Rep. Steve King (R-IA) seems to be in an ongoing battle with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to prove themselves the batshit craziest member of Congress. Iowa’s Supreme Court recently struck-down a 1998 state law defining marriage as only between a man and a woman. Rep. King thinks he knows what will happen next.
…King said that the state must act quickly to pass a marriage residency requirement.
“We have no residency requirement in Iowa law, which means that people can come from all over this country — a man and a man, a woman and a woman — it could be, I suppose, a father and a son or a mother and a daughter,” he said. “They can come to this state and get married and then go back to the state where they reside. And then what they will do — and this will be a national effort — is file suit in their own state. They will press those states to recognize Iowa’s marriage law. If that happens, in each of these courts, it puts a lot of pressure on and breaks down the defense of marriage that has been created by most of the states.
Eerily reminiscent of Rick Santorum’s famous 2003 exchange with the Associated Press, no?
SANTORUM: …Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality —
AP: I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about “man on dog” with a United States senator, it’s sort of freaking me out.
Of course, Pennsylvania voters were kind of freaked out, too, which is why Rick Santorum is no longer a United States senator. He and King engage in a slippery-slope argument. Once we allow men to marry men and women to marry women, what is to prevent people from marrying their children or even their dog? I suppose someone could even marry their couch or their TV remote control. Where does the insanity stop?
One of the interesting things about Rep. King’s argument is that he believes that people that marry their children are less likely to be anti-choice.
“I will tell you that I first came into this political arena with the belief innocent human life was the most important thing that I could be involved in,” said King, a Kiron Republican who represents the 5th Congressional District in western Iowa. “I still believe that is the most important value. But I also recognize that if we don’t save marriage, we can’t remain pro-life.
“The values we have we pour through marriage into our children and into the next generation. Our religious values. Our values of faith. Our values. Our work ethic. Our entire culture comes through a man and a woman joined in holy matrimony, being blessed with children and pouring those values into the children and then living vicariously through them as they go off and we are blessed with grandchildren.”
Rep. King’s logical construction is a little vague but he seems to be saying that the sacred element of marriage confers necessary blessings which then confer values like work ethic and an anti-choice disposition on the newly wedded couple. Since a gay marriage cannot be a sacrament, it cannot confer these blessings. It seems to me that King is going beyond opposition to gay marriage to advocate a position requiring heterosexual marriage. After all, someone who remains single cannot enjoy the blessings of the marriage sacrament and will presumably remain lazy and permissive about abortion rights.
“They are the ones who are offending our civilization and our culture. … The state is interested in marriage. We want to promote marriage. We want to do so because of the things I said — because we pour the values of our society through that marriage, and we encourage the birth of children to [be] brought up in that holy union and that sacrament of marriage. And because the state is interested in it, we want to have generational, healthy societies that will continue to blossom out across this state and this countryside.”
I think it can be plausibly argued that the state has an interest in marriage to the extent that it wants to promote two-parent households. The state may want to create some incentives for parents to remain united and to discourage parents from separating. Of course, such incentives must be limited so that they don’t infringe on personal liberty. But the state has no plausible interest in promoting the ‘holy union’ of marriage. In fact, it is Constitutionally prohibited by the First Amendment from making any “law respecting an establishment of religion.” It cannot, for example, pass a law based on Christianity’s understanding of the sacramental nature of marriage. As for two-parent households, there is nothing about gay marriage that discourages it. Like any other kind of marriage, it is a ceremony commemorating a commitment of two people to stay together, and it therefore should be expected to promote two-parent households. It can be plausibly argued that the state fulfills its interests better by recognizing gay marriage than by refusing to do so.
It should go without saying that our society can distinguish between gay marriage and incest and bestiality.