In addition, there are things you can't do without marriage, mostly involving third party obligations toward a married couple, such as arranging for marital survivorship entitlements to Social Security -- administratively, it would be a total nightmare for the government to determine, from the terms of a merely bilateral contract, whether the parties are appropriately related in a way to get such entitlements. Likewise for agencies and court with, as WD points out, anti-discrimination laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of marital status, or with courts with regard to marital privilege not to testify against your partner, etc. So there are in fact lots of good economic and political reasons to have this particular institution.
Now there's another direction that one might take the Lambda LDF proposal. If there are public, as opposed to the religious or personal or whatever, reasons to have this institution in a state-sanctioned way, one might envisage a reform where there is state-authorized marriage that confers on the parties the bundle of rights and responsibilities that marriage currently does, and then, quite separately, religious or personal commitments that people can make to each other that have no legal status. To get (state) married, you'd maybe take a blood test and file a paper with the county. Whatever you did in church, synagogue, mosque, temple, if anything, would be between you, your partner, and God or the gods. That would mean that religions might be free to discriminate, but actually I think that's OK -- people who have those religious commitments could fight out the issues within their faith, and meanwhile enjoy the benefits and burdens of (state) marriage.
--- On Fri, 5/23/08, WD <mister.wd at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: WD <mister.wd at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] I hate Lambda Legal and the LA Times
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, May 23, 2008, 9:57 AM
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:53 AM, Joseph Catron
> <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Would there be some drawback to people contracting
> among themselves to
> > decide these matters (except for the custody question,
> which is a bit
> > tougher)? Or have I overlooked some reason that
> it's preferable for
> > the state to mandate that they all be decided in one
> fell swoop, in
> > favor of a single individual? You claim that
> "most people would want"
> > it this way, and I'm certainly not proposing that
> we ban them from
> > signing comprehensive master contracts if they so
> choose. But why
> > impose them on the rest of us, while coupling them
> with the ludicrous
> > spectacle of state-licensed religious ceremonies?
>
> The state should mandate that a number of rights
> automatically rest in
> a specific kind of individual for administrative reasons:
>
> You don't want to force non-specialists to have to
> interpret
> contractual language. For example, a landlord might know
> damn well
> that he can't discriminate based on marital status, but
> what if a
> prospective tenant has a "comprehensive contract"
> with another person?
> Or, in a situation where a doctor needs to ask permission
> to, say,
> harvest organs, who does s/he need to consult in the next
> 20 minutes?
> Is every hospital going to need a lawyer in the emergency
> room to
> analyze "comprehensive contracts"? On a related
> note, there are
> innumerable statutes and regulations that refer to, or
> implicate, the
> rights of spouses. Figuring out how these intersect with
> different
> "comprehensive contracts" would be a long-lasting
> legal and
> bureaucratic nightmare.
>
> I don't see what advantages would make these _huge_
> inconveniences
> worthwhile: especially since nearly all comprehensive
> contracts would
> look like marriage anyway. In short, if your objection to
> the state
> being involved with marriage is that it's sticking its
> nose where it
> just doesn't belong, I don't see any convenient
> and/or less intrusive
> practical alternative. And besides, from the perspective
> of queers
> who want equality NOW, it doesn't make any strategic
> sense to agitate
> for a fundamental overhaul of how the state regards
> marriage: it's far
> easier to say "we want to get married too."
>
> I'm all for adopting flexible marriage laws. For
> example, IIRC Spain
> has a category of marriages that automatically expire after
> a period
> of years, so if the marriage doesn't work out, you
> don't need to get a
> divorce, you just let your marriage license expire and go
> your
> separate ways. Fine. I'd probably be open to allowing
> more than two
> people to enter into a marriage. But just for the sake of
> efficient
> administration, there ought to be a single,
> state-recognized status:
> you can call it whatever you want.
>
> > And as for custody, non-biological parents can adopt
> already. Doesn't
> > that offer more security than a legal marriage between
> a biological
> > parent and someone else? My impression is that
> step-parents, whether
> > they're straight as an arrow or gay as the day is
> long, have pretty
> > much no rights under current family law.
>
> Adoption is no walk in the park. No matter how
> uncontroversial the
> adoption is, there are going to be courts, lawyers and
> government
> bureaucrats involved. Talk about state interference in
> your personal
> life.
>
> Under most (maybe all) state laws, if my wife has a baby,
> then I
> immediately acquire the rights and responsibilities of
> fatherhood
> because we're married. I don't need to fill
> anything out or engage
> with any kind of bureaucracy. By contrast, if one half of
> a lesbian
> couple has a baby, her wife will have to go through the
> adoption
> process to acquire parental rights.
>
> If you're proposing a system where everyone but the
> biological mother
> adopts a child, then no thanks. If you're proposing
> some system where
> certain people with comprehensive contracts automatically
> acquire
> parental rights upon a child's birth -- well, that
> sounds a lot like
> "marriage" to me.
>
> -WD
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk