It’s not a difficult concept at all. Your proposal would achieve your aims, which would be to drive a wedge between the state and the word “marriage”, because in your eyes that word has been tainted with religion.
The problem is that people want to be married. They don’t want to enter into a “civil union”, which strikes most people as a fake marriage. In California, for example, gay people can already enter into civil unions which are almost the equivalent of marriages. But they want marriage, and I don’t blame them. The word carries meaning and history with it.
I don’t give a damn what theists think. I don’t give a damn what any church thinks. I want to be in a marriage, not a civil union.
Actually, from the POV of the Christian religion, the church’s original position on marriage was that it was a secular legal issue, not a religious issue. The local priest would happily bless your union if you wanted, much the same as he would bless your new fishing boat at launching, but it wasn’t until 5-600 years ago that the church decided that marriages *had *to be performed by a priest.
Woah woah woah - since when is marriage a religious institution? Sure, lots and lots of people solemnize it before their preferred god or gods, but what it basically is is a social partnering of two individuals into a union in which they share their life, property, bed, and children (if any). It is an institution that suffers not in the slightest from changes in religion or removal of religion (or weren’t there marriages in communist russia?). Really, it’s no more a religious institution than eating meals became a religious institution when people started praying over them. It’s a social institution, and that’s that.
That being the case, the only sensible arguments against it would have to be secular - so far those have been very poor against gays marriage, tending to be slightly stronger against incest, somewhat stronger regarding polygamy (mostly due to complications involved), and ranging to the extremely solid against marriage to minors, pets, and household appliances. (The lack of good secular arguments against gays in particular really bothers those religious people who happen to also be bigots, of course.)
As for disbanding marriage entirely as an institution, I can’t see a reason to attempt to do it. If you did, everyone would declare themselves to be married anyway, whether by the authority of a church or by their own will, and the main difference would be that the doors would be opened for insurance companies and hospitals and the like to pick and choose which marriages not to recognize. How often this would be abused, I cannot say - but it would surely complicate things legally speaking.
If your goals are to remove extra government benefits and conditions for married couples, you could theoretically attempt to alter those benefits and conditions directly. It would have to be simpler than getting any politician to denounce marriage as an institution.
If your goal would be to slip gays past the bigoted religious opposition to them being married, I’m doubtful it would help. Each religion would fall back on god as backing their marriages, and recognize the marriages of other religions, and probably even the self-declared secular marriages of types they approved of. But they would still refuse to accept or recognize gay self-declared marriages or treat the partners as they normally would treat married couples.
Not only that, but the moment we cede marriage to the churches the nasty ones will start trying to do away with civil unions too. I got married in a nice ceremony with no mention of god or religion. I’m with you, I don’t want theists to take that away from me.
You left out the most important one, in common property states like California, at least, which is the sharing of assets as befits a long term relationship. The readiness to do this, as the default, is the think distinguishing marriages from civil unions or less. It is not something to be entered into lightly, which is the point.
I’m for civil unions today, as a stopgap until gays are allowed to marry, as they should. After marriage is available to anyone, I’d have no problem with doing away with them as unnecessary. I’m also for letting a couple marry themselves, as in Pennsylvania. The license is the important part, not who says the words.
AFAIAC, the high rate of divorce isn’t a direct portrayal of marriage as an institution. It is just a reflection of the amount of people who probably should have never been married to begin with, plus some that due to circumstances, just didn’t make it.
To say that the institution of marriage is void of validity due to the rate of divorce is like saying that law school, or med school, is worthless because they have such a high rate of people who ultimately don’t finish the career or don’t pass the tests.
That having been said, there really is not much disparity between being married and having a civil union contract. So basically, you would have a lot of defaulted civil union contracts. The vehicle has changed, but the passengers are still the same.
Additionally, I don’t see why all people, as long as they are both consenting adults and of an age proper to make that choice, shouldn’t be allowed to participate in marriage, civil union, or what not. Poligamy = if it works for you, fine. Marrying my cat? No, my cat can’t be considered a consenting adult.
Then why were the most vocal proponents of Prop 8 the religious?
Don’t get me wrong- I think the best solution by far is to simply allow anyone to marry anyone (assuming, of course, that all parties are consenting and able to give consent). However, if that’s going to be fought tooth-and-nail, then I say we do the legal equivalent of taking our ball home. “You say that your God doesn’t approve of homosexuality, and because of that you won’t let gays marry? Fine. Nobody gets married- everyone now gets civil unions, which we CAN construct in a manner that’s fair to everyone.”
So to sum up:
Best solution- anyone can marry anyone.
Second best solution- nobody can marry anyone, at least not in a state-sanctioned manner, so that theists can’t restrict it to only those people they agree with.
Unacceptable- marriage for normal people, “civil unions” for you dirty perverted heathens.
Ah, I have been married for 45 years and I think the trouble is that the state cannot decide if it is a religious or civil institution. What I would advocate is that there be an institution of civil union, certified by the state in terms of a licence, an optional pre-nuptial agreement and so on. Abrogating this union (aka divorce) would be the same as abrogating any other contract. If the parties agree, fine, if not it could get very messy, as it can right now. Meantime, if the parties want a religious ceremony, that is their business, having nothing to do with the government. If their church forbids divorce, that is their problem, but the state can still recognize the end of the agreement.
Currently no law in the US that I am aware of makes any provision for multi-party agreements and it is not clear how income-splitting (for tax purposes) would work in such cases, nor how intestate laws could accomodate this kind of thing. A problem, but not insuperable, I would think. Perhaps the state would require a pre-nuptial agreement and a will in such cases before recognizing the situation.
Marraige isn’t really doing so well, actually. My wife and I were the only parents not divorced at least once, in my daughter’s grade school classmates.
All of my siblings have been divorced.
My uncle was married 5 times, 3 times to the same woman. He was behind the pulpit when my brother declared himself for Christ. Religious affiliation, or lack there of, doesn’t seem to matter, in my near circle.
'Cause some of them have a religious ‘problem’ with gay people. Which doesn’t make marriage a religious institution, any more than their opposition to abortion makes natural childbirth in mammals a religious institution.
I’m curious about who you think the “we” are that are going to take our ball and go home - there are lots more people who would oppose that than who would vote for Prop 8, and prop 8 passed.
And if you actually got the government to say “Nobody gets married”, those religious people would laugh in their face. They’d still consider themselves married, becuase they would still have their churches backing them and solemnizing them. They’d lose their tax benefits but would rapidly find ways to restore the rest of their benefits - assuming that hospitals and the like even paused in recognizing religious marriages.
The only people who you would hurt by disbanding marriage at the government level would be those with purely civil marriages, and those who wanted to be married civily - the majority of whom aren’t even the people you want to punish anyway. Such people would be forced to try and piggyback on some religion’s marriage recognition, further cementing the seemingly religious nature of marriages that you’re trying to get rid of.
I fully agree that “marriage for us, civil unions for them if we must” is a terrible way to do things, but what you are proposing is literally throwing the baby out with the bathwater - to the degree that it didn’t actually backfire on you.
Marriage for everyone won’t work- at least not for a while. It’s apparently too precious to allow just *anyone *to do it.
Civil Unions? How do you avoid the “separate but equal” problem?
Dude, by the time you can get “Have the government ban all marriages” to work, I can get “Have the federal government legalize marriage between any concievable combination of willing adults” to work. Given that to ban the institution you will have to achieved mind control over the politicians, after all.
(And it wouldn’t take but one activist supreme court decision to really change the playing field regarding gay marriage. What are the odds of them banning marriage, do you think?)
Sigh. The solution to school segregation was not to abolish the classroom and send everyone off to be home-schooled. It was a dual approach of improving the quality of the separate but unequal schools until the country got behind integration. And some parts of the country took a long time to get over it.
Don’t sweat emotional carnage. It’s the currency of humanity.
I think marriage can be salvaged, but only if we make it purely and exclusively about two things: a. money, b. power, or c. some combination of a and b.
(I’m leaving out religion because I don’t think it’s relevant or meaningful any longer, and if it is, it probably ought not be.)
School desegregation is still a thorny issue and the solution has probably caused almost as many problems as it cured.
Schools desegregate brought on or helped instigate:
White flight
Further ghetto-ization of minority groups
fights over school vouchers and funding for public schools
urban sprawl (bad traffic, air pollution, global warming)
Atlanta is a prime example of these problems, but they hold true for many if not most urban areas.
Many cities with white flight never had official segregation, only de facto segregation, so government mandated desegregation can’t be blamed. I think there is a lot less ghettoization today than when I was a kid, in the sense there are more opportunities for those with money. As for urban sprawl, that is more a function of the interstate highway system and expansion into the suburbs thanks to the Baby Boom.
Making marriage equitable is not going to eliminate discrimination based on sexual preference, not in the short run anyhow.
Can you explain this, please? I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t way over my head on wikipedia. Is it just to do with how the state treats ownership of property?
Anyways, I think the issue of whether marriage is religious is a red herring - the point (well, my point, anyways :p) is that the government isn’t involved in legislating any other social relationships. Why marriage? I’m approaching this more from a utilitarian standpoint, with libertarian streaks: unless there’s a demonstrable benefit to society from the government being involved, I’d rather they just left it up to individuals.
