Licensed professions use government as a bully to thwart unlicensed – and thus, unprivileged – competitors. All professional licenses are licenses to steal your opportunity to hire someone possibly more qualified but unwilling to do government’s bidding. Consumers have better tools than licensing to gauge professional quality.

The history of marriage licensing is equally laden with obvious special interests. Marriage licenses were once used – perhaps invented – to discourage interracial relationships. Today they are used to discourage gay relationships. Heterosexuality has its privileges, and it still doesn’t pay to be gay.

For disfavored singles and unlicensed couples – gay or otherwise – let’s aspire to remain unlicensed. Let’s exercise our God-given rights instead of seeking government’s permission to exercise them. Let’s work to get our own houses in order.

Licensed or not, all adults can draft a will or a trust to pass their property at death to their loved one(s), regardless of gender. Nobody needs a marriage license to fulfill this important function.

No couple needs legislators defining each side’s respective property rights when its relationship dissolves. This can and should be done contractually – not just by gay couples but also by husbands and wives.

I sympathize with people – gay or otherwise – whose employers do not extend privilege of certain employment benefits to their live-in co-habitants, as they do their employees’ married spouses. The solutions to this are better employers, not government adding a class of people to its A list.

There is only one valid justification for marriage licenses – legal convenience. They are useful to courts in determining legal relationships, duties and powers when couples break up or testify.

However, common-law privilege against coerced spousal testimony predates marriage licenses. Marriage licenses were never legally necessary to prove marital status.

We would be smart to get government completely out of marriage and give it back to God, where it all began and belongs.

Let God, not government, administer and sanction all of our loving relationships. Make government available to preside over our material disputes.

kenngividen@writersbureau.org

Major League Baseball once considered Indianapolis in an expansion. However, due to lack of planning, it would have cost over $40 million to convert RCA Dome to baseball. Later, MLB abandoned offering franchises to cities with indoor stadiums.

Game parking is inadequate and expensive around RCA Dome. Event parking more than a mile from Dome starts at $5. The Dome has no underground parking and very little parking revenue to share with an NFL team owner.

(To credit of Hudnut administration, RCA Dome is modest. In real terms, it cost about as much as Conseco Fieldhouse, which holds over 17,000. Other than lacking adequate profit-enhancing amenities to keep NFL franchises happy, Dome is a very functional stadium that is used 200-plus times per year, only 10 of which are for regularly-scheduled professional football games.)

Now Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson wants to relive glory days of Hudnut administration, but without that past administration’s modesty. If Peterson gets his way, taxpayers will spend over $500 million to build NFL’s newest stadium, premiering in 2008.

In inflation-adjusted terms, that’s about three times real expense of ill-planned RCA Dome. The Colts have agreed to contribute only $100 million to project, a third of which is in form of a favorable NFL loan.

Indianapolis would be smarter to follow recent lead of Washington. Last week by a 7-to-6 vote, Washington’s city council voted against deal struck between Major League Baseball and Mayor Anthony Williams, which required city to build a new $579 million stadium for former Montreal Expos. Mayor Williams now has until June to find private financing for other half of stadium’s costs.

That’s kind of deal voters of Indianapolis should demand. Less government involvement in city’s next stadium means less risk for taxpayers, better planning and less pressure to raise taxes. We should resist temptation to let government build another obsolete stadium.

(Originally published December 21, 2004)