The government should have nothing to do with marriage.

I assume you're referring to marriage as a religious institution here. I see great value in having legal constructs (e.g., civil marriage) that reflect how people's lives are structured.

@Sam Livingston-Gray

I see love more as an emotional-spiritual experience, not a legal question, so marriage is not a legal question either. Involving a "government" is a question of whether you want your personal life to be "structured" by someone's law or by your own emotional, voluntary relationships.

A government is, by definition, not necessarily a voluntary, let alone loving-emotional ;) relationship. It actually is a group of people that many other people have expressively chosen not to trust; who have "bad creds" with many of those they claim to represent.

So while you might want your leaders ("government") to be involved in your personal emotional relationships, other people don't want your leaders in their relationships, and you probably don't want their's in yours. Both is fine, if you are free to choose.

(Legal constructs - contracts - are possible without "a government".)

Best,A.

While I agree with the claim, I do not necessarily agree with your comment, Andreas. I'm with Sam on this one.

Currently we have two fundamentally different institutions comingled in the current definition of "marriage". We have the social/religious/emotional institution (where I agree, the government should not be involved) and the legal institution used for things like next-of-kin, child guardianship, and taxes.

While I certainly agree that government should have no involvement whatsoever in the religious and emotional aspects marriage, we *do* need a formal legal institution to fill the civil and legal role that marriage is currently providing.

Without question, people must be free to love whomever they choose, and structure their lives accordingly.

However, there are a number of complications that arise with regard to marriage: powers of attorney, death benefits, parental guardianship, and who gets what if the marriage ends. These issues are all difficult to resolve. Indeed, that's why people make rules in the first place: to help them get through thorny issues.

Suggesting that individuals write contracts with one another seems to me like suggesting that we all write our web applications in assembly code, or that we all grow our own wheat, process it into flour, and use that to make our own burritos -- it fails to take advantage of common cases.

While going the DIY route is indeed sometimes valuable, one cannot possibly do *everything* oneself. In this case, we delegate the power to resolve those questions to the legal system. If any system isn't meeting our needs, we have a responsibility to change it.

Current laws favor opposite-sex couples by giving them a convenient shortcut to access the 1,000+ legal rights conferred by marriage, whereas same-sex couples must spend a few thousand dollars to draw up a contract that hopefully gives them some of those rights (assuming their families don't challenge the contracts, which happens). This is fundamentally unfair -- but I hardly think the solution is to scrap the shortcut. Rather, it should be extended without bias to anyone wishing to participate.

(And by the way, my partner and I, though we could do so, are not participating in the legal institution of marriage until that inequity is removed.)

I believe government should stay our of marriage, and it should all be done by contract law, but I favor the government providing a small number of "suggested contracts". They would cover the standard marriage rights currently, and some other popular variations. You could just use a pre-made contract all done for you, or you could customize it as you saw fit. If you only wanted to make small changes, slightly modifying the basic one would be much easier.

This would allow for pretty much the same ease of legal simplicity we have today, with far more flexibility for personal differences.

Go Rachel: that's more or less what I had in mind when I made the claim.

The very nature of this claim suggests that the government should not recognize marriages, give rights and benefits to those that are married, etc. Though I may agree with "what the author may have had in mind," the wording of the claim does not allow me to do so.

Really, how many business would let their employees off from work due to the death of their partner without the government saying very clearly that doing so would be a good thing to do. Sure, the job I have now would be understanding about that, but not the job before that. A better claim is that the government should be less strict in its definition of marriage.

i'm ok with legally recognized "civil unions", but let's take the word out of the government and put it back in the church/vegas casino where it belongs

Knowing who is married to who is OK, since it enables the administration to give out rights in a certain, homogeneous way.

However, there should be freedom of choice IMHO and no government should ever interfere more than with birth-promotion practices.

A significant problem with this discussion is that "government" has not been defined.  In particular, the scale of governance is totally ignored.

Marriage is essentially a social contract with the surrounding community.  It is NOT a private contract only between two people – as many hyper-modern activists would claim.  Its primary function through history has been to ensure that children are raised well.  The community or society has much at stake in this endeavor.

So to claim that "government" has no business in the institution of marriage is absolutely ridiculous if one refers to local governance of the community.

knappster: You might find the book "What Is Marriage For?" interesting (by E.J. Graff; I'm too lazy to Google it right now). The author takes a broad survey of marriage throughout history in the context of property, politics, children, and a few other things I've forgotten since I read it (it's amazing what four years of college will do to one's retention).

I'm with you on marriage as a social contract, btw, but I think it's for more than just kids.

Thanks for the book recommendation, Sam.  I'll check it out at the local library.

Just to clarify, I asserted that the primary historical function of marriage has been to ensure that children are raised well.  I agree that there are also other considerations, but I think that parenting is the most important.

This pretty much sums up how I feel about it: http://www.lewrockwell.com/greenhut/greenhut48.html