July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:05
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing very well. | |
| Let's, shall we, take a few minutes to talk about gay marriage. | |
| But, before we get into that, let's talk about marriage as a whole. | |
| What it's for, what it's all about, and the different flavors it could come in, potentially, in a free society. | |
| So, marriage, people often say, well, it's just a piece of paper, and so on. | |
| Not really. | |
| Human beings follow a particular reproductive strategy, which is huge investment in offspring. | |
| You know, us and elephants and whales, we just have to pour huge amounts of resources into our offspring, unlike sort of Frogs with the spray and pray, sea turtles and so on, where you just have hundreds of kids, you don't put any investment into them and you just, I guess, some of them make it to adulthood and so on. | |
| No, no. | |
| We are a mammalian species which requires close to 15 to 20 to 25 years, depending on how you measure it and which kind of period of history you're looking at, massive amounts of investment in our offspring. | |
| And by far, statistically, the best environment for children to grow up in is to parents, right? | |
| So traditionally, this has been a husband and a wife. | |
| And in general, the husband goes out and gets all the resources, brings them home, and the wife breastfeeds and is pregnant and raises the children and so on. | |
| And that's kind of how it has worked for a lot of societies throughout a lot of history. | |
| Because there's so much investment that is required, For children, there is a strong requirement for parents to stay together, particularly when the kids are young. | |
| And society has a vested interest in keeping families together, like a free society has a vested interest in keeping families together because split-ups in a free society, in other words a society without a giant largely single mom welfare state and quote free government education and subsidies for largely female health care like Obamacare and particularly when People are young, socialized medicine and so on. | |
| Without all of this massive amount of resources going towards women who have kids but who don't have providers or husbands. | |
| Without that, society has a really strong incentive to focus on keeping couples together. | |
| Children don't do very well statistically. | |
| When parents split up. | |
| Divorce is very bad for kids and single motherhood is by far the worst single indicator for the outcome of children. | |
| Not because single moms are bad or anything like that, but because it's just very few resources available for the in-depth imprinting, socializing, acculturating and raising of children. | |
| You're busy a lot, you have groceries, you've got to At work, oftentimes, you've got chores, you've got bills, and it's just not that much time to invest in your kids. | |
| So we are, when we're young, giant black holes of resource requirements and the two-parent structure with particularly, you know, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, everybody sort of mixing it up. | |
| You know, as Hillary Clinton said, it takes a village to satisfy my husband. | |
| No, that's not right. | |
| Sorry, it takes a village to raise a child. | |
| There's something quite important in that. | |
| So again, we're talking about a sort of free society, or at least you can say a sort of minimal government society. | |
| So neighborhoods have a strong incentive, families and extended families have a strong incentive to keep families together. | |
| So if you are a young man or a young lady and you meet the love of your life, What is the point of marriage? | |
| Well, the point of marriage is to say, we are going to get together and we are most likely going to have kids, or at least that's our aim. | |
| And so this is a public declaration that we are aiming at kids, aiming at stability, aiming at monogamy, and all of those things that allow humanoid children to be raised in the best possible way. | |
| So you have a public declaration of You know, you stomp on the glass, you shoot the rabbit, I don't know, whatever goes on in various societies, and this is you as a couple saying, we are committed. | |
| We are gonna be a pair-bonded union, and because we have compatible genitalia, We're going to have kids, so we're going to stay together. | |
| So then, if at some point, like if you've been dating some girl for three weeks and you say to your friends, I don't think she's the right one for me. | |
| They'll be like, no, you know, it's only been three weeks or whatever. | |
| Fine, you know. | |
| But if you have made a public declaration that this is the love of your life, you're going to stay together, you're going to have kids and so on. | |
| If a year or two into that, you're like, I don't know, people are going to be like, You've got to stay together. | |
| You've got to get back together. | |
| Like Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro in Goodfellas, you know? | |
| They have your thing on the side, but you've got to get back to your wife. | |
| It's the mother of your children. | |
| So it's not that there's some sort of piece of paper or some arbitrary thing, and this of course is long before governments got involved in the regulation and subsidization and taxation of marriage as a whole. | |
| It's a public declaration. | |
| Saying, we're going to raise the kids. | |
| Now, society has a huge incentive in a free society to help y'all stay together. | |
| Because society has to live with the consequences of your choices. | |
| In so far as you have kids, those kids grow up, those kids enter into society. | |
| And if the marriage has been really bad, if there's been screaming and yelling and divorces and abuse and so on, well, we are a grow and release species. | |
| I mean, if you have, take a hopefully not too annoying analogy, if you have some dog, I care about that dog, I don't want you to harm that dog, but if you do harm the dog and you keep the dog locked up in your basement and no one ever really knows about it, That's terrible, but it's not something that eviscerates society as a whole. | |
| But if you sort of torture your dog and then you release the dog into the neighborhood, that dog's going to run around biting and chasing and doing all kinds of crazy things and harming other people. | |
| So society, free society, neighbors and extended family and so on have a strong incentive To get involved and to try and make sure families stay together, children are raised well, because we all have to live with the consequences of your kids just as you have to live with the consequences of my parenting. | |
| So that's why societies as a whole get involved and that's why it's a public declaration to all of the people in your community, to the people in your family, to the people who are your friends, to the people who are going to be around For the course of your marriage saying, we're serious about this, we're going to raise kids, so do everything you can to help us stay together and be good parents and be good spouses. | |
| So that's marriage in a nutshell. | |
| Now, totalitarian regimes are almost every flavor, but in particular on the left, in the communist world, the state families, right? | |
| Because families, Teach the children, and what the Communists want is for children to be the property of the state, to get them into early daycares, to get them into government schools. | |
| See, they're doing pretty well with their plan. | |
| But Marx and Engels wrote a whole book about Marx's anti-family tendencies. | |
| But he hated the bourgeois family and wanted to rip it and destroy it, turn the kids against their parents and so on, and have them spy on their parents. | |
| That's natural for all totalitarian regimes to target, first and foremost, the family. | |
| The family is the social unit that resists tyranny in a lot of ways. | |
| And when the family functions well, when adults stay together, when children are raised well, you need less government because people are more functional. | |
| Like, one statistic is that children are 35 times more likely to be abused by a live-in boyfriend than by a biological father. | |
| We're talking about Abuse within the family, we're largely talking about abuse within non-biological families. | |
| Not the biological father, not the biological mother, or some combination thereof. | |
| That's where the majority of abuse occurs. | |
| And since abuse so often leads to adult problems, dysfunctions, criminality, health issues, instability, you name it, Society has a strong incentive, as I said, to work with families to make sure everything comes out as well as possible. | |
| So that's family in a nutshell. | |
| It's for the kids and it's to ensure the pair bonding and stability, monogamy and all of that kind of stuff that produces good outcomes in the human mammalian environment, the best environment for kids. | |
| Now as far as gay marriage goes, gay marriage that doesn't involve children Society just has less vested interest in that than they do in Heterosexual unions that involve children. | |
| And we'll get to adoption in a second, but it's just less important. | |
| It's sort of like if two 80-year-old people get married. | |
| I think that's nice. | |
| I think that's lovely, but it's not like they're going to have six kids who might be stealing my car in 16 or 15 years. | |
| So it's nice, we'll go to the wedding, we'll eat their cake, and we'll toast them and so on, but we're just not as invested as we are in young couples who are going to have kids. | |
| So From that standpoint, you know, the public declaration, we're going to stay together, it's like, well, that's great. | |
| But if you do split up, you're not producing offspring that are going to be a potential curse and plague upon society. | |
| So the incentive to keep gay couples together if they're childless, and the incentive to keep childless couples together as a whole, is less significant for gay couples. | |
| So, from that standpoint, that's one important consideration. | |
| Now, of course, it's not like couples are in isolation. | |
| They are involved with kids around and so on, and they can be very helpful in the raising of kids and that, but the pair bonding, the need to stay together for the kids, just not as strong. | |
| So, as far as gay marriage goes, sure. | |
| I mean, nobody who gets married who's Asking someone and gives them the opportunity to say no. | |
| No one who is married is initiating the use of force, right? | |
| So this is the standard non-initiation of the use of force as a sort of prime moral foundation for a rational and free society. | |
| Gay marriage certainly does not initiate the use of force against anyone. | |
| Perfectly fine. | |
| Who could possibly have any particular disagreements with it? | |
| Now, around adoption, You know, there's people who say, well, you know, it's very new. | |
| We need to get the studies and so on. | |
| Well, I'm not positive exactly about that. | |
| So, um, if, uh, I'm not saying that this would be even remotely close, but you are significantly more likely to be an abuser if you yourself were abused. | |
| So would you be comfortable with adoption agencies not giving kids to married couples, heterosexual couples who'd been the victim of child abuse? | |
| I wouldn't because History is not destiny because you have choice, you have self-knowledge, you have free will, and you can work to do things better. | |
| So I don't think that we can look at statistical outcomes and make that decision. | |
| I mean, as a society as a whole, I'm an anarchist, so it's not like there'd be some central agency that would do it. | |
| But I would say that if couples who are gay or lesbian or transgendered or anything like that, if they want to adopt kids, there is no initiation of force involved in that. | |
| So to me, that would be obviously perfectly fine from a moral standpoint. | |
| So, I think it's important to recognize that what has occurred now, which has occurred in so many different ways and in so many different areas in society, what has occurred now is governments have taken over particular institutions that used to be fairly private. | |
| I mean, there was religion involved throughout most of human history in marriage, but Religion was really focused on two things. | |
| Stability of the couples and usually transmission of religious concepts from, usually along the maternal line, but certainly from parent to child. | |
| Now that there is the welfare state and there's lots of alimony and child support and so on, and lots of goodies being fired at single moms and single dads, The idea that society has some sort of vested interest in keeping couples together and that it's a public deco... it has all sort of fallen away. | |
| And in a weird way, it kind of has just become a piece of paper. | |
| Whereas the piece of paper formerly represented something that was very important for society as a whole, which is, is our culture going to continue? | |
| Are you going to raise a bunch of criminals or something like that? | |
| And so that has kind of all gone away. | |
| And now there are Rights that gay and lesbian couples really want to get a hold of. | |
| Like, of course, the rights of inheritance, the property transfer, of visiting your partner when your partner is in the hospital and so on. | |
| And there are other particular benefits, spousal benefits, retirement benefits and so on. | |
| All of this comes from the state as a whole and the state's general involvement in our personal lives. | |
| And I don't have any particular answer to that because I don't want the state to be involved in our personal lives in any way, shape, or form. | |
| So the idea that, well, we should support gay marriage so that these people get the same rights as heterosexuals, well, sure. | |
| But the whole point, I think, would be let's stop having these really artificial status intrusions into our personal lives. | |
| Let's not look at having Gay couples get the same rights as heterosexual couples. | |
| Let's look at getting government out of our personal lives as much as humanly possible and sort of see where the chips land from there. | |
| So yeah, to sum up... | |
| If there are kids involved, society is going to get involved in a free society because we need to ensure that the healthiest kids are going to be raised because we're going to have to live with them. | |
| If I live in the same neighborhood for 60 years and the kids and the grandkids that are growing up, well they're either going to help me across the street or they're going to grab my wallet. | |
| And I'd rather the former and less of the latter. | |
| So I'm going to be involved in helping people stay together, in recognizing the seriousness of the monogamous commitment to raising kids and so on. | |
| When it comes to heterosexual adoption, there is just no initiation of force in that. | |
| So it's hard to argue. | |
| You can't argue against it morally. | |
| It would be wrong to do so. | |
| So in conclusion, I think that the goal would be, at least I think from a moral, philosophical, empirical and rational standpoint, would be to recognize what marriage is, that it's fundamentally about kids, which doesn't mean that childless couples or elderly couples or anything else, couples who choose not to have kids, are any less in love or any less committed and so on. | |
| But the foundation of it is the public declaration of, for God's sake, keep us together for the sake of the kids, do everything you can to help us out. | |
| All of that is perfectly available to gay couples as it is to straight couples. | |
| So, as usual, I would say, rather than extending the dead, withered cryptkeeper hand of the state across gay marriage, I would rather get it removed. |
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