Nonetheless, there is a slippery slope associated with allowing gay marriage.

If we consider the reasons why allowing gay marriage is consistent with freedom while banning it is not, we begin with two basic principles.

1 – People are (and should be) free to do what they want, provided they don’t harm anyone or deny this same freedom to other people. The Declaration of Independence phrases it as “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

2 – Government should stay out of people’s personal lives. Thus, people should be free to associate with whomever they want and define their relationships however they want.

With a few tidbits in the news about the HBO series “Big Love” and reactions within “outlaw” families in Utah, polygamy is seeping back into the public’s cultural consciousness. Polygamy, of course, is the real end of the slippery slope. A man being married to multiple women (actually called polygyny) is consistent with the two principles above just as gay marriage is. Naturally, so is polyandry.

Personally, I don’t understand how polygamy can work in practice, given the vast bubbling cauldron that is human emotion. I read an article at ABC News on a polygamist family in Arizona (http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime), and I still can’t get a handle on it. But if the polygamists who let themselves be interviewed are any indication, it somehow, perhaps, maybe, does work. Is love between multiple individuals really that alien of a concept? As long as the polygamous arrangement is truly consensual, on what basis can we object? Difficulties understanding something doesn’t automatically justify condemning it. Too much of what passes for moral reasoning is really nothing more than rhetorically-fluffed “I don’t like it, so you can’t do it.”

From a legal standpoint, of course, we can make any laws we want. The slippery slope ends where the law ends. As it stands, only heterosexuals can marry – with a few happy exceptions. Despite it being perfectly logical and just for the government – private institutions are another matter – to recognize other forms of marriage, until the law is changed, the slope comes to a sharp end.

A Litmus Test

Thus we come to what I think of as the liberty litmus test, namely, the degree to which a politician (or anyone, for that matter) is truly committed to liberty. We hear a lot about bringing liberty to Iraq, for example. Or grand statements like the following from Mitt Romney: "What is it about America’s culture and values that makes us such a successful nation and society? Part of that is we love liberty, we love our country, we’re patriotic." (http://www.mittromney.com/Issue-Watch/Values)

But the claim to love liberty is hollow when accompanied by arguments to restrict it for some groups of people. The thing is, liberty involves accepting that people will do things we would not want to do ourselves, but are nonetheless not harmful. People will wear different clothes. People will have different hobbies. People will have all kinds of relationships.

This is why political conservatism (“small government”) can’t really coexist with cultural conservatism, which aims to maintain certain cultural and traditional standards through legislation – and thus at the expense of liberty. For all the good that culture can and does bring, the bad side is that culture can be just as much a source of tyranny as government. Culture, through demands of individual conformity, can be just as antithetical to individual responsibility as government is.

While marriage is perhaps not the most pressing issue in a political landscape filled with pressing issues, attitudes towards gay marriage and polygamy are indeed an interesting litmus test, particularly for the presidential candidates. While there are, obviously, valid reasons to restrict freedom on ethical grounds, those grounds don’t lie in people’s consensual love lives. How politicians put their “love” of liberty into practice offers a hint, I believe, of how they will generally govern.