JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (March 15, 2021)  Last week, a Missouri House committee passed a bill that would end government marriage licenses in the state, an important step towards nullifying both major sides of the contentious national debate over government-sanctioned marriage.

Rep. Adam Schnelting (R-St. Charles) introduced House Bill 1282 (HB1282) on Feb. 23. The legislation would amend the state’s marriage laws by replacing marriage licenses with “contracts of domestic union.”

“Two persons seeking to be married in this state and who are otherwise legally authorized to do so shall enter into a contract of domestic union. A contract of domestic union shall be the legal equivalent of marriage under the laws of this state.”

In practice, the state’s role in marriage would be almost entirely limited to recording marriage contracts entered into by consenting adults, or with parental consent if under the age of 18.

A civil and independent or religious ceremony of marriage, celebration of marriage, solemnization of marriage, or any other officiation, and administration of the vows of marriage may be conducted or engaged in by the parties to this contract of domestic union by an officiant or other presiding party to be selected by the parties to the contract. The state shall have no requirement for such ceremonial proceeding that, whether performed, shall have no legal effect upon the validity of the contract of domestic union.

The contract of domestic union shall be recorded by the recorder of deeds and shall constitute a legal record of a domestic union of the two parties.

The proposed law would change all references to unmarried persons in state law to “persons not party to a contract of domestic union” and swap all mentions of “marriage” with “contracts of domestic union.” Further, it would repeal a section of state law that specifically defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and that prohibits same-sex couples from receiving marriage licenses.

HB1282 would still retain certain restrictions on contracts of domestic union such as prohibiting those under the age of 15 from entering into them, as well as a continued prohibition on incest and bigamy. Common law marriages would also remain illegal.

On March 10, the House Downsizing State Government Committee passed HB1282 by a 7-5 vote.

Alabama enacted a similar law last year.

Testifying for a similar bill last year, Schnelting, an ordained minister, said it’s about getting the government out of marriage.

“Whether you’re religious, whether you’re nonreligious, whether you’re straight, whether you’re a member of the LGBT community, this is about restoring the government to its proper role. If I don’t need a license for my right to keep and bear arms, I certainly do not need the government’s permission or a license to marry.”

There is significant opposition to the bill, both from supporters of “traditional marriage” and advocates for same-sex unions.

While this change in the law may seem like semantics, it is quite significant. It ends the requirement to get state permission before getting married. The state would instead simply record signed contracts between consenting individuals. In effect, it would remove the state from the approval process and relegate it to a mere record-keeper.

Passage of HB1282 would take a step toward returning to the traditional Western custom in which the state had little to no involvement in marriage, even though it was a legal contract as well as a religious institution. Marriage in medieval Europe technically fell under the legal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, with priests officiating weddings at the door of the community church. However, it was ultimately a private arrangement that did not require a third party in order to be considered legitimate.

In “The Middle Ages: Everyday Life in Medieval Europe,” Jeffrey Singman writes that proposed marriages were announced at the parish church of both persons for three Sundays, but this was in order to ensure problems such as preexisting marriage agreements did not arise. Still, “not every marriage followed these formalities.”

Singman writes:

According to canon law, marriage could be contracted either by a vow of marriage expressed in the present tense or by a statement of future intent to marriage followed by sexual consummation. The latter sort of marriage in particular could take place without the participation of church or community. Such marriages were illegal, but not invalid; the although the couple might be prosecuted in the church courts, they remained legally married.

In fact, state marriage licenses were initially used to prevent interracial marriages. As a 2007 New York Times op/ed points out, licenses later became necessary in order to subsidize the welfare state.

“The Social Security Act provided survivors’ benefits with proof of marriage. Employers used marital status to determine whether they would provide health insurance or pension benefits to employees’ dependents. Courts and hospitals required a marriage license before granting couples the privilege of inheriting from each other or receiving medical information.”

In a modern political context, HB1282 would reduce the state’s role in defining and regulating marriage, which has become a contentious issue and places a burden on government officials torn between the legal requirements of their jobs and their personal religious convictions. By limiting the state’s role in marriage, the legislation will allow Missourians to structure their personal relationships as they see fit without interference or approval from the government.

Something rarely considered by those seeking to control the state’s definition of marriage is that a marriage license means a person requires government permission before getting married. In America, people generally cannot drive a vehicle without a license. People cannot practice law without a license, nor can they provide medical care. Put another way, under a licensing scheme, marriage is not a right, nor a religious institution, but a privilege granted by the state and limited by its requirements.

Consider this: In the same way a driver can lose their license if they break certain traffic laws, a man or woman, theoretically, could one day find their marriage license revoked for breaking certain “marriage” rules, whether it pertains to childrearing or their religious and political convictions.

Christopher Wesley, an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, wrote that “marriage is most endangered when it rests in the coercive hands of the State.”

Constitutionally, marriage is an issue left to the state and the people.

Removing state meddling in marriage will render void the edicts of federal judges that have overturned state laws defining the institution. The founding generation never envisioned unelected judges issuing ex-cathedra pronouncements regarding the definition of social institutions, and the Constitution delegates the federal judiciary no authority to do so.

WHAT’S NEXT

HB1282 will now move to the House Rules Administrative Oversight Committee where it must pass by a majority vote before moving forward in the legislative process.

Mike Maharrey

Michael Maharrey [send him email] is the Communications Director for the Tenth Amendment Center. He is from the original home of the Principles of ’98 – Kentucky and currently resides in northern Florida. See his blog archive here and his article archive here.He is the author of the book, Our Last Hope: Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty., and Constitution Owner’s Manual. You can visit his personal website at MichaelMaharrey.com and like him on Facebook HERE

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Republished with permission from The Tenth Amendment Center.

The post Missouri House Committee Passes Bill to Eliminate Marriage Licensing appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

It’s amazing how the prospect of death clarifies priorities.

Before the virus, we indulged in all sorts of luxuries such as dabbling in dirtiness and imagining a world purified by bucolic naturalness. But when the virus hit, we suddenly realized that a healthy life really matters and that natural things can be very wicked. And then when government put everyone under house arrest and criminalized freedom itself, we realized many other things too. And we did it fast.

Lots of people are predicting how life will fundamentally change in light of our collective experience this last month. I agree but I don’t think it will turn out quite as people think. This whole period has been an unconscionable trauma for billions of people, wrecking lives far beyond what even the worst virus could achieve. I’m detecting enormous, unfathomable levels of public fury barely beneath the surface. It won’t stay beneath the surface for long.

Our lives in the coming years will be defined by forms of blowback in the wake of both the disease and the egregious policy response, as a much needed corrective. The thing is that you can’t take away everyone’s rights, put a whole people under house arrest, and abolish the rule of law without generating a response to that in the future.

1. Blowback Against Media

I’m a long-time fan of the New York Times. Jeer if you want but I’ve long admired their reporting, their professionalism, their steady hand, their first draft of history, even if I don’t share the paper’s center-left political bent.

Something about this virus caused the paper to go completely off the rails. In early March, they began to report on it as if it were the Black Death, suggesting not just closing schools and businesses but actually calling for a complete totalitarian policy. It was shocking and utterly preposterous. The guy who wrote that article has a degree in rhetoric from Berkeley and yet he was calling the shots on the paper’s entire response to disease on a national level. They’ve gone so far as to falsify dates in their reporting in order to manipulate the timeline (I called them out on a case in point; the paper made the change but never admitted the error.)

I’m sure that in the coming days and weeks, the paper will dial back all this blather just as they did their certainty that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election. In fact, they have already started with an admission that the virus was already widespread in the months before the lockdown (which suggests that most everything else the paper has written since March has been wrong). But it will be too late. They bear some moral culpability for what has happened to our country.

Anyway, I don’t want to pick on the Times alone; the media has been nearly in lockstep on the need for lockdown forever and on the claim that this virus is universally lethal for everyone. You can read in various spots alternative opinions from experts (here here here here here here here plus a thousand others plus videos with serious voices).

But notice that all these links point to sites that do not enjoy viral traffic. AIER has been a leading voice, obviously.

Once you get up to speed on the real story here, with authoritative voices, you turn on Fox, CNN, NYT, CNBC, and all of the rest (the WSJ has been slightly better), and you hear nothing about any of this. They merely spin tales. People glued to the tube have almost no clue about any basics, such as how long the virus has been here, how gigantic is the denominator that makes up the fatality ratio, how many people have zero symptoms so that it’s not even an annoyance, the true demographic makeup of the victim population, and the unlikelihood that many of these deaths would have been preventable through any policy.

Watching this disgusting parade of media-driven ignorance, genuine experts or even people  passingly curious about data, have become demoralized. Surely many people have already stopped listening to the news completely because it is nothing but a distraction from the reality on the ground.

Why and how did this happen? An obvious answer seems almost too simple: the media wants people at home staring at the television. Maybe that’s the whole thing. But it almost seems too cynical to be the full explanation. In any case, I’m not the only one noticing this. I seriously doubt that the credibility of the mainstream media will survive this. There will be blowback. Much needed!

2. Blowback Against Politicians

You do recall, don’t you, that the governors and mayors who imposed the lockdowns never asked their citizens about their views about instantly getting rid of all rights and freedoms. They didn’t consult legislatures. They didn’t consult a range of expert opinion or pay attention to any serious demographic data that showed how utterly preposterous it was to force non-vulnerable populations into house arrest while trapping vulnerable populations in nursing homes that became Covid-soaked killing fields.

They thought nothing of shattering business confidence, violating contractual rights, wrecking tens of millions of lives, prohibiting freedom in association, tanking the stock market, blowing all budgets, shutting down international travel, and even closing the churches. Amazing. Every government executive except a few became a tin-pot dictator.

The first hint of the possible blowback came from Henry Kissinger who warned in the Wall Street Journal on April 8: “Nations cohere and flourish on the belief that their institutions can foresee calamity, arrest its impact and restore stability. When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed.”

Yes, that’s quite an understatement.

From testing failures to policy failures to profligate fiscal and monetary policies to straight up brutalism in its shutdown antics, the reputation of government in general will not fare well. When the dust settles on this, a whole generation of leaders could be wiped out, provided we return to democratic forms of government, which surely we will. Left or right, Republican or Democrat, there will be a serious price to pay. Politicians acted rashly for fear of their political futures. They will find that they made the wrong choice.

3. Blowback Against Environmentalism

Wash your hands, they kept telling us. But we turn on the faucet and hardly anything comes out. They ruined them some years ago with flow stoppers. The water isn’t hot because the hot-water heaters don’t work as well due to regulations. Keep your clothing and dishes clean but our washing machines and dishwashers hardly work. And let us not forget that our toilets are also non-functional.

Government has wrecked sanitation by ruining our appliances in the name of conservation. And now we suddenly discover that we care about cleanliness and getting rid of germs: nice discovery! Implementing this is going to require that we upend the restrictions, pull out the flow stoppers, permission new and functioning toilets, turn up our water heaters, fix the detergents and so on. We played fast and loose with germs and now we regret it.

So yes, plastic bags are back, and the disease-carrying reusables are gone, but that’s just the beginning. Recycling mandates will go away. Hand dryers in bathrooms will be rethought. Bring back single-use items and universalize them! We will care again about the quality of life as a first priority. As for nature and nature’s germs, be gone!

4. Blowback Against Social Distance

Staying away from direct contact with sick people is a good idea; we’ve known since the ancient world. Vulnerable populations need to be especially careful, such as elderly people have always known. But government took this sensible idea and went crazy with it, separating everyone from everyone else, all in the name of “flattening the curve” to preserve hospital capacity. But then this principle became a general one, to the point that people were encouraged to believe silly things like that standing too close to anyone will magically cause COVID-19 to appear. Going to the grocery today, it’s pretty clear that people think you can get it by talking or looking at people.

Several friends have pointed out to me that they already detect a blowback against all this. And why? There is a dubious merit to the overly generalized principle, and that will become more than obvious in the coming months. Then the blowback hits. I expect a widespread social closening movement to develop here pretty quickly. You will see the bars and dance floors packed, and probably a new baby boom will emerge in a post-COVID19 world.

And the handshake will again become what it began as, a sign of mutual trust.

5. Blowback Against Regulation

In the midst of panic, we discovered that many rules that govern our lives don’t make sense. The regulations on disease testing clogged the system and gave us an epistemic crisis that kicked off this insanity in the first place. Fortunately many politicians did the right thing and repealed many of them. The Americans for Tax Reform has assembled a list of 350 regulations that have been waived. This is hugely encouraging. Let’s keep them waived and never go back.

6. Blowback Against Digital Everything

We keep hearing how this trauma is going to cause everyone to communicate more with video. I don’t believe it. Everyone is experiencing tremendous burnout of these sterile digital environments. Hey, it’s great that they can happen but they are far from ideal.

“Can you hear me?”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Is my picture blurry?”

“Why am I looking up your nose?”

“Change your settings.”

“Silence your mic!”

And so on. At first we thought this was merely a period of adjustment. Now we know that we just don’t like all this nonsense. It’s no way to live.

There is nothing like real people in a real room.

7. Blowback Against Anti-Work

I suppose many workers weren’t entirely unhappy when the boss said work from home. But millions of people have now discovered that this comes at a cost. There is loneliness. The dog. The kids. The spouse. The depressing failure to dress up like a civilized human being. Everyone I know misses the office. They want to be back, be on a schedule, see friends again, experience the joy of collaboration, share jokes, munch on the office donuts.

It was only recently that everyone seemed to be complaining about the workplace. There were endless squabbles about pay, pay equity, race, metoo, executive compensation, family leave policies, and you name it. No one seemed happy.

We didn’t know how good we had it.

8. Blowback Against Experts

The media from the beginning trumpeted some experts over others. We went credential crazy. How many letters you have after your name determines your credibility (unless you have the wrong opinion). But soon we discovered some interesting realities. The experts that everyone wanted to cite were wrong or so loose with their predictions that their predictions were useless in practice. Dr. Fauci himself wrote on February 28 that this would be a normal flu. Merely a week later, everything changed from calm to panic, and with that change came the wild government response, long after people on their own realized that being careful would be a good idea. Under expert guidance, we swung from one end to the other with very little evidence, exactly against the strong and compelling advice of one of the few experts with credibility remaining.

9. Blowback Against Academia

Just like that, we went from enormously expensive campuses and a huge administrative apparatus to a series of Zoom calls between professor and students, leaving many to wonder what the rest is really worth. Surely many colleges and universities will not survive this. The other problem concerns the marketability of degrees in a world in which whole industries can be shut down in an instant. The college degree was supposed to give us security; the lockdowns took it all away. Also there is the problem of the curriculum itself. Of what value are these soft degrees in social justice in a world in which you are struggling to pay next month’s rent regardless?

As for elementary and secondary education, homeschooling anyone? Its existed under a cloud for decades, before suddenly it became mandatory.

10. Blowback Against Unhealthy Lifestyles

There has been no small effort to suppress the demographics of COVID-19 fatalities but the word is still getting out. This BBC headline sums it up: Nine in 10 dying have existing illness. And here’s another: Obesity is the number one factor in COVID deaths. This should not be lost on people considering improving their overall health and reducing disease vulnerability. Maybe you already feel it and are using your quarantine time to reduce and get fit or at least stop advancing too quickly toward your final demise. There are things we can do, people!

This would be an enormous change in American culture, to say the least.

11. Blowback Against Spending

You are likely saving lots of money from cutting entertainment. Feels good, doesn’t it? Regret not having saved more to prepare for these days? This will change dramatically. Those mattresses are going to get stuffed with cash in the coming year or two. It’s all fine: savings leads to investment, provided people have an ironclad promise that nothing like the monstrous destruction of the last month will ever occur again.

This article is republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

The post There Will Be Blowback, In Mostly Good Ways appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

In his preface to the 1982 edition of his classic Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman wrote:

Only a crisis‐​actual or perceived‐​produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Change of some kind is politically inevitable. My new hope is that what was until a couple of months ago politically impossible–a widespread embrace of what Adam Thierer calls Permissionless Innovation–becomes if not politically inevitable at least politically feasible.

In a lot of ways, the pandemic is bringing into high relief the problems interventionism and restrictionism have created. Perhaps, as people see and appreciate how regulation has made the problem worse, they will finally be convinced to dispense with the notion that someone should have to get permission from an alphabet soup of government agencies before producing or trying something new. At the very least, I can hope. Here are a few ways embracing permissionless innovation would make it easier for people to thrive during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

1.  Drone Delivery

The world oohed and aahed a few years ago when Jeff Bezos unveiled Amazon’s delivery drone prototype. So where has it been? According to the website for Amazon’s Prime Air, “We will deploy when and where we have the regulatory support needed to safely realize our vision.” Adweek reports that “The biggest challenge is regulatory approval.” It is important and a little depressing that the biggest hurdle we have to overcome before revolutionizing the transport of goods and services is regulatory rather than technological. There might be strong arguments to be made for subsidies for basic scientific research, but what good are new technologies when the regulators won’t let people use them?

The FAA should suspend rules and regulations governing drone delivery and get out of the way of companies that wish to use it. There are obviously complex liability issues at stake, but the history of common law makes me optimistic that they can be handled creatively and acceptably by the legal system. It’s kind of nice when Shipt shoppers, delivery drivers, and the mailman come by, but during a pandemic lockdown it seems obvious that we should be exploring other, literally-hands-off technologies for delivering goods. If it has in fact been a good idea to shut down big chunks of the global economy in order to stop the spread of COVID-19, it is almost certainly a good idea to open the floodgates to permissionless innovation in package delivery. It’s cool when our mailman comes by, but in light of recommendations about social distancing, we would likely do well to look for other ways to deliver the mail. Of course, a lot of what the USPS is carrying is resource-wasting junk mail anyway, and I suspect that without the helping hand of government a lot of these little potential disease vectors wouldn’t be sent in the first place.

2.  Home Testing

As I wrote recently, it is simply astounding that the FDA moved to limit the production and distribution of at-home COVID-19 tests. While it is true that false negatives could lead to sick people traveling more and false positives could lead to healthy people clogging doctor’s offices and hospitals, I think these possibilities pale in comparison to improved detection and treatment.

3.  Mask Sterilization and Production

Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle has come up with a process to decontaminate N95 masks that are in very short supply. In spite of Battelle’s claim that each of their machines could decontaminate 80,000 masks per day, the FDA at first only approved 10,000 mask decontaminations per day. Eventually, the FDA relented in response to bad publicity and pressure from President Trump (here is coverage from the Dayton Daily News). It’s another example of the FDA stepping in and actively obstructing an innovative response to a global crisis. Even if brand-new masks are better than sterilized masks, sterilized masks are better than no masks or over-used masks and are a good stopgap measure until more masks hit the market.

Once again, though, regulators are standing in the way. At MarginalRevolution.com, Tyler Cowen points to a claim that getting approval from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health approval for a new mask production facility would take 45 to 90 days. This is yet another example of government stepping in and actively preventing the free market from addressing the problem. Yes, there are spillover costs and information asymmetries, but it’s not at all clear we should let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

4.  Eliminate Medical Licensing

In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman criticized medical licensure for restricting output and raising prices. He acknowledged that there are information problems in medical markets, but he argued (correctly) that this is at best an argument for government certification, not licensure that requires someone to have government permission to practice.

Quality is a valid concern, but just as it is well known that we probably wouldn’t be doing any favors for people if we only allowed Cadillacs and Lexuses, we hurt them by requiring that certain medical procedures can only be done by Cadillac and Lexus-equivalent doctors. At a bare minimum, we should be looking for ways to make it easier for medical personnel trained in foreign countries to work legally in the United States.

Of course, these would all be good policy ideas even if we weren’t in the middle of a global pandemic, but as Friedman suggests, “real change” is usually a non-starter in normal times. With tens of thousands of lives on the line, restrictions on innovation are “luxuries” we can ill afford.

Art Carden

This article is republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

The post May this Crisis Shock Us Into Embracing Freedom appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

But this “beating a dead horse” is not unique to just my father and his joke-telling. Just as my father does not learn from his not-so-witty mistakes, the state of Missouri does not learn from theirs as well.

Repeatedly, the state meddles in what should be decided by the private sector, not learning that this intrusion brings more harm than good. The most recent occurrence of this was just announced a few days ago, with the state releasing the names of the businesses that received licenses to sell medical marijuana in Missouri. 

Over 900 applicants sought a license to sell medical marijuana in Missouri. To obtain a license, they were tasked with filling out a lengthy application that included writing responses to numerous questions regarding how they would impact the community and their plans for marketing among other valuable questions. These answers were then judged and scored by a third-party company that the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services delegated the process to.  

This is the first of many problems in the process. According to the Kansas City Star, to find a third party to judge the applications, Missouri “put out a call for bids for companies to score the medical marijuana applications, [but] it got no responses.” This should have been the first red flag that this process was a horrible idea.  Nonetheless, the state was undeterred and on its second call, received interest.

To judge the third party, Missouri instituted a scoring system that would rate the prospects. The highest possible score of this system was 218, but the highest scorer and ultimate winner of the job to judge the medical marijuana applications, a company called Wise Health Solutions, received a whopping 106! This is red flag number two because Missouri handed out the task of judging the applications to a company that received less than 50% on its scoring test.

This does not exactly inspire confidence in this third-party scorer and whatever confidence that the state of Missouri had in Wise Health Solutions should be erased after the licenses were released. Since those who qualified for medical marijuana licenses became public, numerous applicants and lawyers who were associated with the process have cited irregularities and inconsistencies within the scoring process. 

One notable instance of this was applicants provided the same answer to a question and received wildly different scores. Some applicants who applied for multiple licenses “copy and pasted their answers on basic questions. But those identical answers received wildly different scores”. This happened even though the Missouri scoring guide stated that the same answer should receive the exact same score. This is red flag number three, with Missouri blatantly disrespecting the rules that it set out for applicants to follow. 

But the abuses don’t end there. In addition to indiscriminately giving the same answer different scores, applicants also received zeros for lengthy responses to application questions. One applicant stated that she received zero points on a question even though she provided exactly what the questions asked. The Missouri Medical Cannabis Trade Association ascertained that about 67 percent of the application pool received a score of zero on a question about marketing plans. The Association that this was so egregiously bad that it had to have been an error in the process.

Another applicant had support from the Mayor and 297 out of the 300 people in the small town that he planned to build his dispensary. In addition to this support, he planned to use revenue from the dispensary to aid the local police force. But this got him nowhere on the question on the application about the economic impact on the local community as he scored poorly on it. This apparent lack of attention to the application process earns Missouri a fourth red flag.

Apparently, though, Missouri is blind to the faults of this process. State officials still claim that the process was “secure and legitimate”, even though it was obviously not. Disgruntled applicants and their lawyers have started to file lawsuits against the state, causing an unnecessary headache for the Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS). The DHSS has already begun soliciting bids from attorneys who can defend the state in these lawsuits, which will be a misuse of taxpayer dollars.

But the underlying point remains: all of this could have been avoided if Missouri had left the task to the private sector. Hopefully, Missouri voters and legislators will learn their lesson so they will not repeat the same mistakes when recreational marijuana becomes legal.  I am not optimistic though. Missouri loves to beat a dead horse.

Image: Paul Sableman

The post Don’t Give Missouri License to Beat a Dead Horse appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.