Anti-pornography activist Maggie Gallagher of the Philadelphia Revised Institute Against Public Pornography criticized government support of marriage yesterday on the popular Volokh Conspiracy web blog.

“Why is marriage universal?” asked Gallagher. “Because it is the answer to an urgent problem that is biological and innate: sex. The governments of this country should not be in the business of promoting this sort of pornography. Marriage is intrinsically about sex.”

Gallagher called marriage a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on all kinds of kinky sex acts,” comparing marriage to “legalized prostitution in which the state plays the part of the pimp.”

According Gallagher, the government makes money from marriages, and warned that if the state doesn’t stop “pimping marriages” that “in 200 years our country will suffer death by sexual disorganization, just as the Roman Empire did.”

According to Gallagher, sex, which is the leading cause of marriage, is also the leading cause of abortions and venereal disease.

Gallagher also worries that proposals to grant benefits to those who marry threatens to make marriage too desirable. She says that governments should not allow spouses to preferentially inherit spousal property, to gain automatic spousal visitation rights in hospitals, or to gain automatic custody of children in the case of a spousal death. She claims that benefits such as these threaten to further entrench government involvement in “the world’s oldest profession.”