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Sunday, June 22, 2008

Of Course Polygamy is Next

The Anchoress has put up a post that received a very educated response. The pro-gay marriage cabal has been relying on the fact that there are financial advantages to being a married couple.

That's true.

And once we are in the business of re-defining marriage there is no constitutional reason why the number two should be the limit to the married state; nor the relationship of the people in the marriage so:

Of course polygamy is next. There is now no rational basis for maintaining the prohibition on it.

Soon thereafter, of course, incestuous marriages are quite forseeable, if only as an estate planning device. For example, currently, mega-taxes are imposed on transfers of wealth following death (estate taxes and inheritance taxes), including inter-generational transfers. However, federal and state death tax laws also recognize a marital exemption, allowing the estate to pass to a spouse tax-free.

As such, it would be legal malpractice for a lawyer to not advise widowed spouses to marry their children. By marrying their children, they obtain the benefit of a tax-free transfer via the marital exemption upon the death of the parent/spouse. By not marrying their children, such transfer at death gets taxed.

The fact that they never live together or never have sex is, of course, within the couple’s right to privacy, i.e., none of the government’s business.

When we start defining marriage to be whatever the hell we want it to be, such inane and absurd results are sure to happen.

But like I said before — there is no “law” anymore. A “law,” properly understood, is something akin to transcendent truth — unchanging. Human law, e.g. statutes and judicial decisions, have the force of law, but are not technically law per se. Even so, such human law historically has been seen as having to be consistent with reason, e.g. the common law, so as to be fairly applicable to everyone.

Today, instead of law, we have “a mirror of our culture,” which is as about as subjective and relativistic as you can get. Mirrors of culture are not law, and never have been, but that is what we have got. As such, we can alter at will the law of human life; we can alter at will the law of sex/gender; we can alter at will the law of marriage. I suppose if you can mutilate a woman’s genitals, pump her full of hormones, and surgically construct an appendage, which some insist is a facsimile of a penis, you can call a woman a man as a matter of “law,” and when she later gets pregnant because they apparently have not yet removed her uterus, you can print headlines that a “man is pregnant,” but she is still a she and always will be as a matter of fact and truth.

So are we at all surprised that something like “marriage” could be nevertheless treated as nothing more than moldable clay — even though it pre-existed all courts, pre-existed all government, pre-existed all organized society, and thus has a set “definition” (being the union of a man and woman), which, having not been created by government, is beyond the power or competency of government to add to or subtract from or change in any way?

God may not be dead, but man’s belief in the idea of law is gasping its last breaths.


I'm going to advise my wife, should she survive me, to marry my son and daughter to avoid the estate tax.

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