The main job of liberals like Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman, and Michael Moore is to keep the liberals convinced that knuckle-dragging Republicans are responsible for everything that's wrong with America and that the solution is replacing them with intelligent Democrats. They seem to be doing a good job. On the other hand, the main job of Conservatives like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh,Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reily, Mark Levin, and Michelle Malkin is to keep conservatives convinced that evil, God-hating Democrats are responsible for all that's wrong with America and that the solution is to elect good Christian Republicans.[i] Unfortunately for us, they too seem to be doing a snow-white job – or a white snow job depending on one’s perspective. Ann’s recent hit piece on Ron Paul in her Human Events article, Get Rid of Government, But First Make Me President, illustrates the extent to which these disinformers will bend logic and make fools of themselves in order to accomplish their purpose.
Now I don’t think Ann is all bad – she has an unquestionably sharp wit – but she commits a logical blunder of the first order when she attempts to go from Ron Paul’s statement
“I don't think government should give us a license to get married. It should be in the church"
to
“If state governments stop officially registering marriages, then who gets to adopt? … Who inherits in the absence of a will? Who is entitled to a person's Social Security and Medicarebenefits? How do you know if you're divorced and able to remarry?”
This is a classic non sequitur. Registering a marriage is different than granting a license. You can have a requirement to register a marriage without having a requirement to get a license. It’s just like having a baby. A license is not required to have a baby, but the law does require the birth to be registered after the fact.
By definition, a license grants permission to do something that is otherwise illegal. (Bouvier’s Law dictionary defines a LICENSE as, “A right given by some competent authority to do an act, which without such authority would be illegal. The instrument or writing which secures this right, is also called a license. VideAyl. Parerg, 353; 15 Vin. Ab. 92; Ang. Wat. Co. 61, 85.”)
When a couple requests a marriage license, they are entering into a 3 way contract with the state. This is explicitly stated in some state laws and acknowledged in many other places. For example see the first page of the Family Law manual produced by the Ohio Bar Association below. Or read the anecdotal, and possibly apocryphal, conversation that Virgil Cooper had with a clerk in the Maricopa County courthouse in Arizona that explains the implications of the fact that a marriage license from the state makes the state a party to the marriage.
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| Published by the Ohio Bar Association |
All of the questions Ann Coulter raises about divorce, adoption,inheritance etc. were answered long ago. This country ran just fine for the first 250 years of its existence with the very situation she is mocking. Marriage licenses are relatively recent in history of the US, becoming commonplace only in the early 20th century. The absence of a state issued marriage license in no way prevents the state from requiring that prospective adoptive parents be a married man and woman. What’s more, eliminating the necessity of asking the state’s permission to marry in no way diminishes the ability of a married couple to establish that they are married. It can be established the same way any other contract is established. Below is copy of the 1856 marriage covenant from my great, great grandparents. It is not a state issued document and it says nothing about it being a license, but it’s proof based on multiple witnesses that they were married.
In making irrational and ludicrous statements like: “Libertarians would be better off spearheading a movement to get rid of stop signs than to get rid of officially sanctioned marriage. A world without government stop signs would be safer than a world without government marriage." Ann is not only showing her us her juvenile reasoning ability, she is also, by implication,calling Blackstone a fool.
According to my 1915 US edition of his Commentary on the Laws of England, Blackstone said of marriage, “Our law considers marriage in no other light than as a civil contract. The holiness of the matrimonial state is left entirely to the ecclesiastical law: the temporal courts not having jurisdiction to consider unlawful marriage as a sin, but merely a civil inconvenience. The punishment therefore or annulling of incestuous or other unscriptural marriages, is in the province of the spiritual courts which act for the welfare of the soul. And taking it in this civil light, the law treats it as it does all other contracts: allowing it to be good and valid in all cases, where the parties as the time of making it were, in the first place, willing to contract;secondly, able to contract; and lastly, actually did contract, in the proper forms and solemnities required by law.” [Chapter 15, §533,Vol. 1] Emphasis mine.
The editor of the edition I have ( William Carey Jones, Director of the School of Jurisprudence, University of California ) says in the footnotes that “the law gives no action to the wife or child, directly, for any breach of the husband’s or the parent’s duty,” although it might punish a parent for neglect. In other words the state had no authority to interfere in a private contract unless there was a crime being committed.
When Ann states:
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