No. To be legally married, you have to sign a form that’s witnessed by a public official, but that isn’t even a ceremony unless you arrange some choreography around it. Many couples choose to combine that with a religious service, or even a nonreligious celebration of some kind, in which the officiant is deputized by the state to perform the legal bit too, but that is not instead of a civil ceremony. Look closely at the next church wedding you go to and you’ll see the newlyweds sign a form afterward to satisfy the Gummint.
We do not *require *a ceremony at all, only signatures on a form.
Exactly. Marriage is at its essence a legal contract giving rights to and imposing obligations on the parties involved. Right now that’s the couple and the state.
The couple gets to file joint tax returns. In most cases assets may be held jointly with right of survivorship. Children are protected. Insurance and pension benefits earned.
If only churches would be allowed to confer this legal status on couples, it would not take long for paper churches to be formed that would confer the obligations and benefits of marriage on couples.
BTW, it’s this kind of stuff getting very complicated that makes me leery about multiple partner marriages. I’m OK with the sex part, but how is it fair to force an employer to pay for health insurance for a family of six adult partners and ten or twenty children when other employees have standard families? (That’s just a small sample of the complications.)
I know. I just wonder what the practical difference is between requiring a license with ceremony optional, and requiring a license and a civil ceremony with religious ceremony optional is. Either way, the ceremony is just, well, ceremonial.
True, no ceremony required, just usually one of two kinds happens, I meant.
But unless the state defined such a contract as between two people, neither of which are already in other contracts, it would mean anyone could marry anyone, including poly marriages, or even perhaps corporations “marrying.” So the state would have to define it, if not license it, which is about the same thing.
Then thousands of laws and policies would have to be changed to accommodate them.
Not easy. I hope OK does it though, it would be hilarious to watch.
Carlson is mostly right. As he says, the numbers don’t lie. Most of the pay gap is attributable to factors like differences in the job, in qualifications, and in hours worked. Only a small part is unexplained and therefore possibly due to discrimination. At least according to this study:
The first point simply doesn’t give enough information to judge. How was the sample different, and why was it worse than others? It might be better.
The second one is simply repeating the same mistake! If women tend to work part-time, that helps explain the wage gap. Of course you compare women working part-time with men working full-time. As long as the sample represents an accurate proportion of both kinds of workers in both sexes, it’s simply part of the data.
The larger point is this - regardless of how the numbers come out when you analyze them, you have to analyze them. You can’t use the raw data. There are other studies out there that also show that the wage gap is smaller than the raw data show. The raw data just throws everyone in one pot without fair comparisons. Of course a woman who works at Walmart earns less than a man who is a lawyer, for instance. Part of the wage gap is explained by the fact that men tend to have the higher-paying jobs, or more qualifications and experience, or even work more hours. You have to compare people with the same jobs and experience and hours to get a fair comparison. Every study that does that shows that the wage gap isn’t as big as the raw numbers show (though every study shows, contrary to what Carlson said, that there still is an unexplained gap that may be due to discrimination).
Of course, the fact that men have the higher-paying jobs may itself be due to discrimination, past or present, though it can also be due to women’s career choices.
Likewise, when studies show people are more willing to hire equal-resumed white felons than black men, it’s obviously the fault of the black men they’re not being hired. Were they just not black, they could get those higher paying jobs. Instead, they choose to make decisions that give them lower paying jobs!
I hope you understand why that line of argument is totally ridiculous.