Micah Tillman

As I mentioned below, part of the problem a lot of people have with the legalization of same-sex marriage is that they are afraid there will be no logically-consistent reason to stop expanding the legal understanding of marriage once the government starts.

I argued in my most recent article on the subject, that if the logic of legalizing same-sex marriage is understood, you see that not only was the legalization of same-sex marriage inevitable, but it creates no legal leakiness.

This doesn’t mean that those who worry about the leakiness problem can completely relax, because as far as I’ve seen, nobody but me and “my readers” understand the true logic of same-sex marriage. The CA Supreme Court decision, for example, was reached illogically.

But once you see the logic, you have “truth on your side.” And that’s helpful at least.

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The logic goes as follows:

There are certain things about you which the government is not allowed to pay attention to when it comes to deciding whether you can vote. One is your ethnicity. The other is your gender.

In other words, the government is supposed to encounter its citizens as raceless and sexless. When you exercise your citizenship in the most fundamental way possible — by voting — you show up to government as having no ethnicity or gender.

If you’re okay with that, if you’re willing to make the exchange, you’ve essentially given up your race and sex to become a (fully-functioning, actualized) citizen. You’ve said it’s okay with you to not have your ethnicity and gender taken into account as being part of what makes you a citizen.

Just like some men may see you as nothing but a sex object, the government sees you as a sexless object. And just like some racists may see you as nothing but a walking instantiation of your race, the government sees you as raceless.

(Have you ever met a government walking down the street? Dangerously close to WEediness, there Tillman!)

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If you essentially give up your race and sex to become a citizen, people in government eventually realize that they probably shouldn’t be asking about their citizens’ races and sexes when they come to apply for marriage licenses. So interracial marriage becomes legal. And same-sex marriage becomes legal.

The question is, does seeing your citizens as genderless lead people in government to be more likely to legalize marrying children, marrying animals, marrying more than one person at a time?

And the answer is “no.” Genderlessness has nothing to do with any of those issues.

Rather, to slip a child marriage by government watchdogs, they’d have to be paying no attention to age. And yet government sees you as having an age: you’re either younger than 18, or 18 and above.

To slip a human-animal marriage by government watchdogs, they’d have to be paying no attention to species. And yet government has not been barred from doing so. There is no clause in the Constitution which says, “The right of citizens to vote shall not be infringed on account of their species.”

And to slip a polygamist marriage past the government watchdogs, they’d have to be paying no attention to number. (”2 people getting married? 3 people getting married? It’s all the same to me! All I see is the algebraic variable ‘x‘!”)

And yet you don’t give up the fact that there’s only one of you to vote. In fact, people get thrown in jail for pretending to be other people (e.g., ID theft), pretending there could be more than one of any given person.

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You can’t logically get from “citizens are sexless” to the legalization of child-marriage, bestiality, and polygamy. Those three perversions of marriage would depend on completely different premises (”Citizens are ageless,” “Citizens are speciesless,” and “Citizens are numberless.”)

So, what we should be doing is insisting that people in our government be logical. It’s not so much that we don’t want a government that legalizes perversions, it’s that we don’t want an illogical, irrational government. Right?

Tags: Bestiality, California Supreme Court, Child Marriage, Citizen, ethnicity, Gay Marriage, Gender, Government, Logic, Marriage, Number, Polygamy, Race, Same-Sex Marriage, Species