Marriage Quote by Tom McClintock

Strip away the state, and marriage still survives: that’s the dare Tom McClintock is making, and it’s aimed less at romantics than at regulators. The line performs a neat inversion. Instead of treating marriage as a legal status the government confers, he casts it as a pre-political fact - a social institution that precedes law and therefore should not be redefined by it. It’s a conservative argument in a single sentence: if something would exist without the state, the state should approach it with humility, not authorship.

The subtext is doing heavier work than the syntax. “All the laws” is an intentionally absurd thought experiment, a rhetorical scorched-earth scenario meant to make “marriage” look like gravity: inevitable, natural, immune to legislative tinkering. That framing sidesteps the messy, modern truth that marriage is also a bundle of enforceable rights and obligations - inheritance, custody, immigration, taxation - that are not merely decorative. When McClintock says marriage would still exist, he’s quietly relocating the real debate from policy details to moral legitimacy, where opponents can be cast as trying to outlaw or invent something ancient.

Context matters: McClintock’s career tracks with eras when “marriage” was a political flashpoint, especially around same-sex marriage and the cultural power struggle over what institutions get to define family. The line is designed to reassure one audience (your values aren’t dependent on government permission) while warning another (your reforms are just paperwork against tradition). It works because it flatters marriage as bigger than politics - even as it’s deployed as politics.