involve itself in wage garnishing to settle child support, and police enforcement of visitation rights, possibly restraining orders, and investigations of child abuse allegations.  The sovereignty of the family is almost completely eliminated with the state’s determination and invasion of the most intimate details of people’s lives.

These acts by the court and the police require massive state expenditures that married and childless couples are forced to subsidize.
And these interventions are in a sense necessary in a free and virtuous society, insofar as they coerce people to live up to their genuine responsibilities.

The effects on children of such situations are well-documented: lower performance and more behavioral problems that require far more educational and disciplinary resources.

The state does not legally penalize non-married couples who raise children. But is it not reasonable that the state legally privilege the form of marriage that is most socially beneficial?  Ordinary families create a system of interdependence that the state has an interest in promoting. It also gives poor women like Stephanie a goal to aspire to.

Andrew Jaspers is a third-year seminarian at St. Paul Seminary and a recent philosophy instructor at Creighton University.

 


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