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Marriage

By pharrell

A few weeks back I went to a talk here at Yale by Patrick Sammon, the head of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay and lesbian conservatives who are trying to promote gay rights within the GOP. The talk was hosted by the Yale Law Republicans and also by the Yale OutLaws, the law school gay and lesbian organization, and it attracted a pretty diverse group of students. What most struck me about the talk wasn't anything Sammon said (he conceded that the last seven years have been tough), but the fact that a number of my classmates from different political persuasions--including at least two who self-identified as evangelical Christians--suggested that the government should get out of the marriage business. Basically, they seemed to share view of this New York Times op-ed:

Perhaps it?s time to revert to a much older marital tradition. Let churches decide which marriages they deem ?licit.? But let couples ? gay or straight ? decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship.

The view among my classmates on the issue was essentially libertarian, that people should have the right to structure their private lives as they saw fit, and that marriage, which, after all, derives from religious, not civil, traditions, does not need to be entwined with the state to retain its meaning. While I'm not going to pretend that Yale Law conservatives--or liberals, for that matter--are representative of the nation at large, it is interesting to see my generation swinging strongly in favor of a much more open conception of domestic relationships.

Full post as published by Harrell Blog on November 28, 2007 (boomark / email).