Faith and marriage

In Italian the wedding ring is simply called faith.

I'm not quite sure yet why this phrase came to my mind as a kind of synthetic comment to the LD's remarks in the last posts on the state of today marriage legislation.

Sharp remarks, that left little room for current arguing in defense of "traditional marriage": given the way that legislation is made, there is no reason why marriage should be denied to same sex people.

No piecemeal argument.

Rightly then he ended his second intervention with a criticism of Justice Marshall's marauding sentence: it makes shreds of the law, in a way worthy of a tyrannical state.

A free state doesn't make the law, it just promulgate it. To remind that simple fact John Adams, if I am not going wrong, wrote the constitution of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Back to the wedding ring. There is a law immanent to things – meaning human relations – and what its Italian name suggests to me is what that law is all about, which the state should just promulgate: articulating faith – fides, i.e. trust – among people.

Does this allow some argument in defense of "traditional marriage". Well, I'd say yes.

To put it rather bluntly: who gives a shit about the sentiment two persons feel toward each other so that the state should give to it an official ratification? Or, to put it better, of course we do care, because, as I just suggested, all laws should promote faith among people. But the word marriage evokes a feeling among people leading to some kind of sexual intercourse among them. And then again I repeat my question: why should the state ratify it?

The only reason is the one hinted to by the LD: because by way of sexual intercourse between people of different gender a society perpetuates itself. Now, society is articulated into a certain status rei publicae, and the institutions – like the presidency, the legislative body and the judiciary – that make that state of things should promote the perpetuation of its life.

This leads to still larger questions. I summarize them by this statement: if the state sanctions the separation of sex and reproduction, and assures the perpetuation of society by any other way than the establishment of family relations, it means that it is sucking in itself all of social life – in short, that it is becoming not simply tyrannical, but totalitarian.

HP