Can you define what you mean by ‘marriage’? Is it the actual pair bonding itself, the government recognition of such, the religious recognition of such?
Marriage is not a ‘divisive’ issue - religious nut jobs wishing to restrict it to heterosexuals only is what is causing the division.
So, lets Abolish religion instead - its the real problem here.
How would the OP go about abolishing marriage? Would he order churches not to peform the ceremony? Would there be fines for referring to someone as a husband or wife? How about tickets for wearing rings on the wrong finger?
While I don’t think it makes any sense to “abolish marriage”, we really don’t know when marriage started or when religion started. It’s likely that they evolved together in some fashion.
Why do you assume that “marriage” is an exclusively religious term? and what government involvement in the religious element are you referring to?
“Marriage” has a long-standing legal, civil meaning. Why do you think that only religious people are entitled to use the term “marriage”?
Mrs Piper and I got married in a civil ceremony, by a judge. Why do you think that we shouldn’t be married?
I had thought for a while it would make sense to make an effort to separate legal marriage from religious marriage, but there’s several big problems with that.
First, they’re not as neatly divided as we’d like to think they are. There’s certainly legal aspects, particularly things like taxation, property, rights, etc. There’s also religious implications for those who have those beliefs. But there’s the underlying social construct that goes with all of it and that is really the important part. That is, two people have a socially recognized committed pair bonding. For the vast majority of how marriage is actually useful as a social construct has nothing to do with any of that. I have married religious friends, married non-religious friends, and married friends whose religious beliefs are unknown to me. In all those cases, my recognition of that is completely unrelated to their religious beliefs, their tax filing status, or any of that.
There are a lot fewer people choosing to get married today than used to be, but that’s not because people aren’t pair bonding anymore, it’s just a rejection of the old paradigm and all the extra crap that we’ve piled on top of it. I’m sure we all know long term couples who have been together for a number of years and intend to be together for the long haul but don’t want to get married for whatever reason. So what? And it no longer serves much of it’s old purpose of supposedly ensuring that the man has a legitimate heir, since it’s not the concern it used to be and paternity, for whatever it matters, can be determined scientifically.
And what do we call it? Does anyone actually take into account how two people got married before considering them such socially? If one couple just signed a legal document but another had the whole wedding with a minister and all, is one couple any more or less married than the other? As far as serving the social construct purpose, I’m not sure that either matters other than that there’s some level of formalization of the relationship rather than something nebulous like how long they’ve been together or something like that. Even if we decided to call both legal and religious marriages something else, there’s literally all of human history as momentum behind the concept of marriage. We’d just end up using marriage as a catch all anyway, and whether you have a domestic partnership or an blessed bonding or whatever silly names we’d come up with, they’re both socially committed pairbondings, and we’d still just call them married socially.
And, really, what purpose would it server. Legally, it doesn’t matter what you call it, all that matters is what rights and privileges we assign to it and whether they’ve gone through necessary process and filled out the paperwork to be recognized as such. The government just plain won’t give those rights and privileges to anyone who doesn’t do that. Legally speaking, it’s just a special type of formalized contract. And from a religious perspective, no one has to recognize any particular legal marriage since there’s no religious implications from filling out a form. If a church doesn’t want to recognize a legal marriage because they don’t approve of gay marriage or simply because they didn’t fulfill the proper rituals associated with their beliefs, they shouldn’t have to and those people don’t have to be a member of that church, so it shouldn’t matter.
So, really, I’m not seeing any advantage to making any changes at all. All it would do is appease the people who don’t want to recognize other people’s marriages for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because they’re against gay marriage or against the popularized celebrity marriage as a gimmick or whatever. But, socially speaking, you don’t really get a choice; it doesn’t matter if you like it or not, if two people make a formalized commitment, present themselves as married and their friends and family recognize it, some random person’s opinion of how legitimate it may or may not be just plain doesn’t matter, and the legal and religious implications sort themselves out separately.
None of this makes any sense. DNA tests only determine paternity or maternity in cases under dispute. DNA tests don’t establish legal parenthood, otherwise adoption wouldn’t be possible. And people have children without getting married today, people get married without having children today, so how is determining paternity relevant?
Yes it’s true that under our law if a woman gives birth her husband is presumed to be the father, and unless paternity is disputed then he’s the legal father whether he’s the biological father or not. How would abolishing marriage change things? We already don’t require DNA tests to establish paternity if the parents are unmarried. We just take their word for it. My sister isn’t married to the man she has a child with. He’s the legal and social father of the child, but he didn’t have a DNA test to prove it. They just wrote his name on the birth certificate at the hospital. The only way they would have done a DNA test is if he denied paternity, or if someone else showed up and claimed paternity. Putting your name on the birth certificate as the father makes you the legal father, regardless of who the biological father is, unless paternity is disputed.
And how exactly does the internet make marriage obsolete? Let’s stipulate that the internet makes it easier to meet people. What’s the step two?
And “five year renewable contracts” and so on were staples of science fiction written in the 50s and 60s. But the actual implementation of this idea in our existing society was to implement no fault divorce. What’s the point of a five year renewable marriage contract when you can divorce whenever you’re tired of seeing the other person’s ugly face? It used to be that you couldn’t get divorced, even if both parties wanted to divorce, without proving adultery or cruelty. And even in the case of adultery, the adulterous spouse couldn’t initiate a divorce, only the cheated-upon spouse could do that, and only by naming a particular third party as the cause of the divorce, and only by proving in court that the spouse and the third party actually committed adultery.
We’ve done away with all that, which was the sort of thing that hypothetical term marriage contracts were supposed to solve, by simply allowing people to get divorced whenever they want.
And so what if fewer people are marrying? Do we preserve marriage if 51% of the country is married, but abolish it the instant only 49% are married?
See, your problem, as in your infamous atheism thread, is that you can’t understand why someone who wasn’t religious would want to be married. There are other reasons to get married than to avoid God’s wrath for having sex.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it’s because the gays have ruined the classic definition of marriage. And since the OP can’t get them to stop demanding equal rights to marriage (to say nothing of all that gross kissing on the nighly news every time another state recognizes SSM), perhaps nobody should have that right anymore. That other stuff about the internet and low rates of marriage is just a smoke screen.
I thought African-Americans already tried this, and it didn’t work out all that well …
This is off-topic and trollish. Formal warning issued for being a jerk.
Not to mention that fact that most Americans ARE religious, so the atheist argument isn’t going to get you very far.
If the OP thinks having marriage is divisive, does he not realize that eliminating it will be infinitely MORE divisive? Your thesis doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Exactly what does the OP mean by “abolishing the institution”? Are we just getting rid of government recognition? Sure, I can get behind that.
Abolishing marriage is stupid, but I would like to see some sort of formal recognition of Domestic Partnership that conferred some/most/all of the rights of marriage to two people who wished to create a household in that way. It’s extremely hard (and expensive) to do without marriage, and you still don’t end up with the same rights. I’ve known lots of non-romantic couples (especially among older people) who would benefit from such an arrangement.
It’s isn’t a huge issue for me or anything, but I think it would be a good idea.
I wouldn’t mind divorcing the civil practice of “marriage” from the religious practice of “holy matrimony,” or whatever term people would prefer to use for the latter.
But there is absolutely no difference today between religious and non-religious marriages. I got married in a non-religious ceremony and our daughter got married by a justice of the peace. and our marriages are indistinguishable from those done in churches.
We need to expand what government recognizes, and let religious institutions marry whom they please. They have always had restrictions beyond not being gay - some imposed requirements on mixed religion couples which might not be acceptable. Let them, so long as there is a secular and equal alternative, which there is now.
Who knows what the fertility goddess worshipers did, but I think it is fair to say that marriage predates all extant religions.
And while it’s not as common, there are also churches that marry people who cannot be legally married. The FLDS church, for example.
Yeah, that. And there’s an (ultra liberal) church in my city that marries gay couples* with all the trimmings. It’s just a ceremony, but it’s nice.
*gay marriage is illegal in my state, unfortunately
I agree. In the Netherlands, they have the options of civil marriage (open to same-sex and opposite-sex couples as of 2001), registered partnership (almost identical to civil marriage, and made more or less obsolete when marriage rights were extended to same-sex couples), and the samenlevingscontract or “living together contract”, which is a notarized individualized legal agreement between members of a joint household.
Signatories of a samenlevingscontract can be romantic partners, roommates, relatives, whatever. The law recognizes their mutual contractual obligations but doesn’t make any assumptions about whether or not they’re having sex.
I don’t think any of these claims are true or at least demonstrable. I’m pretty sure marriage, religion, and government all developed more or less simultaneously. After all, they are all ways of formalizing interactions with other people. Finally, the Na people of China do not have marriage, although the Chinese government is trying to change that.