When one considers the proposed redefinition of marriage, one cannot help but notice the undeniably statist nature of the proposal. The state is effectively being asked to redefine the meaning of a millenary institution that, according to classical liberal philosophy is actually antecedent to the formation of the state. As John Locke pointed out in Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690), ‘the first society was between man and wife, which gave beginning to that between parents and children’. 

Locke is known as the ‘Founder of Classical Liberalism’ because his immense contributions to political philosophy provided moral and political justification for the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England....