Marriage is being debated in the Supreme Court. Many people say the federal government has no business defining marriage. Those people are wrong. But there is a more important point to consider.
As you probably know, I am a constitutional scholar like our current head government worker (B. H. Obama). I have already analyzed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in a post last fall. Almost all DOMA does is define a word so that federal laws are made understandable. (It also makes it illegal for judges in one state to impose their state’s laws on another state.) Not only is it constitutional for Congress to define ambiguous words that appear in its own statutes, it is required. Clearly the word “marriage” has become ambiguous; some states allow marriage between hetero- and homo-sexuals, others permit marriage only between hetero-sexuals. Congress had a duty to define the word “marriage” as it applies to federal laws. This kind of thing happens, and I have examples from business law to give, but that would take me far from the major point I want to make here. Suffice it to say that all the rhetoric about federalism, discrimination, outlawing love, politics entering the bedroom, and the plethora of other irrelevant arguments against DOMA are a smokescreen. DOMA is constitutional (even though a majority of the Supreme Court are probably going to say otherwise).
But as I said in the opening paragraph, there is a more important point to consider, and that point is this:
Why should society, through government, favor married people?
Keep in mind that when DOMA says where federal laws refer to “marriage” that word must be interpreted to mean a union between one man and one woman, the vast majority of the federal laws that are affected are tax laws. So why do we want to favor married people with our tax laws? It is after all downright discriminatory against unmarried people to give certain tax breaks only to married people.
The answer is that by historical reasoning, society decided we needed tax laws that were designed to promote and protect the historically traditional family unit. Now the Supreme Court, using hysterical reasoning, is about to make us all view those tax breaks as a right that must be extended to gay couples. And here’s more about marriage: Besides obviously historically un-traditional gay marriages, something like 75% of Black children are born out-of-wedlock (again, non-traditional), Whites barely even have children anymore (no more nuclear families there either), and over half of all marriages end in divorce!
So it is time to face a glaring fact of the 21st century:
The historically traditional family unit barely exists anymore. The tax code is simply doing a very poor job of promoting and protecting the historically traditional family unit.
This whole issue about whether gays should be allowed to marry is irrelevant except to reinforce the bigger point in modern society:
The reasoning behind preferential tax treatment of married people is faulty in today’s society. It’s time to end all preferential treatment of married people! It’s time to stop discriminating against the unmarried!
Tax breaks are not a right. The common sense approach to marital status in the modern world demands that we repeal all of the tax breaks for all kinds of married people now!