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Back in 2000, the Orange County Register backed a proposition that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. I was an editorial writer there at the time and remember it well.

Today its editorial, written by editorialist Alan Bock, backs the state Supreme Court ruling that persons of the same sex can “marry” one another. Yet it offers no explanation for the switch in opinion. It should do so. I’m curious about the reasoning behind the switch. Maybe they could put it up on their blog.

And given that an unsigned editorial like this represents the opinions of the paper’s owners and editors, not just that of a lone editorialist, all involved should put up their own opinions, from the Hoiles family and Freedom CEO Scott Flanders on down to the paper’s editorial and commentary director. This is a major opinion switch, and readers are curious about how the individuals in the collective came to this decision.

Get government out

My own position is simple.

First, there is no such thing as homosexual “marriage.” By definition, marriage is between a man and a woman. Anything else is something else. Two persons of the same sex can no more “marry” than can a man “marry” his golden retriever.

Am I exaggerating? Over by Palm Springs, near the interstate is a sign reading, “Pets are children, too.” Animal rights groups now will begin lobbying for the right to marry their pets.

Second, if you want a legal view defending the ruling, the best one is by constitutional scholar Glenn Greenwald, whom I highly respect. He closely read the court opinion, which points out that previous court rulings mandated that “equal protection” be applied to the “right to marry.”

But he doesn’t deal with my objection: That the ruling also means that a man now has a “right to marry” his golden retriever.

Third, all this brings us to my main point, which I made last December: that government should entirely get out of the marriage business. Only in recent centuries has government seized a privilege previously exercised only by families, churches, and the marrying man and woman themselves. (Nowadays, athiests, agnostics, and other non-religious types could marry within their groups, or make up their vows. Just don’t bother me about it.)

Not surprisingly, government has made a mess of marriage, with a divorce rate of 50%. If airplanes crashed 50% of the time, how long would airlines be in business — or airline executives out of prison?

As to homosexual “marriage,” it’s a chimera. But if people want to believe they have one, they obviously should be allowed to believe such, just as people should be allowed to believe that Jabba the Hut, Boba Fett, Darth Vader, and other “Star Wars” fictions actually exist.

Fourth, and finally, the conservatives and “family values” types criticizing the California Supreme Court ruling have only themselves to blame. For at least 30 years now, especially during the current Bush regime, they have exalted government as never before, vastly increasing the police, regulatory, and snooping powers of the government — all the while saying they favor less government. That cognitive dissonance — saying they want less government but giving us more — shows how conservatives have led the redefinition of reality.

As a Bush administration official put it:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

That’s how even “conservatives” think nowadays.

They should not be surprised now that government, having been built up by them to monstrous proportions, arrogates to itself the power to redefine reality, in this case redefining marriage.