That’s probably right. 59% favored the ban.
So much for, “My word is my bond.”
But it’s not just a piece of paper, it’s making a commitment not just to each other but the world at large. People of the (lack of) calibre of Britney Spears are not good counter-examples.
While Britney is the current disposable-marriage poster child, it’s not as if we have a good track record for keeping commitments like these.
http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/r010524.htm
OTOH,
So, who is a good example? Around fifty percent of marriages are said to end in divorce. According to some things I’ve read, a portion of those that do remain intact are dysfunctional. Conversely, I know a couple who have been together for nearly forty years who never did officially marry. I consider them to be a better example of commitment than many married couples.
What commitment have I and my husband made to the world at large? As I said before, we only went down to visit the Justice of the Peace because I couldn’t be covered by his medical insurance otherwise. The ceremony and offical “husband and wife” status didn’t change our relationship one whit. The only things that changed were my last name and the fact that I now call him “hubby” instead of “my SO.” I made no vows to the world at large, and I don’t expect that the world would much care if we divorced. it would just be another sheaf of paperwork.
Yes, my “word is my bond”, but I said those words long before I re-stated them in front of the judge. I don’t consider the “official” pledge to be more binding than the words I said when I decided I wanted to be with this man forever.
I don’t think the state or employers much cares about the nobility or sincerity of your feelings or your ability to rise above mundanities like legal vows and signed pieces of paper. That’s touching, but Sarahfeena is right–it’s sheer practicality.
Given the state of things in this country, it’s prohibitively expensive for many people to seek their own benefits (particularly health benefits). It’s also expensive for employers to offer them. That creates an incentive for people to try to get employer-sponsored benefits, and a disincentive for companies to just hand them out generously beyond their own immediate employees. By requiring a formal, legal relationship between two people, states and employers limit how much they have to pay out in partner benefits–they can offer an important tool in employee recruitment, retention, and (potentially) productivity, BUT it keeps them from paying them to single employees’ casual friends, roommates, third cousins, etc.
You and your husband might have been willing to get married for no reason other than benefits, and divorce may be only a sheaf of papers to you, but to many other people it represents more than that. On an emotional level, to some people it represents a semi-sacred state. To others it represents a serious legal entanglement with potential future obligations and ramifications. Either way it’s looked at, marriage, is something that many people will not enter into casually. Therefore, it becomes a very handy requirement for employers who want to offer benefits to partners: those benefits are available to just about any committed heterosexual couple willing to get married–but that couple does have to be willing to jump through that legal hoop.
If more couples felt like you did about marriage and divorce, this would probably cease to work, but as it is, it suffices.
Of course that all falls apart for that small population of employees who can’t “get married” to their partner because they are same sex, and here we are back to the issue that started this thread. In my estimation, the main thing that keeps more people from taking advantage of same-sex partner benefits (which are, after all, easier to get without legal entanglements) is that there remains, for some heterosexual people, a stigma to being considered gay. Few people want benefits badly enough to pretend to be a sexual orientation that is sometimes ostracized. If that changed, same-sex benefits could also become too expensive (and abuse-prone) for employers to offer.