John Stossel, host of Fox Business
Network's Stossel, on Thursday challenged NOM's Brian Brown on
gay marriage.
Brown, the president of the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM), the country's most vociferous
opponent of gay marriage, and nationally syndicated columnist David
Harsanyi, a self-described libertarian, were Stossel's guests on the
segment.
“It is a mistake to allow government
to define what marriage should be, gay or not. It should get out of
the business of defining marriage at all and let people – it's not
a public good, it's a private relationship that people should engage
in without government,” Harsanyi told Stossel to the delight of the
audience.
Brown disagreed, insisting that
marriage is “a public good.”
“The state's interest in marriage is
that this is the institution by which we create stable families where
kids can be connected … to both their mother and their father.”
“So what we've seen in states that
have gone in this direction – we see things like attempts to
recognize three parents, because there is a biological father and two
mothers. So what we see is a total deconstruction of marriage.”
“So what?” Stossel asked.
“Well, because deconstructing
marriage is a very bad idea,” he answered, then added that broken
families result in higher rates of incarceration and juvenile
delinquency.
Harsanyi noted that none of that
undermines his marriage.
“Well, marriage is not a creation of
the state. The state should support what is true and good and
beautiful. It's true and good and beautiful that marriage is the
union of a man and a woman,” Brown responded, giving the audience a
good chuckle.
“I don't want the state deciding what
is good and beautiful,” Stossel said to encouraging applause from
the audience. (The video is embedded in the right panel of this
page.)
(Related: Brian
Brown suggests gay marriage will “normalize pedophilia.”)