The public debate over abortion rights has a long history, with seemingly intractable differences. Some of the most common arguments on both sides have obvious flaws that I won’t belabor here. However, once we get past the bad arguments, there are still two points of view that deserve defending, and there are good arguments for both points of view:

1. Abortion is bad (wrong / immoral), therefore one shouldn’t have an abortion.

2. Abortion is permissible (my choice / none of your business), therefore abortion should be legal.

From the form of this, it should be apparent that there is no contradiction here. Consider:

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I had started to write this as an academic paper several years ago. It never got finished, so I’ve slightly rewritten it for the web. Enjoy.

The issue of same-sex marriage oft gets bandied about in the public forum. People are essentially arguing over whether marriage is a legal right, and whether marriage should be defined as a union between one man and one woman. The issues involving “gay marriage” are addressed fairly well (in a rather one-sided fashion) by Scott Bidstrup in Gay Marriage: The Arguments and the Motives. But the question that has not been sufficiently addressed is why marriage is a legal institution, and more importantly whether it should continue to be. I intend to demonstrate that marriage should not be an institution of the state, specifically in the US.

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