Implied Dissent

Monday, June 14, 2004

People need to learn more about dirty bombs. Gordon Prather isn't a particularly great writer, but he is wicked smaht and an ok writer, so you should be able to follow along.
I found this article on Hayek and gay marriage quite interesting. I doubt that Hayek (one of the great political economists of the 20th century) ever wrote on or thought much about the topic, but I think the way he would look at the issue mirrors mine own in many ways. What I'd like to see is government stop involving itself in marriages. Help enforce marriage contracts, but not be involved in the marriage business itself. This isn't going to happen, so then we should stop treating certain marriages differently under the law, because that's what's happening. Gay people are married just like straight people are, except that a marriage of a man and a woman has the law's protection. However, we shouldn't rush in either. As we learned from Hayek, institutions exist they way they do for reasons, and we need to be careful when we change them. If the armed services had been all-white and then suddenly fully integrated, there would have been extreme problems. Instead, they were segregated for many years, then integrated. There still were problems, but not nearly as many. We should move forward on gay marriage, but do so in a piecemeal, step-by-step way. Civil unions and state-by-state initiatives seem to me be the way to go for now. As people see that society doesn't fall apart where it is tried, resistance will weaken and more progress can be made. I'll listen to alternative theories of course, but this seems to be the most logical way to deal with the issue.

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