In my plowing through my RealClear Politics backlog, I see that Bill Maher has decided to open up his dim bulb on the subject of love and marriage and state intervention in same. I don't especially have a problem with his observations but it's clear that he hasn't thought this through by the way he breezily advocates the idea that the state get out of the marriage business. He's talking about shifting over a thousand federal and state laws around (and who knows how many county and municipality ones, nobody's bothered to even count those), controlling the ripple effects so any bad side effects don't swamp the good ones of reducing government, and does it with the easy breezy manner of someone who thinks such major surgery on the legal system would be painless.
I know he's a comedian but he also likes to style himself as something of a social critic. I know high school children who make better in-depth analysis than he does. Would it have killed him to devote even two lines to the difficulty of extracting marriage from the clutches of the state?
Unfortunately, Maher is not alone, nor does he even represent the worst of this trend. Whatever people decide in the end, changing and shifting marriage is major, societally risky change. It shouldn't be entered into lightly.
Posted by TMLutas at February 16, 2004 11:05 AM