Vermont's Government Catches Up With Vermont's Citizens

With the Vermont legislature -- not the courts, the legislature -- legalizing same-sex marriage today, it grows even harder to sustain the argument that such unions are being imposed by social engineers and activist judges. In the words of … um, me:

Marriage isn't being re-engineered. It is evolving in an impeccably Hayekian fashion, as folkways appear on the ground and are gradually ratified by imitation, then market acknowledgement, and then, only lastly, by the law. For eons, same-sex couples have quietly lived as though they were married. As social mores changed and gays came out of the closet, so did those longtime-companion relationships. Before long, lovers were holding their own marriage ceremonies, which were not recognized by the government or (at first) by any established church but did carry weight with family, friends, and neighbors. Couples started to draw up marriage-like contracts, in an effort to establish rights privately that they couldn't acquire publicly. Businesses had to decide whether to extend benefits to gay spouses; with time, more and more did.

All this happened without legislators or judges taking the lead. It happened because a certain number of gay people wanted to live as married, then slowly established institutions that allowed them to do so. Legalizing gay unions—I don't really care if the government calls them "marriages," because what's important is what everyday people call them—doesn't rearrange a core social institution. It recognizes a rearrangement that is already taking place.

The government of Vermont now acknowledges an institution that ordinary Vermonters have recognized for ages. Welcome to the club, guys.