Response to Huckabee

In criticizing Obama's decision to abandon his defense of DOMA, Mike Huckabee claimed that marriage is the foundational form of government. Here's what I wonder: for someone who spends an awful lot of time talking about political philosophy (his whole schtick is about how we need government only to the extent that the people fail to govern themselves privately), has he ever read John Locke's Second Treatise? 'Cause I have, fairly recently, and I happen to remember that Locke addresses this issue. He specifically inquires whether the family power relation is an appropriate model for a political power relation, and decides that it is not, for several reasons. The family relation, he says, is an emphatically natural relation, i.e. people are born into it (or, as he would put it, are placed into that relation by god), whereas a political relation is, uh, political. People choose to enter a political compact, but you're stuck with your family. So it's not a good model.

Of course, you can disagree with Mr. Locke, but given that a) the importance of this conclusion in the Second Treatise is to enable Locke to reject a system of monarchy by divine or natural right, and b) we tend to reject systems of monarchy by divine or natural right these days, I think it's interesting that Huckabee just blithely asserts this. Now, one can get doubly modern on this problem, and state that marriage has changed to where it's no longer the foundation of an absolute patriarchy founded on divine right but rather a voluntary arrangement between two people which might also, as circumstances dictate, grow to include others with ties that are to some degree voluntary (in that you can get out of them if you really want to) to the core pair. In this case you can almost make the case for an analogy to government. But unfortunately at that point we've also de-gendered marriage, and it's hard to see why this kind of civil-arrangement definition of marriage would in any way prejudice us against letting gay people have it. If the point of marriage is that people get to form what one might call private social contracts, stronger in force than the actual social contract but limiting only a very few people, and that these compacts are sort of analogous to political compacts scaled down, then there's no reason at all why it should have anything to do with sex. So basically, Huckabee's making a very odd argument here.