WHY?

'Why should the State know who marries whom?' he exclaimed. 'Of course, if living together and not registration is taken as the test of a married state, polygamy and polyandry may exist; but the State can't put up any barriers against this. Free love is the ultimate aim of a socialist State; in that State marriage will be free from any kind of obligation, including economic, and will turn into an absolutely free union of two beings. Meanwhile, though our aim is the free union, we must recognize that marriage involves certain economic responsibilities, and that's why the law takes upon itself the defense of the weaker partner, from the economic standpoint.'

It seems the demise of Communism has been greatly exaggerated. The above may sound like libertarian (if you remove the refs to socialist states) or mainstream liberal thinking, but it is actually a direct quote from a Soviet debate on the abolition or marriage. The speaker was the USSR's public prosecutor, an advocate of abolition, and obviously a Communist. Marriage was one of the first targets of Soviet social engineering when Lenin overthrew the Czar:

When the Bolsheviki came into power in 1917 they regarded the family, like every other 'bourgeois' institution, with fierce hatred, and set out with a will to destroy it. 'To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did,' declared Madame Smidovich, a leading Communist and active participant in the recent discussion. So one of the first decrees of the Soviet Government abolished the term 'illegitimate children.' This was done simply by equalizing the legal status of all children, whether born in wedlock or out of it, and now the Soviet Government boasts that Russia is the only country where there are no illegitimate children. The father of a child is forced to contribute to its support, usually paying the mother a third of his salary in the event of a separation, provided she has no other means of livelihood.

At the same time a law was passed which made divorce a matter of a few minutes, to be obtained at the request of either partner in a marriage. Chaos was the result. Men took to changing wives with the same zest which they displayed in the consumption of the recently restored forty-per-cent vodka.

That the American Law Institute's principles regarding marriage echo the old USSR's, and that "mainstream" liberal writers like Michael Kinsley advocate abolishing marriage in the name of ending the argument over gay marriage, should give gay marriage proponents some pause. It won't--they'll remain ignorant of this connection, or bury it, or toss it off as coincidence--but it should.

(hat tip MarriageDebate.com Blog)