Government and marriage

I usually respect the Centre for Cultural Renewal and the work it does in carefully analyzing court decisions and public policy issues in light of a Judeo-Christian ethical framework. However, I have difficulty comprehending why the Centre would take comfort in a National Post editorial last month on the same-sex marriage issue, which it claims supports its own position. If marriage is a distinctive community, irreducible to a mere private contract and intrinsically bound up with the procreative possibility of sexual intercourse -- as affirmed in Judaism, Christianity and virtually every one of the world's civilizations -- then a call to "Get Ottawa out of the marriage business" would seem an unwarranted concession to the liberal tendency to flatten out every human community to a voluntary association. To be sure, government legitimately protects private contracts, properly understood. But in its ongoing task of doing public justice, it must also protect the genuine diversity of human social formations, including those which cannot be understood in contractual terms. The Centre and the Post would seemingly have government abandon a crucial part of this task. The call to "get government out of" such and such an activity appeals to a certain libertarian mindset, often in conservative guise, but it is not a recipe for the doing of justice.