Get the Privatize Marriage t-shirt.
A government powerful enough to give you the right to marry is a government powerful enough to take it away. The only way for both sides to protect marriage as they understand it and achieve true marriage equality is to give all individuals the equal right to define marriage the way they see it.
Pooling our definition of marriage in the public sphere is problematic in the same way and for the same reasons as pooling our money in the public sphere: it leaves us all bitterly divided and endlessly fighting over what to do with a "public resource" that belongs to everyone and no one. As long as one monolithic giant gets to define marriage for everyone, everyone will be fighting for their own definition to prevail.
Conservative advocates of the traditional family are constantly reminding us of the critical importance of marriage. LGBT activists and their supporters, who have tenaciously fought to legalize gay marriage, clearly value marriage as well.
If both sides value marriage so deeply, why would either want to hand it over to Washington or to any of the fifty state capitols to define, control, and regulate?
Is it because they've done such a great job with their stewardship over the other resources they've appropriated from us? Don't just write me off as a libertarian. If you complain about either party as much as I know you do, if you are as unhappy with as many aspects of public policy as I know you are, then you can't say you think the government's doing a great job with what they have already. I read Gallup. I know how sorely you disapprove of Congress.
"They're all a bunch of crooks," right? You hear both "sides" saying it. Why would you want a bunch of crooks to get in bed with you and your partner? To have any say over who you get to love and what that's supposed to mean? Why hand the government one more thing? Why not try taking something back from them? Especially something so crucially valuable and deeply personal and spiritual. Why not privatize something that is so-- inherently private?
Conservatives like to privatize things, right? And DE-legalizing STRAIGHT marriage would create the (hashtag) marriage equality that the progressives seek, right? Wouldn't it be nice to stop fighting about this? To no longer have to fight about it? Wouldn't it be nice to stop hearing about it? Wouldn't it be nice to put this back in the bedrooms, and churches, and private places where it belongs, instead of all over freaking Facebook and Twitter and fast food chicken restaurants where it's making us hate each other?
Just privatize marriage. It's a libertarian solution that I'm very proud of. It would work.
And now some words of wisdom from Doug Stanhope (NSFW):
