Same-sex marriages are now legal today in California.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am thrilled for the people who want to marry legally but haven’t been able to up until now. I wish every one of you who have wanted to marry and now can the best of luck and a lifetime of happiness together. Love is important, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
On the other hand (and those of you who feel like I’m being Captain Buzzkill can stop reading now. I’m not gonna trash your day).
Marriage as an institution needs a serious revamp. The laws around marriage and family reflect a social structure that we don’t actually have any more. Society has changed, but some institutions haven’t quite caught up. Lags like these aren’t unusual, but it’s important to look at them clearly so that when we make our changes, we’re doing it usefully.
I’m asking questions in this article rather than presenting solutions because when confronted with the enormity of the problem, I find myself waving my hands around and looking like a deer in headlights.
You see, society has changed, but human nature hasn’t. People connect and want to live together. Plenty of us fall in love and decide to have kids. Some decide that they want to live together, but don’t want kids. Some decide they want to live with more than one person — and on it goes.
Sure, you could say marriage is for the protection of pregnant women and their offspring. That’s a necessary social function. We need to ensure kids are provided for.
But marriage ain’t just about kids. Plenty of people who don’t want/can’t have kids want to be married to partners.
Why?
Part of it is cultural. People who are in love marry, right? How many “happy ending” romantic stories end with people not getting married — especially if the story is marketed for the under 13 set? A lot of it is simply cultural expectation.
Part of it is for the legal benefit. There are about 1,400 benefits and advantages (State and Federal) that one gets when on marries. There’s the big, obvious stuff like tax advantages and visitation rights in hospitals, and then the stuff we don’t think about as often like rights in lawsuits and inheritance issues. Many of the legal benefits are based on the “and the two shall become one” principle. A married couple is often treated as a single unit for financial and some legal issues. Ferinstance, if someone is driving drunk and kills your husband, as a wife, you can sue for wrongful death and loss of intimacy. If you’re not married? The law is a whole bunch fuzzier on the issue.
For myself, I’d like to see a disconnect between the legal institution of marriage and the social behaviors of romance. We humans are social creatures and I think it’s important for the legal structures to recognize and support the very natural human desire to form partnerships for mutual benefit. However, the whole romance thing is really muddying a lot of the waters.
I’d like to see cohabitation and parenting contracts that specifically exclude the concept of a romantic relationship, which marriage is presumed to be right now. (i.e. “I don’t give a damn if it’s Twoo Wuv or not. The kids need to be taken care of, and the damn bills need to be paid!”)
Thing is, it’s easy to theorize. Actually coming up with workable solutions (and we do need them) is something else entirely!
I’d love to know what my readers think about his one.
I wholeheartedly agree. As someone who is less than a week away from my wedding to my BF, this is a major issue for me… especially since we’re doing a religious handfasting only, no legal paperwork because he’s married to GF/Wife (and has been for almost 15 years). The government simply needs to stay OUT of the bedrooms of the American people, plain and simple. Marriage at its core foundation is a contract. If more than 2 people can enter into a business contract, why can’t they enter into a marriage contract? A contract is a contract at least that’s hwo the government SHOULD be viewing it.
I’m of the opinion that marriage should be a social or religious thing, and that if people want legal contracts between each other, they can have them. The two should be separate. Right now, unfortunately, the government has the two of them mixing.
Right now, I think that if you’re poly and want to be married to multiple people, which isn’t allowed in this country, the only way to do it is to have a social or religious ceremony, and then draw up legal contracts. After thinking about this, I think that this would be the best thing for _everyone_ instead of the way it is currently.
I agree too. I am specifically not ever getting married because I know it’s unfair – until I and all of my friends can marry who we wish, I’m not going to marry anyone. I don’t mind people who do marry, but I refuse to participate in that system.
On the other hand, I tend to think that anything that pushes at the boundaries of the currently ossified institution of marriage will help the cause of reforming the institution, and legalization of same-sex marriage does poke at those boundaries. Of course reform does not automatically mean improvement – see French, Russian, and more recently Cambodian Revolutions for possible counterexamples. Argueably increased vigilance is warranted during times of reform. Once the old rules are gone, one should be careful about what new rules get put into place. That said, I tend to agree with Tammy that it would be best if in the eyes of govenrment, marriage was reduced to a variant of contract law focusing primarily on upholding agreements between/among the parties involved.
where I can sign under every letter in “The kids need to be taken care of, and the damn bills need to be paid!” ? thank you.
@courtney please, NO religion in marriage either – some of us do not necessarily appreciate _any_ religion in vicinity, and now you are trying to push on us another form of exclusion, undersigned of silent church-goers majority. NO THANK YOU!
I agree with a lot of this post. The legal system just is not set up to adequately handle the tangle that marriage brings, and especially if it would involve more than two people. Hospital visitation is a particular peeve of mine: why shouldn’t anyone who has a close relationship with the patient be able to visit? Especially when many people are estranged from, or at least not close to, their actual family, yet the family they have chosen – friends, relationships, engaged partners – cannot be close to them. Ideally, I would love to be able to just draw up a sort of “kinship list”, have it notarized, and have that be it; something basically saying, “these people are my family and the people I want close to me in the event that I cannot express this desire for myself.”
@cbfi Um, she (repeatedly even) said “social or religious”, not just religious, and as far as I could tell, she wasn’t pushing anything on anyone, just relating her own experiences.
cbfi, I do not hear courtney saying that she is pushing religion on anyone. I hear her saying that those who choose to have a social or religious ceremony should be able to do so, but that this should be separate from and unrelated to contractual agreements that are recognized by the government.
I would not support limiting anyone’s right to freedom of religious expression. If someone wants a religious marriage ceremony, no law should stop them. I believe that if you have a religious marriage, you are welcome to adhere to the rules of your religion regarding your conduct of your marriage.
I also believe that civil marriage should be defined by rights and responsibilities with a secular purpose (“The kids need to be taken care of, and the damn bills need to be paid!”). There is no place in a civil contract for the enforcement of religious rules.
@cbfi
I don’t think Courtney was necessarily shoving anything down anyone’s throat. I think they were trying to imply that marriage either needs to be solely a religious ceremony or simply a legal contract, and not both.
Either way, someone’s going to get excluded- if marriage becomes nothing but a legal contract with the religious/ceremonial bits stripped away, the right-wingers are going to whine and complain about being excluded because their religious views aren’t being recognized.
This is why I’m all about the domestic partnership concept. I sympathize with and appreciate – REALLY I do – the argument that domestic partnerships are a “separate but equal” fiction. a consolation prize intended to mollify and silence gay couples seeking “full marriage.”
But. It doesn’t have to be a patronizing fiction. It could be the LEGAL STANDARD. Domestic partnerships for everybody! Het couples, gay couples, college roommates, best friends, parent-and-adult-child domestic arrangements, people with other, co-existing partnerships. Quite literally, any domestic partnership – any arrangement of people with common domestic and personal-financial needs and obligations. Marriage rituals for them that want them.
This seems to be something that could, over time, actually happen – a path for the social concept of marriage to evolve from where we’ve been to where we could be, without open warfare between ideological groups or radical all-at-once restructuring of the legal system. It seems attainable.
Since I’m not religious, I was definitely not trying to shove religion or religious exclusion down anyone’s throat. I was saying that marriage should be a social thing or a religious thing, or some sort of special ceremony for whoever wants it.
That being said, adults (as many as you please) should be able to enter into a legal contract that gives the rights that marriage currently gives in our country, in my opinion.
“Society has changed, but some institutions haven’t quite caught up.”
Neither have a lot of members of society, unfortunately. I’d go along with what you say but the only way (I suspect) that it will happen is in a couple of generations’ time, when today’s children are tomorrow’s leaders and they have grown up in a world not quite as obsessed with marriage as the be-all-and-end-all.
“Society has changed, but some institutions haven’t quite caught up.”
I think that should be “Some of society has changed and some institutions haven’t changed in the same way.” I am against the wholesale trashing of marriage and if, as you say, society is out of sync with human nature, perhaps it should be brought back into alignment with said nature.
From what I’ve seen, the big push for same-sex marriage has been *for* those 1400 benefits so all those saying the government should “get out of the marriage biz” are, in essence, saying that the current push for same-sex marriage is misguided.
Of course, I am very much against throwing out rules or traditions without an understanding of why those rules and/or traditions are there; history shows us the consequences of *that*.
Allowing same-sex couples to marry seems quite reasonable to me (and, it seems to the courts in Massachusetts and California) but it *is* a slippery slope so let’s not get out the toboggan.
Problem is, how does the government extend the benefits of marriage in a poly situation without opening up the legal institution to even more abuse than it currently sees? I mean, right now, you want a poly “marriage” you gotta care enough to shell out enough to get lawyers to give the arrangements the once-over for legality. If it’s sold as a free package, the guvmint’s stuck dealing out those benefits to pretty much any group who asks for ‘em.
@Xan: The problem with boycotting the institution of marriage is that it actually benefits the government financially; they reap savings by not dishing out marriage benefits.
I joke that I’m a wonderful girlfriend (my boyfriends agree) but I was a terrible wife, and therefore no sane person would permit me to get married again. Don’t you know that “wife” is a four-letter word?! *grin*
My primary (live-in) SO and I just celebrated our 9th anniversary. That means we’ve lasted more than 3 times as long as either of my disastrous early marriages (divorced the first, was widowed in the second). This relationship is about 3,000 times healthier & happier than either of my marriages, too.
We got the domestic partnership a few years ago, just in case it comes in handy some day (for instance, my employer allows spousal rights on health insurance for registered domestic partners, whether same-sex couples or not, although the paperwork’s a bitch). Of course, my daughters (ages 19 & 15) want us to get married so he can be their “real dad,” but he’s been their real dad in every way that matters for 9 years so that’s a moot point. Not to mention a lousy reason to get married. (For the kids’ sake? Kind of an after-the-fact shotgun wedding?)
My secondary (live-out) SO is more allergic to marriage than anyone I know…other than me. So that works out well. :-)
Marriage simply doesn’t meet any need that I already have met _without_ marriage! I’ll rethink my position if it becomes extremely financially advantageous to ever get married…but it doesn’t look likely. Marriage benefits? All my married friends complain how the government screws them on taxes, and I get WAY better tax breaks filing head-of-household than I possibly could as married, whether filing jointly or not.
My primary and I got married 13 years ago. She asked me, in front of the Burger King in a mall:
“Hey. we should get married!”
Me: “Huh.. why?”
Her: “Cause we’d get cool stuff.”
Me, smiling and nodding, “Yeah.. cool. Ok”
:-)
For us marriage was gaming the system, really. We had already decided to be together For The Duration so it was a formality to please family. Mind you, the fact that we haven’t had kids has caused a bit of concern, but we’ve finally stopped getting abused on that score. Mainly because a crop of nubile girls in the family has started getting married and will almost certainly have children immediately.
I can’t imagine what conditions would have to exist to have the idea of marriage being a two person pairing change. This is essentially a world wide ideal, and is much more strongly rooted in some places (just try being poly anywhere in the middle east, Indonesia, or related places). Essentially, it would mean that the Abrahamic faiths had lost their hold on the psyche of the world, and that we had started going down the road to true secularism.
Its better in The West, of course. But it is still illegal to have more than one cohabitating partner, if that other partner is sexually active with you or your other partner. Blue laws and “common law marriage” laws abound in various states, provinces and countries so that you simply cant cohabitate with people who are not relatives and not be in legal jeopardy, if someone really wanted to push it, or the state did, in a child custody case.
In other words, even if you never got married to your primary partner, living with them for an amount of time makes you a “common law” married couple. Having children in this situation is even worse, as even though you are “common law” married, all that tends to mean is you suffer the bains and not the benefits of that status. No amount of legal wrangling will stop a dedicated social services case worker from “protecting the children” because they found out about your poly lifestyle and consider it dangerous.
None of this will probably happen in a progressive US state or Urban area.. and if the household is clean and happy, and the kids are ok, it is unlikely since social workers are pretty overburdened with horrendous things. But.. that damn sword is still hanging.
So that is also a reason to get married. But, keep in mind if you are married in the US, and another partner comes into it, that state can still charge you with Bigamy (those “common law” marriage things again) even if all are consenting. Unlikely. But legally possible. I do wonder WHO gets charged with bigamy in a same sex couple situation though…but then, most common law marriage laws refer to opposite sex partners, so I’d bet there is no legal standing there. Making same sex couples less in jeopardy if they are poly than opposite sex couples.
(Hey wait.. thats an excellent idea! If you are straight, poly, and have a small pod, and are permanent partners with some people.. just marry the guy/girl who is your partners other SO. Ooo. Its so sneaky it hurts :)
And on and on. These are the problems I worry about, and the ones that I think would change first, if the tides are going in the right direction. If the “common law” marriage laws start getting struck down, then I think that is the canary that tells us more good things are to come.
PS: if any lawyers who know more about this than I care to chime in, please do!
In other words, even if you never got married to your primary partner, living with them for an amount of time makes you a “common law” married couple.
In the US, that’s not entirely so. Fortunately. Only 11 states even recognize common law marriage and even then in only very specific circumstances. I urge you to check out the Common Law Marriage FAQ at Nolo Press.
To date, only Utah has ever used these laws to go after someone.