As the family weakens, our welfare and correctional bureaucracies grow.

Thus, again, marriage is comprehensive in some basic ways, not in every sense. But the same holds of most revisionists’ master principle: a spouse cannot be your “number one partner” in every activity, or your “soul-mate” in every domain.

As we deprive marriage policy of definite shape, we deprive it of public purpose.

If marriage is centrally an emotional union, rather than one inherently ordered to family life, it becomes much harder to show why the state should concern itself with marriage any more than with friendship. Why involve the state in what amounts to the legal regulation of tenderness?

Finally, promoting conjugal marriage need not and should not involve prohibiting any consensual relationship. For all these reasons, libertarians should favor the regulation of marriage-which is, again, practically inevitable anyway.

Thus, again, marriage is comprehensive in some basic ways, not in every sense. But the same holds of most revisionists' master principle: a spouse cannot be your "number one partner" in every activity, or your "soul-mate" in every domain.