Marriage
We never really needed government approval or codification of a commitment by people to become family, share their lives, raise children or pets together, support and protect each other, and make decisions for each other. Not even religious approval. It just is.
But we have that, and it can be a convenience. In a modern, more complex society and legal framework, having a defined contractual arrangement called “marriage” saves the legal footwork required to setup powers of attorney, ironclad legalities defaulting inheritance to a spouse, and that sort of thing.
That aside from benefits above and beyond the conveniences; benefits that are not government’s to give, and that if they are there, ought to happen at lower rather than higher levels of government. There are tax benefits that accrue more to marrieds than others, and at least an implicit policy encouraging the creation of more citizens for the government to own represent.
Since there is such a framework, sets of benefits that can make life easier, and a heavy-handed government involvement, marriage gets defined by the government, some possible forms of it are forbidden, and some folks seek legal approval for forms not currently recognized formally and bestowed with government beneficence.
Why deal with lawyering galore when you can be pronounced married and get the same rights, plus more besides? Your spouse becomes your primary family. If there is a medical emergency and you cannot speak for yourself, your spouse is contractually sanctified as the one speaking for you and making decisions on your behalf, where your parents, children or siblings might have shouldered that burden for you when they were your primary family. If you predecease your spouse, it is natural for your spouse to be the default heritor and controller of your estate. Ditto for the continued care and raising of your children.
If you don’t trust your spouse to be in this position, hie thee to divorce court. By all means, don’t delay.
The underlying contract of marriage is fundamental to the warp and woof of society subject to predictable rule of law. Rending it is not something to do lightly and without cognizance of the damage being done.
If you have any special attachment to the word “marriage” as meaning one man and one woman, or to the government imposition of incentives for goals that make sense mainly in that context, or a craving for societal neatness, then of course the idea of gay marriage, polygamy, line marriage, or that sort of thing bothers you. Ironically, it is because of government’s involvement in marriage, and provision of benefits for it, that government approval for non-traditional familial groupings is sought.
In the seeking, what damage is done? Do we wait another generation, if that, for society to be more open to the concept of gay marriage, flowing into recognition and legislation of it almost as a matter of course? Or do we seek to have it imposed before its time through judicial contortions? Should we be going the other way instead; getting government out of the business of marriage rather than trying to drag them in deeper? We all know how that usually turns out. Beware the unintended consequence, for it escapes freely and sports a nasty bite.
If we go beyond heteromarriage as the only legal “marriage” in the context of all the contractual rights and obligations, as well as the benefits government might bestow, appropriately or not, then is there really any reason not to go beyond bipartite marriage? Polygamy as normally portrayed or practiced isn’t for me, but something like Heinlein’s line marriage makes a lot of sense. Yet then what happens to the contractual basis of your spouse acting on your behalf no matter who disagrees with their decision? Perhaps evolution into a seniority basis. It strikes me that so long as we don’t destroy spousal legal rights, whether we always like the outcomes on a case by case basis, keeping that a prime reason for gay marriage, then gay marriage is a decidedly easier case to make than arrangements that include more than two people.
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