It sounds to me as though you’re using the phrases “social recognition” and “legal recognition” as synonymous–is that correct?
If so, then sure–I agree that legal recognition of the relationship is important. But that’s very different, I believe, from the argument that Miller (I think) puts forth. I think that conferring the legal rights and responsibilities when they’re requested should be the government’s only role regarding marriage. “Social recognition” sounds to me to go beyond those legal rights and into some sort of attachment of cultural, not simply legal, importance to the relationship.
But all of these legal rights need to be accepted and accessible, socially. I can’t have a lawyer trailing along with me everywhere I go. People need to know what my relationship means for them in their dealings with me. We have a shorthand for that called “marriage” which has a whole bunch of universal benefits that people learn from a young age. That’s the social acceptance of the facts of the relationship. People know what I mean if I say I’m married, they know what the rights are within the context of my dealings with them, they don’t say “Oh, you’re married but not married married.” It’s not a two-tiered system, there are no other terms. There’s no confusion. There’s married and there’s not married.
Having rights isn’t just about the government saying, “Oh sure, these are your rights.” If the people you’re dealing with every day don’t acknowledge those rights, you don’t really have them. That’s the problem same-sex couples run into when they try to power of attorney and legalese their way into those same rights. Legally, they may be giving each other the rights, but if the hospital or the bank or whatever doesn’t get it, the rights don’t really exist in any practical way.
I think SSC run into problems because other institutions are unfamiliar with their particular set of legal rights, and because the law is unclear, and because there’s a two-tiered system, and because not all rights of marriage are currently available outside the institution of marriage, not because there’s no social thumbs-up given to them. If my proposal went into effect, everyone who’s currently married would have that same set of rights, so there wouldn’t be similar problems. And if such problem occurred, they’d be treated by the government exactly as they’d be treated now if someone denied visitation rights to a spouse.
Plus people who don’t fall under any definition or connotation of “married” would also have access to those rights, which is a minor advantage.
Your examples are bad. (Oh I did like the mutual lifelong omittment.) (1) If you’re that worried about your estate, make a will. Dying intestate is a pain for your survivors no matter what. If you haven’t got a bit ahead financially yet, it doesn’t much matter, does it? (2) If you are unconscious long enough for someone to have to make a medical decision other than putting you in an ambulance, the accident was that bad. (3) Ex-husband? I thought we did away with marriage entirely. I have seen this play out in the real world. There was always a lawsuit. (4) This is just nuts. Why should you be taxed less than your coworker making the same salary? How do you even know what your coworker gets taxed? (5) You don’t have to house and support your mother. (6) Again with the spouse, I thought we did away with these. In various schools my children have been enrolled in, they have asked who was authorized to pick up the child. They didn’t have to be related by blood or marriage, just on the list. (7) It’s no worse than when she leaves early for a soccer game, and she’s the one who gets in trouble if it’s not done–not me.
So it comes down to: Do you want the government out of your bedroom? Or not? This is the problem with gay marriage. Supporters want the government out of their bedroom and out of their house some of the time, unless it can benefit them.
The “whole bunch of universal benefits” actually boils down to a couple, and those are well balanced by a bunch of hassles. People can get married if they want to, but it’s just not going to be as fun and effortless as they think.
I could fix this pretty easily, I think, by simply declaring that two cohabitors of any sex could file joint income taxes, and that any couple who filed joint taxes for a certain number of years were entitled to whatever pension and social security benefits would have accrued in a marital relationship of the same duration.
If by “a couple” you mean 1,138, then you’re right as pertains to the federal government. But when a couple can be more than a thousand, we’re expanding the discussion to serious polygamy.
I was wondering when the “marriage has no benefits” argument would rear its head here. Thanks for a great example. I find it even more spurious than the “abolish marriage” one that the OP is railing against.
If your position is that there are no benefits to marriage, then you have no basis to deny legal marriage to anyone.
It’s similar to my position. Legal recognition ultimately flows from social recognition. If society at large recognizes the validity of my relationship, then there will be no barrier to legal recognition. Currently, gay marriage is illegal because society at large does not recognize the validity of gay relationships - at least, not at the same level as straight relationships. In that sense, the social recognition is more important than the legal recognition, even though the social recognition does not, of itself, convey any rights or responsibilities.
Right now, we’re in a position in this country where most people are willing to accord gay relationships a lower level of recognition than marriage - civil unions. Obviously, I have problems with that. Although it’s not part of your motives here, the effect of your proposal is to achieve equality by ensuring that nobody can get that higher level of recognition. Instead of raising everyone up to same level, you’re dragging everyone down to the same level.
Granted, the above paragraph uses some prejudicial language. If civil unions are designed to offer precisely the same package of rights currently covered by marriage, how do I justify referring to civil unions as being less worthy than marriage? And that, admittedly, is a purely emotional reaction. I like marriage. It has weight to it. History. Tradition. Civil unions, by contrast, are a sterile, artificial concept that reeks of compromise. There’s no soul to it, no emotion, no poetry. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like getting LLC status: it might make sense for financial or legal reasons, but it’s not something in and of itself that people dream of doing their entire lives.
I know that your ideal is that anyone can declare themselves married without the blessing of the government. But as I’ve pointed out before, anyone can do that right now. Similarly, I can declare myself a Brigadier General of the Salvation Army, the Cardinal of Boise, Idaho, or Emperor of the Greater Los Angeles area. Without any sort of larger social recognition, these terms are utterly meaningless, and I’m profoundly disturbed by the idea of relegating marriage to a similar status.
Wow, the anti-gay-marriage people were right! I thought they were full of shit when they said this would cost everybody else money, but most of these would, sure enough.
And some of them are just bogus.
This is also allowed between non-spouses who can buy the place as joint tenants with right of survivorship.
And this one is pretty funny:
“Sorry, hon, I’m laying you off. Don’t even think about trying to collect unemployment.”
Most of these only count if you’re a federal employee (granted, there are a hell of a lot of them) or veteran (ditto). If you eliminate those and the silly ones that shouldn’t be worth half a point, you are back to a couple.
I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t really want the government involved in the poetry business; I like my government sterile. As for compromise, I definitely don’t propose it as a compromise position; for me the compromise is continuing to have government involved in marriage, but making it available to everyone. It’s a Republican-style compromise (y’know, the kind where you basically get everything you want), but still a compromise.
Those examples of what you declare yourself all have the same problem: you’d be declaring yourself had on an existent organization and expecting others to follow you. Of course that’s a meaningless declaration, but it’s also disanalogous. Marriage is different; it’s more like declaring yourself an enlightened guru. Yeah, without any social recognition at all, it’s meaningless–but if you can get yourself a bunch of students, that is, if you can find a community of people who are willing to support you in your declaration, suddenly the term has meaning.
With marriage, in order for it to have meaning, the bare minimal social recognition is one other person: it’s pretty silly to declare yourself married if not even your spouse agrees. But my marriage is given meaning not only by my spouse, but also by the community that I chose. The poetry and emotion doesn’t come from the marriage certificate signed by the ordained minister, but from the marriage covenant signed by the people I love.
I get that that’s not enough for you, and I can respect that. However, when you say that without “any sort of larger social recognition” (by which you seem to mean “without the blessing of the government”) the term “marriage” is meaningless, I dispute it.
Which is well and good… but note that I’m not pitting people starting threads saying “hey, here’s an idea, let’s debate it”. But instead it always pops up in the middle of gay marriage debates, in which context it’s just ends up, even unintentionally, being a diversion.
I mean, maybe your theory is “all boys should be given reversible vasectomies at age 10, and not have them reversed until age X when condition Y is met”. Now that’s a potentially justifiable position which might be worth debating, but clearly not currently a particularly popular one, and if you kept popping up in debates about condom distribution in school to propose your plan, and point out that it would solve the condom distribution issue, it might end up irking people a bit.
So what if gays want to get married. It doesn’t really bother me. Just because it’s tradition for just a man and a woman to get married doesn’t mean we should view it that way forever. Laws were written to be able to evolve over time. So, I guess the same people who think gays shouldn’t marry are the same people who think women shouldn’t vote and blacks should be pushing plows…
LHoD, your idea makes rational sense, and if we were building civilization totally from scratch and had the choice between marriage as it currently exists and “marriage” as you propose, I’d be in the camp arguing for the latter.
But the problem with your appeal in the year 2010, is that the problems you claim exist with having goverment involved in marriage are purely philosophical. As long as the state remains in the equation with respect to the legal aspects of a union, its merely aesthetic preference as to whether the government should be in the “poetry business” or not. People get married everyday without the entrapments of ordained ministers, churches, and covenants. They just go to the courthouse. And the state has no problems with this. So what exactly is there to complain about here?
I agree with the OP. If the downsides to having government-sanctioned marriages are only trivial, theoretical, and/or purely philosophical, and someones start proposing it in a debate about allowing SSM, I can understand why that would bug the crap out of SSM-advocates. First, because it is an argument that smacks of privilege. Kind of like how when someone claims to be colorblind, you ever notice it’s never a ethnic/racial minority saying it? Yeah, it’s sort of like that.
Furthermore, LHoDa cynical-minded person has to wonder why someone who is philosophically opposed to government-sanctioned marriages would become married in the first place. Obviously whatever issues you have with it, they’re not so odious that you’ve decided to take a stand against the institution. This further undercuts the persuasiveness of your case.
I thoroughly endorse this comment, and this thread in general. And I’ll just point out in further response to Roland Orzabal’s comment:
It’s perfectly on point to bring up the unpopularity of the idea of “getting the government out of marriage” when the idea is proposed as a solution to the idea of marriage between people of the same sex being legalized. It seems like in every SSM discussion, someone comes up with this idea as a way to get the law to treat gay people equally, while not upsetting the opponents of SSM. But if the idea is less popular than just allowing everyone to marry someone of either gender, it doesn’t really solve the problem, whatever its merits may be.
No, they’re not. See my first post in the thread, under “fairly minor benefit.”
A cynical-minded person wouldn’t necessarily wonder that, but a simple-minded person might. A person with a more complete understanding of what I’ve said would see that I recognize massive practical benefits to the institution government currently calls “marriage,” and that I want those benefits available to everyone under some name or another. Calling them “marriage” and making them available to all romantic/sexual couples is almost as good as calling them “civil unions” and making them available to all adults who want them. I’m no more a hypocrite for getting married than is any other straight person who wants these rights for gay folks.
Max, it’s a fair point that it’s a hijack, and in fact I’ve gotten irritated at its cousin argument, “How can you support SSM without supporting polyamorous marriages?” as a distraction. I’ve been guilty either of starting or continuing such hijacks in the future, and I’ll knock it off. Thanks for pointing that out.
I don’t think you’re a hypocrite (which I why I didn’t use the word hypocrite), but surely you can get what I’m saying here. It’s easy to stake the position that you have when you’re not the one who wants to get married in the traditional, status quo way but can’t.
When you grow backwards in time like I do, it’s easy to get the past and future confused. Sorry about that. FWIW, it was a Supreme Court decision in 2016 that settled the question with marriage for everyone.
ywtf, I see what you’re saying, but as I suggested, it’s a trivial objection to the argument, a pure ad hominem. I would be marginally happier if I had the same suite of rights without having a government marriage: it’s the marriage known to my community, not to my government, that matters.