By way of comparison, it's a bit like Apple telling Samsung, "We don't care who's on top. Heck, it's only IP. Help yourself. What's ours is yours and good luck to you, Samshine."
Except Apple has protected their property, in a most meddlesome manner. As should the church. Because it too can properly claim a proprietary interest - in the software of marriage. It is, to a large extent, their intellectual and institutional property.
For the best part of 2000 years, the church has defined and refined what marriage is and can rightly point to changes it's made over the centuries - like the introduction of public ceremonies - as an early step in the emancipation of women.
Granted, the state has, for some time, shared that IP. Marriage remains a sacrament of the church but is a civil ceremony too, with sanctioned secular status. Given this duality, you might think any change in the definition of marriage would be negotiated and agreed between the parties. Indeed, you might also think an agreement would be a constitutional prerequisite.
Since marriage is not an institution solely of the modern state's making, it should not be an institution the state changes as it sees fit. What the state can do - and must do - is ensure that people in equivalent situations aren't treated differently. People who make a joint public commitment should share privileges, responsibilities and entitlements. In fact and in law, but not necessarily in name. The state's right to co-opt that is, at best, conditional.
Or would be, if it weren't for the fact that the church, more mute than meddlesome, has ceded its right to protect its possession. And because it has, there's been little debate about the state's right to redefine an institution it doesn't own. Instead, the argument's focused on issues of equality.
"The state currently discriminates," argued Louisa Wall on Wednesday. "That is not fair or just." Maybe not, but it happens all the time. If equality was Parliament's objective, there'd be no minimum drinking age, no ban on bigamy or specified drugs, no requirement to pass a test to get a driver's licence and no Maori seats either.
It will be interesting to see if any member champions the removal of discriminations like racial preferment. They won't, of course. Gay marriage is a bellwether issue, as Brendan O'Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked, noted in a recent piece.
"The real value of the gay marriage issue is not in the improvements it will allegedly make to homosexual people's lives, but rather in the opportunity for moral posturing and right-on preening it affords its backers. Gay marriage isn't a real issue; it's a cultural signifier, which you support in order to show that you are decent, enlightened and, most importantly, not like Them, the rabble. In an era when old-style morality is on the wane, if not dead, the elites are forever feeling around for new issues through which they can communicate their moral superiority."
For "the chattering classes", O'Neill argues, gay marriage has become "the issue through which they distinguish themselves from rednecks and the religious, from bogans and the backward".
Well, at least we know where St Matthew-in-the-City stands - and the secular priesthood too. The world is a piece of playdough to be shaped as they see fit.
And there's nothing meddlesome in that, Your Majesty.
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