Marriage License Form 4473

14 April 2008

As I was showering to-night, I was thinking about hypotheses concerning sexual and gender orientation and environment, and wondering how they might be tested. Then it occurred to me that some of them would become far more testable if same-sex marriage were legalized, as it would effectively register a significant share of homosexuals and bisexuals as such.

At that point, a normative concern awoke: With the push to place homosexuality on equal footing, databases are being creäted that could later be used to facilitate persecution of homosexuality and of bisexuality.

I have in the past asserted that the state ought to treat marriage as simply a contract. It's not that I think that marriage itself ought to be an ordinary contract, but that I don't think that its extraordinary aspects are the business of the state. I don't think that the state should be effecting marriage, nor promoting or shaping it beyond simply assuring that any contractual obligations creäted by marriage are met.

My basic reason for this position has been and remains that the state shouldn't be engaged in active social engineering, whether it be the sort dear to the political left or that championed by Focus on the Family. But I now see that there is some danger — albeït perhaps fairly small — that records creäted by this one sort of social engineering programme might be used for a far more dire programme later.

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