I'm obviously not the only right-leaning person who thinks this doesn't really matter because marriage is a joke:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... rialPage_hYou won't find enthusiasm for same-sex marriage at NRO, but we found it at Facebook, where a friend wrote: "So, now every person in this state who wants to make a lifetime commitment to someone else, someone they love, with all the rights and benefits that accompany, [is] free to do so. Simple as that. Congratulations to anyone whose life is changed by this, and best wishes!"
It's a sweet and generous sentiment but a false premise. Last August, to far less public attention, lawmakers in Albany enacted legislation making New York the final state to institute no-fault divorce, thereby abolishing even the pretense that marriage is a lifetime commitment under the law. Under this regime, marriage is a lifetime commitment only until one spouse decides otherwise.
As a Bloomberg report noted at the time, the Legislature took this step for a good practical reason, "to reduce long, cutthroat court battles over who's to blame when marriages fail":
"There is a human cost and a financial cost" to a system demanding fault-finding, Robert Ross, supervising judge of the matrimonial division in Nassau County, New York, on Long Island, said before the bill became law. "It's hard to know what impact a new law will have, but we do know that a grounds trial, and the expense and delay associated with it, is not a good thing."New York's previous fault-based divorce system was out of step not only with the laws of the other 49 states but also with a culture in which divorce is commonplace and marriage for life is no longer the norm. This state of affairs has multiple and mutually reinforcing causes: female careerism, which reduces the value of the traditional male provider; the social acceptability of nonmarital sex (still quaintly termed "premarital"), made possible by the easy availability of contraception and abortion; and welfare and child-support laws that create incentives for childbearing outside marriage.
None of these developments have anything to do with homosexuality. Deroy Murdock made a good point some years back when he observed, in a column posted at NRO, that "social conservatives who blow their stacks over homosexual matrimony's supposed threat to traditional marriage tomorrow should focus on the far greater damage that heterosexuals are wreaking on that venerable institution today."
Murdock should have written "have wreaked for decades," because the developments we note all long predate any serious consideration of the idea of same-sex marriage. And it must be said that some social conservatives--notably Maggie Gallagher, another frequent National Review contributor--do take a broader view of the subject. As a political matter, however, outside the area of abortion it is hard to find a constituency whose members are eager to subject themselves to greater obligations or constraints in the name of social stability or for the good of the next generation.
Thus for the foreseeable future, civil marriage is likely to retain its character as little more than a financial arrangement. To be sure, many individual marriages are deeply committed relationships. But under a regime that permits either spouse to opt out of the commitment at will, the legal recognition of marriage is mere symbolism.
Your Pal,
Jubber
