Okay I admit censusing probably isn’t a real word. Anyway whilst the ALP federal government, under the leadership of Kevin Rudd, refuses to sanction same sex marriages in Australia the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is apparently set to accept the reality of gay marriage in the context of the next census.
http://www.starobserver.com.au/news/2009/05/12/census-to-count-gay-marriages/13107
So gays can’t get married in Australia, but if they do find a place where they can get married then it will still count. Or at least be counted.
Australian Libertarian Society (old site) 
I wonder why governments, even secular governments, are defining marriage to begin with? Since when did the semantics of people’s domestic arrangements and sex lives become a government function? Well yes, since always really, but why are we persisting with it in the C21st? We don’t look to the government to establish legal definitions of clever or well dressed, we accept it’s a matter of opinion. Why can’t a gay couple could say they’re married and everyone else could agree or disagree or not give a toss either way according to their own values? And why is the government interested anyway?
Angry Exile – male, straight, married and completely indifferent to anyone else’s domestic situation or what they choose to call it.
It is always in the nature of people to always want more power- so why should we suppose that politicians are any different? Being able to define anything, such as marriage, keeps them in control- so they don’t want to give that up. The Hoarding instinct, clutching laws and red tape as close as you can… Just In Case! (If you leave the reason undefined, you can keep changing it.)
As an esoteric Christian, I think that homosexual behaviour is a previous-life memory interfering in this life, one of the reasons that memories are suppressed. Therefore, I will not advocate gay lifestyles, but it should not be up to government to do anything about it, either.
Marriage has a common law basis that predates government legislative use. However for the purposes of common law it does make some sense for marriages to be registered. What we ought to have is a register that is generic in basis not one that seeks to police the validity of a given registration beyond the fact that the parties involve agree that they share a view that the registered relationship exists. Registering a marriage ought to be nothing more than a special case of registering a club.
Although given that marriages entail witnesses and formalities (eg booking a venue) that can be reference latter on the need for a central register is only tentative until the government decides that tax and welfare needs to be administered on the basis of such relationships.
The issue of gay marriage is more about equal treatment than about whether marriage should be registered in the first place.
What really bugs me is the fact that the government deems itself able to declare a man and a women to be in a defacto marriage simple because they share an address. How long until it begins to deem men who live together to be in a defacto homosexual relationship? When will it start declaring women to be lesbians? If they treated gays and hetrosexual relationships equal in this regard it would cause a real storm and hopefully a rethink on the whole enterprise.
Nicholas Gray, yes of course it’s about retention of power and influence on the part of government. I was just wondering aloud why we put up with it. TerjeP, yes, they also need to define marriage for tax and welfare reasons, which is a whole other can of worms of course. Remove the tax and welfare issues – not straightforward I know – and that need would go away, though cynic that I am I’m sure that politicians would instinctively want to carry on deciding who’s married and who isn’t for the reasons Nicolas Gray gives.
The issue of gay marriage is more about equal treatment than about whether marriage should be registered in the first place.
That’s true, but I doubt literally equal treatment is achievable as long as registration is imposed on people. Ignoring the same sex issue we will always have the problem that a beach wedding on the Gold Coast might be valid in Australian law while a very similar beach wedding abroad might not, even though the two couples are equally committed. Then we have the religious aspect – the wedding ceremonies for all the major religions may be legally valid but what happens if it’s some obscure minor sect that has only a few hundred followers in the world? Legally invalid simply because hardly anyone has heard of it? What if someone starts a new religion, these Star Wars obsessed Jedi fans for example? And wouldn’t adherents to the major faiths quietly say among themselves that such people aren’t really married, just as they already define marriage in their terms, with the back up of the law, as between males and females only?
Even if you could change the law in such a way that the legal definition of marriage was acceptable to both the gay and religious lobbies, and I very much doubt that enough common ground exists for that to happen, there’d still be others in unconventional relationships demanding the right to call themselves married. Polygamists for example. Doesn’t float my boat but I’m not going to say that a polygamous relationship cannot be as loving, or as valid to the people in it, as a monogamous one any more than I’d say a homosexual marriage would be in some way less than a heterosexual marriage. Hence my feeling that the word and it’s definition should be left up to individuals and dictionary compilers – the government should have better things to do anyway, and if tax and welfare should not depend on sexuality or marital status there’d be no need for registration or any government involvement. Let people decide for themselves if they count as married, de-factos, partners, whatever, and let everyone else around them have their own opinions. You say potato and I say potahto, they say they’re married but they say they’re actually cohabiting really… all it takes is for people to act like adults and agree to disagree over what marriage is, and for the government to eff off and find something productive to do instead of clowning around on semantic issues.
It is not correct that gays can’t marry. They have the same ability to marry as everyone else. What is in issue is the legal *recognition* of marriage, and the social recognition for that matter.
Not even government, nor even the church, claims that its registration of marriage is what constitutes the marriage.
The situation in history, in canon law, in common law, in statute law, in fact, and in ethics is, always has been, and will always be the same: what constitutes a marriage is the act of the parties in taking each other to be husband and wife. Church and state registration is always merely recognition of that prior fact.
Gays are free to take each other as partners but that is not what they are trying to achieve, which is, to use the apparatus of compulsion to force everyone else to recognise as a marriage, a homosexual union that they know very well everyone else does not, and does not want to recognise as a marriage.
And who is government to talk? What legitimacy do they have? They are the biggest single factor undermining marriage. Even their Marriage Act is completely inconsistent with the Family Law Act. The former says marriage is for life, and the latter says its for as long as you feel like.
The Commonwealth’s regulation of marriage,and the state’s regulation of de facto relationships, have been an utter disaster.
The LDP is making a big mistake in its misguided push for legal recognition of gay marriage. It would be far more to the point, and better for liberty to *deregulate* private sexual relationships, not to *increase* the regulation of them!
Why just gay marriage? Why not legal recognition of polygamous marriage? What business is it of the state what private sexual relationships people are in?
Terje
“However for the purposes of common law it does make some sense for marriages to be registered.”
No it doesn’t. Common law marriages were not registered and did not even require witnesses.
It was not until the 19th century that govt started registering marriages, and now everyone thinks that it’s government involvement that defines the marriage.
” What we ought to have is a register that is generic in basis not one that seeks to police the validity of a given registration beyond the fact that the parties involve agree that they share a view that the registered relationship exists. Registering a marriage ought to be nothing more than a special case of registering a club.”
There is not the slightest reason for government to be registering marriage relationships.
“Although given that marriages entail witnesses and formalities”…
Only because govt requires them.
“…(eg booking a venue) that can be reference latter on the need for a central register is only tentative until the government decides that tax and welfare needs to be administered on the basis of such relationships.”
Tax and welfare do not need to be administered on the basis of such relationships. What is this? The blog of the national socialists club?
“The issue of gay marriage is more about equal treatment than about whether marriage should be registered in the first place.”
Why should these relationships be treated equally? If people don’t want to treat them equally, why should they be forced to? It’s the same with de facto relationships. If people don’t want to recognise them as being the same as marriages, who is the state to tell everyone that they must?
“What really bugs me is the fact that the government deems itself able to declare a man and a women to be in a defacto marriage simple because they share an address.”
Well it follows from the rationale that government ‘needs to administer’ them for tax and welfare reasons.
“How long until it begins to deem men who live together to be in a defacto homosexual relationship? When will it start declaring women to be lesbians? If they treated gays and hetrosexual relationships equal in this regard it would cause a real storm and hopefully a rethink on the whole enterprise.”
Equality should not be the criterion. Liberty should be.
Very true, peter.
LDP policy should be that the government has no business sanctioning private relationships at all. It’s ought to be up to individuals to decide who they want to recognize as married or not.
Peter,
I feel misunderstood. I was not advocating that tax and welfare should be based on marital status. Just observing that it is and that this provides the administrative rationalisation for marriage registration. I suspect that tax administration is also a big part of why we register births and deaths.
I agree entirely that we should not have a marriage register and that tax and welfare should be blind to marital status. I said as much in my ABC opinion piece before the last election. In fact it is one of the merits of 30/30. That unmarried people get treated differently to married people is as much an issue of inequality before the law as the fact that gay people are excluded from marital status.
I don’t agree with your suggestion that equality before the law is an irrelevant issue. It is in my view a very important principle.
I’ll link to my 2007 ABC opinion piece when I’m not blogging via a PDA.
JC – LDP policy ought to be in favour of equal legal recognition of gay marriage. That the LDP ought to be against any state involvement in marriage is not in contradiction with the first point.
And whilst we are at it the policy of the ALP, Liberals, Nationals, Greens, Family First, ACD, DLP etc should also be to end state involvement in marriage.
I wonder if you guys have read the LDP’s policy. This is what it actually says:
.. the LDP preference is not to seek the granting by governments of equal rights for gay marriages, but the withdrawal of government so that it remains a private domain.
The LDP would amend relevant legislation so that marriage between two individuals had the same consequences irrespective of whether they were of the same or different gender.
But for the fact that “marriage” has unavoidable consequences (think inheritance etc), the second sentence wouldn’t be necessary. But the LDP is a political party, not a think-tank. Some pragmatism is necessary.
David,
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I can’t think of anything other than inheritance as an unavoidable consequence. That being the case isn’t that what wills are for?
As for record-keeping, I say leave it up to the churches, let’s face it, marriage was their idea in the first place and I, for one, couldn’t really care less about anybody else’s domestic arrangemnets anyway.
As promised here is what I wrote in 2007.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/16/2060485.htm
It begins as follows:-
The following discussion based on the article may also be worth a look:-
http://www.catallaxyfiles.com/blog/?p=3224
New Hampshire has signed up.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gUUXsl3sakXbS8W1AYb4xSxxEMIgD98JFHLO4
Terje
Isn’t it self-contradictory to be in favour of ‘equal legal recognition’ of marriage, but against ‘any state involvement’ with marriage?
What would legal recognition be for, but to confer rights or impose liabilities?
Peter, it’s a 2 stage or “lesser of two evils” approach.
Ideally the government would confer no marriage benefits to anyone. But that’s a dream.
So in the meantime government recognised marriage benefits should extend to any two adults of sound mind that desire them.
Why any two? Why is such discrimination against other sexual relationships okay?
Why is extending government regulation of private sexual relations the lesser of two evils, the other option being not to extend it?
Surely that assumes the legitimacy of the government extending marriage benefits in the first place, which no-one here has justified?
I’m not being flippant by the way. My wife can’t have children, but would consider agreeing to me taking a second wife. However at the very least I would need to be able to make binding settlements of property, otherwise my wife could not protect her assets from being taken in a family law action by the second wife, so why would she do it?
The main restrainer is that every part of what I want to do is regulated to death by the government. To start with, simultaneous marriage is a criminal offence. Yet the government itself recognises simultaneous marriage for certain purposes, for example, co-existence of legal marriage and de facto marriage for tax purposes.
Then, the family law act makes it impossible to make a binding settlement, because the judges reserve the right to simply disregard any contract, or even a deed, that the parties have solemnly made, and substitute their own opinion, based on lavish doses of socialist and feminist ideology.
I can’t escape the problem by avoiding de jure marriage, because de facto marriage has been colonised as well. All the same rules apply.
I personally think gays are mad for wanting to attract the same thornbush of rules, but that’s not the point.
The point is, that the movement for liberty should be *against* the regulation of private relations, not *in favour of* it. The fact that there is unequal treatment as between gay and straight is irrelevant. There is unequal treatment between everyone covered by the marriage laws, and everyone else, but that is no reason to extend them, it’s a reason to abolish them!
i think that gay marriage should be allowed in certain states but not in other states *’-
Wow, so many intelligent comments! I love how two sides of an argument can bicker, then libertarians come in, say they’re both wrong and offer a superior solution.
Government recognised marriage is a coercive institution. It is basically forcing others to recognise relationships which they might not agree with. The libertarian solution would suit both sides. Since official gay marriage would otherwise be inevitable, the strongly religious and conservative would be able retain their right to not recognise non-traditional marriage. Gay marriage proponents would achieve their goals of equality and their opponents would harbour much less resentment against them. Of course there’s the bonus that religious and eccentric minorities and polygamy, which intrigues me, would achieve equality also.
Of course it is complicated by the tax and welfare mess, but I personally will never have an marriage which is recognised by the government. Just the thought of being branded as a statist approved relationship is too much to bear.