The Risks of Deregulating Marriage

Here's an essay by Stanley Kurtz from NR a few years ago arguing that the real danger in legal homosexual marriage is that it breaks the social requirement for monogamy in marriage. It attempts to answer the "libertarian question" of why those who're hesitant to regulate personal freedom should be in favor of not legalizing gay marriage.

He also has the cover story in this week's Weekly Standard, which tackles the growing trend toward polyamorous relationships and how, in Sweden, there's a movement that seems poised to push for legalized polyamorous marriage, which would likely follow in the US as soon as gay marriage becomes legal nationally.

I'm just iffy on this, though. I agree with him that polyamorous, non-monogamous lifestyles are often detrimental to those who practice them. And I'm even willing to concede, to a degree, that legalized homosexual marriage and polyamorous marriage will further break the taboo on extra-marital relationships; it will weaken our already fragile will for monogamy. But it still seems pretty precarious to me to want to regulate this sort of risk, but not, say, that of smoking. Everyone agrees that smoking is bad for your health, and I think it's obvious that portrayals of smoking in movies, video games, etc... makes people more likely to do it themselves: it's advertising, and big, glamorous, idealized (even if villianous) images are influential. (Why else would companies spend billions each year on advertising?) But this doesn't mean we should regulate smoking or smoking in the media. Transfer that logic to the marriage debate and it becomes quite the thorny question.

The government's job isn't to protect people from risk or unhappiness, and neither should we want that to become its job -- the government just isn't very good at it. So why marriage and not smoking? Why marriage but not anything else, for that matter? Risk is a part of life. Individuals should inform themselves about it and have the power to make their own decisions about how to proceed. Right?