The final words on this.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINEPRINT

At the risk of repeating myself, let me revisit a few points that have cropped up over the years in this space. Once done, I promise not to belabor them again.

I'll start with this one: Being a believer in the notion that government should play a limited and well-defined role in the lives of citizens is not the same as being anti-government, despite endless efforts by progressives to conflate those two very different beliefs. in fact, government performs many vital roles, and my only complaint is that I wish it performed them better. Borders need to be guarded, a military maintained, the financial industry regulated, the garbage picked up, public safety preserved, courts operated, environmental-quality protected, etc. And taxes are required to pay for those operations. I get it. I grasp the relationship between the hefty property-tax bill on my home and the appearance of two police cruisers outside the house when some drunken stranger was pounding on the door at 3 a.m.

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But by and large, what 1 want most from government is to be left alone. I want it to maintain streets, but I don't want it to tell me that I can't buy a big, honkin' cup of soda or smoke a cigarette on the beach, for instance. (Both examples culled from recent real-life events, by the way.) I'd prefer that government not give itself the exclusive legal sanction to operate a numbers racket that preys on the poor while simultaneously making obesity a moral issue. And I really don't want government to tell me whom I can and cannot marry.

That last belief puts me at odds with a majority of North Carolina voters, who recently approved a constitutional ban on gay marriage. My guess is that most of them would agree with everything I've said above, except for that last part. And that puzzles me. If you believe in limited government and place a premium on individual liberties, how do you reconcile that with your vote to invest bureaucrats with the power to force themselves into the most personal part of a citizen's life? That's the gold standard of governmental intrusion. Conservative people voted for that?

I don't think government should be in the business of licensing marriage at all--gay or straight. Most people don't realize this, but marriage licenses were essentially nonexistent until after the Civil War, when they were introduced as the device by which race-mixing could be prohibited. Society managed to function without marriage licenses for thousands of...