"The gays can marry, but I can't pay workers $2 an hour? What times are these?" — Rand Paul http://t.co/EKqwFNNJZu pic.twitter.com/DM8mjYOIVJ
— Elizabeth S. Bruenig (@ebruenig) June 29, 2015
The libertarians I’ve known personally hold the view that marriage shouldn’t be a government function at all, but if it must be regulated it should be at the state or even the local level, because freedom. Unfortunately, in our imperfect world, there are so many legal rights & responsibilities tied up in the status of married-v-‘single’ (taxes, inheritance, support, child custody… ) that the best we can probably hope for is further removing the civic licensing of one’s ‘marriage state’ from the myriad religious iterations. Little Prince Rand, forced to step outside his ideological fiefdom to explain his GOP-primary-voter-friendly objections to Obergefell v. Hodges, once again steps on his own…. tongue. As reported by Amanda Marcotte at Slate, “Rand Paul Would Rather End Marriage Than Share It With Gay People“:
While most of the football team’s worth of Republicans running for president have reacted to the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision with straightforward rejections, Rand Paul decided to get cute about it. “Perhaps the time has come to examine whether or not governmental recognition of marriage is a good idea, for either party,” he argues in an editorial in Time. “So now, states such as Alabama are beginning to understand this as they begin to get out of the marriage licensing business altogether. Will others follow?”
Paul suggests that marriage shouldn’t be a standard-issue government contract but instead be treated like a business contract, written from scratch by couples for every new marriage…
Paul’s plan to privatize marriage rather than share it with gay people is reminiscent of how segregationists reacted to Brown v. Board of Education… As my colleague Jamelle Bouie explained recently, the decline of the public pool is also a symptom of this reactionary urge to privatize an institution rather than share it with people who conservatives consider undesirable. That the same logic is being whipped out by Paul is no big surprise. This is a man who famously opposed the Civil Rights Act that made the “privatize instead of share” goal harder to achieve.
But although this strategy has a lengthy conservative pedigree, it’s hard to imagine it really taking off as a way to shut gay people out of marriage. If the government really did stop issuing standard marriage contracts and couples were forced to write their own contracts, all that would do is make marriage a privilege of those who can afford lawyers. … The only thing Paul’s brilliant plan would do is ensure that most Americans, gay or straight, would never legally marry at all…
Don’t try to be cunning, Rand. Only your momma thinks you’re that cute, and she might be having her doubts by now.
Open Thread: Rand Paul Explains How Libertarianism = IGMFUPost + Comments (194)