Founded in 1991, the Republican Liberty Caucus works to advance the principles of limited government, free markets and individual liberty within the Republican Party.

Jack Hunter has written an excellent article about the same-sex marriage debate where he correctly calls the issue a distraction and highlights the absurdity of focusing on such a thing while the federal government continues to spend trillions of dollars on numerous unconstitutional activities. The bottom line is that marriage is a state issue, not a federal one:

As with most things, simply following the Constitution would solve the gay-marriage dilemma. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the federal government the power to regulate marriage.

On the national level, this in fact should be the end of the debate. Unfortunately, many Republicans keep this issue in the news, because they campaign on the promise of amending the Constitution to define a marriage as between one man and one woman. This in turn gives Democrats a perfect opportunity to pick up voters they may not otherwise have earned. The single most important thing about Democrats is that they believe the government should run the economy. This is antithetical to America and the success that this country has seen in its short history. Therefore, if this was the only thing Democrats ran on then they would lose miserably in every election. So instead, their strategy is to divide and conquer. They divide voters into blocks and classes, by race, sex, religion, income level, industry type,  and sexual practices. This is also antithetical to America and the spirit of our founding, but unfortunately it has been a very successful strategy. The people in the various demographic groups that the Democrats have targeted have been swayed by their arguments, despite their party’s history, and despite the fact that they want to control your life from the toilet you use to the car you drive to the things you can see on the internet. So how do we combat this as Republicans and win elections by large margins? Well, it is not by giving them more ammunition and more ways to divide Americans. In trying to use the federal government to define marriage, Republicans are trying to solve a societal problem by using a big government solution. This is exactly what the Democrats do. Furthermore, we are alienating an entire “demographic” that contains many members (such as Log Cabin Republicans) who might otherwise be ardent supporters of our cause. On a federal level, the same-sex marriage debate is not only a distraction, but it is also destructive to Republican campaign efforts. But what about the state level? Should we make this a big Republican issue in South Carolina? Jack Hunter makes a great point here as well:

The institution of marriage was under assault long before gay activists got involved. Divorce alone has been far more damaging to the institution of marriage than gay marriage. If I had my druthers, I’d get the state out of the matrimony business altogether and let churches and other social institutions decide what constitutes marriage.

Yet again, mister Hunter is right on. Around the mid-1950s in the U.S. several court rulings and state laws clearly recognized the many instances of no-fault reasons to end marriages. The immediate result was a spike in divorce rates during the 1960s. This same thing happened again with “no fault” divorces in the 70s, followed by another huge spike in divorces. So if the object here is to protect marriage, then we are fighting the wrong battle. Finally, there is a more fundamental, principled aspect to this debate that isn’t often talked about. Why does the government have the authority to control marriage in the first place? It didn’t always have that authority, marriage licenses issued by the government are  a relatively new thing in Christian history. With divorce rates up around 50% after thousands of years  in the single digits, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea? It is something to think about.