thoughts onmarriage first, let me preface this with some information about myself: i m a single never-wed heterosexual male

who self-identifies as a classical libera l or libertarian. i voted for H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. i was raised Lutheran, and consider myself to be a Christian, even though i am infrequent in my church attendance. i consider myself to be culturally a Southerner. i listen to a lot of Rush Limbaugh and NPR. i m not a raving left-wing loony (though i know more than a few) or a right-wing T eatard (i know a few of those as well). so, marriage. the same-sex marriage debate is raging in this country, and has been since at le ast 1970 (when James McConnell and Richard Baker applied for a marriage license in Minnesota). but recently, it s reached a peak with the growth in legal recognit ion across New England. this, of course, has social conservatives livid and liberals hopeful. but nobody really seems to be considering what marriage is, and whether the gove rnment has any business in it at all. we know that marriage in one form or another predates written history. there are any number of definitions of marriage, varying widely across cultures, allowing for near-infinite permutations of partners. what seems common across all of them including the traditional US definitions is that a marriage establishes a legal familial relationship, with defined rights and obligations to the members of that family unit. therefore, marriage is essen tially a contract between individuals. as a private contract, the state has no b usiness in defining the terms of that contract unless it canprove harm to the com munity. it is difficult to imagine how same-sex (or polygamous) marriages could logicall y be shown to harm the community at large; instead, we are confronted with moral arguments, based in almost entirely in religion. which again makes one wonder what right the state has to interfere; if marriage is a religious ritual, then the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to t he Constitution would seem to apply. as a religious ritual, the state s recognitio n of onlyonenarrow definition of that ritual isde factoestablishment. which brings me to my point: the government, whether state or federal, has no re al business defining marriage at all. if it is a purely contractual agreement, t hen the definition of that agreement is up to the parties involved. if it is a r eligious ritual, assuming it does not cause harm to innocents, it s none of the go vernment s business. naysayers have claimed that a failure to define marriage as being between a man and a woman will lead to mass insanity; persons marrying inanimate objects and a nimals. i would suggest that cats and toasters cannot enter into contracts, and a human wedding a turtle could be demonstrated to be harmful to that turtle s well -being. but between two men or two women? or three men and two women? or one woman and t wo men? or a woman and a man? it s none of the state s business. and it s not the state s business to force churches, mosques or synagogues to perfor m rituals they don t adhere to, either. so if a church doesn t want to perform a wed ding ceremony for a couple, they shouldn t have to. the state, however, cannot be so choosy. what is legal for one must be legal for all: We hold these truths to b e self-evident, that all men are created equal not All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. quote of the day: Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor fr ightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it. Abraham Lincoln, 27 February 1860