# Why is government involved in marriage at all? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 22, 2006, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160 "2006-12-22T01:52:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Kalhoun](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/3bc359/32.png) [@Kalhoun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kalhoun)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/21 "2006-12-22T17:15:58Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] Okay. **Why government should be involved with marriage:** First, people are _going_ to engage in sexual relations with each other. For the vast majority of people, such sexual relations can and often do result in the conception of a child. Allow me to exclude from this assumption engagement in “alternative sexual acts” however common they may be, exclusively gay persons, infertile persons, women past menopause, etc. I’m making a gross generalization with an awareness that there are many (though overall still a minority) exceptions to it. Among a large percentage of such persons, one or more children are **wanted**. Society considers itself responsible for assuring that children too young to work receive proper care to enable them to grow into the next generation of productive adults. (Note that this does not presuppose government responsibility to provide or finance that care. Government may be libertarian, depending on charitable means to provide it, or may mandate that parents provide it.) It is socially beneficial that every child have a caring nurturing parent (whether biological or adoptive) providing for it. Given our social structure, there is a strong advantage to having **two** adults providing that care. This corresponds well to the two adults it requires to procreate. There may be circumstances (“deadbeat dads,” “unfit mothers,” etc. – see any daytime talk show for examples) where the state is obliged to step in and arrange for a child to receive that proper care. But in general, it is considered far more advantageous to give legal recognition, and often tax advantages, to the desire of a couple which wishes to spend the remainder of their lives together with appropriate boinking and consequent offspring. This assures that there are two adults present and providing for the care of the child(ren) which they have produced, at little or no cost to the state. **Marriage is not exclusively religious** : There is absolutely no correlation between the desire of two people to commit to each other and their putative religious faith. Atheists fall in love just as often as fundamentalists, and every gradation betwen. However, **marriage is seen by some faiths as entailing a religious commitment**. One makes promises before God, the gods, the tutelary god of marital unions, one’s ancestors, or Whomever, relative to the union one is committing to in marriage. These commitments are similar to the ones the state tends to seek the marrying couple to make to assure the care of the resulting offspring. So there is no clear and practical reason why the religious officiant (priest, pastor, rabbi, bishop, whatever) should not function as agent of the state in receiving those commitments. This meets the Lemon test, in that there is a clear secular purpose distinct from the religious one, and far from entangling government in religion, it reduces the duty on government by enabling the clergy to assume a share of the duties of the marriage-officiant civil official, as regards their own co-religionists. **Marriage requires some degree of regulation** : Children become capable of receiving sexual pleasure at a much younger age than is required for mature commitment to a lifelong marriage. For most people this is the early teens; for a substatial minority of people, sexual arousal, sometimes even with orgasm, occurs before full puberty. Childhood/adolescent crushes on adults are a staple of human experience. Adolescents pair-bond and proceed as far in sexual relationships as they consider socially acceptable (note, not as far as their parents do, as far as they do). But these relationships are not (usually) stable lifelong commitments, but temporary emotion-based reactions. The result is a very fertile breeding ground for pedophilia and for unstable underage marriages. So obliging commitment for marriage to require a certain degree of maturity (generally an age of consent, often with parental or judicial signoff required for marriages at a younger second tier of ages) is beneficial to the goal of providing stable adult parentage for minor children. **Marriage does not require fertility**. The array of factors that lead a couple to desire to contract marriage is as manifold and rich as are the varieties of human experience. The ability to jointly beget and bear a child is not a mandative factor. It is here that we bring back into the discussion those people we excluded from the generalization in the first paragraph. Because **adoption** , fostering, and other modes of provision for children by others than their biological mother and father, are fully acceptable ways of handling society’s requirement that children be provided for. And some couples will wish to take advantage of the nature of the marital commitment towards each other without any desire to add children to the mix. Hence: The nature of pair-bonding, and the social requirement to assure children are provided for, make marriage an institution which requires to be encouraged. A delimitation on the basis of maturity is a good one. But other limitations are mandated by personal (often religious), not social definitions of marriage, and need not be applied. (I call on all participants to place tripartite and higher-level marriages and bigamous concurrent marriages in a separate thread, to avoid confusing the discussion with the sorts of extraneous complications such relationships necessarily entail legally.) [/QUOTE] With regard to children, our society already makes both parents responsible for that child’s care, regardless of their marital status. Also, marriage doesn’t guarantee the parents will stay together, nor does it guarantee both parents will contribute to the well-being of the child. Parents either want to or they don’t. Marriage does not affect that decision one way or the other. In these days of 50% divorce rate, the encouragement factor has little meaning. Commitment to children can remain even if the marriage ends, and lack of commitment can be present even if the couple remains married for their entire lives. It all depends on the individual family. Just my observation. ---
**Author:** ![Keeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f07891/32.png) [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/22 "2006-12-22T17:34:37Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] … … {{ A lot of stuff that Kalhoun already quoted }} … … [/QUOTE] That was a pretty long post. Please forgive me for losing the forest in all those trees, but I’ts not clear to me what your point was. Are you suggesting that marriage is a government license to have children? If so, they’re doing a pretty lousy job finding and punishing people who dare to have children without marriage. Or maybe you were saying something else? ---
**Author:** ![levdrakon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@levdrakon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/levdrakon)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/23 "2006-12-22T17:48:52Z")
[QUOTE=Lilairen] Given that my religion has no marriage ceremony, and my husband has no religion, I find that utterly unacceptable. I am _married_. I am exactly as married as people who have some sort of liturgical dongle on their marriages because they have religious hoops to go through. I am not the sort of second-class citizen that does not get access to the universal human thing known as “marriage”. [/QUOTE] I’m not sure I understand. A civil union should accomplish everything you and **Polycarp** want. The only difference would be what you choose to _call_ it, as opposed to what it _is_. What you have is a union, as defined by DOMA. ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/24 "2006-12-22T17:58:17Z")
[QUOTE=alphaboi867] As long as the spouses in question worksout a pre-nuptial agreement covering all possible contigencies regarding inheritance, medical decisions, spousal benifits, etc I see no problem with polygamy. Of course it could make spousal exemption from court testimony more complex. [/QUOTE] Do employers get to weigh in on how many spouses they’re willing to help support? Suppose I’m in a group marriage with 3 husbands, 7 wives, and 22 children, all of them legally within my civil union. How many of them does my employer have to provide medical benefits for? ---
**Author:** ![Kalhoun](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/3bc359/32.png) [@Kalhoun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kalhoun)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/25 "2006-12-22T18:03:49Z")
[QUOTE=Ethilrist] Do employers get to weigh in on how many spouses they’re willing to help support? Suppose I’m in a group marriage with 3 husbands, 7 wives, and 22 children, all of them legally within my civil union. How many of them does my employer have to provide medical benefits for? [/QUOTE] They’d have to provide for the 22 children, for sure. Married, poly’d, or not. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/26 "2006-12-22T18:06:27Z")
[QUOTE=Sapo] Polycarp, let me take issue with a few of your points (excuse my paraphrasing 🙂 ) “Humans are horny and when they do, kids can come out” “These kids need to be taken care of and that is more likely to come at no expense to the government when there are two parents” We have better ways to establish paternity than seeing who is married to the mother. You can regulate paternal responsibility without regulating marriage. [/quote] Good point. But consider this: man and woman cohabitating and raising their joint children. Government not involved in any way with their lives (well, yeah, taxes, public services, etc. But not in the operation of their home as a family household. One or both earn money which is used to pay for the necessities of the family. Contrast this with: Woman takes child’s putative father to court. Court case establishes paternity. Court orders father to pay support for children. Father does so, usually routing it through a social services agency to ensure children are provided for in case father does not. Or father does not, lawsuit results to collect support. There’s a net savings to the community as represented by its government in having marriages work. > [@](#): > > “Marriage is not exclusively religious” > > Cohabitation and cooperation (with or without children) do not need marriage. This is where the differential incentives to marriage come in place. If you make them either available to all or not available at all, there is nothing left but a “spiritual” bond of whatever flavour you choose and no real function to a legal marriage. As far as I’m concerned, a couple who choose to commit to each other to live together in a romantic/sexual relationship are in fact married, by their own standards. Whether state or church recognize that marriage is their problem, not the couple’s. What everybody’s been doing a song and dance about “make a civil union” available to everybody regarding, is an institution that precedes civilization, and for which there is a good term in English. That term is “marriage.” That the Full Gospel Free Will Baptist Congregations of America and Used Car Brokerage, U.S.A., Inc., thinks that marriage should be what **they** consider it to be, has no bearing on the social institution. Two atheists saying, “Let’s live together and have sex with each other, for the foreseeable future,” are in fact contracting marriage. No license or sacerdotal blessing changes that. > [@](#): > > “Marriage requires some degree of regulation” > > You are substituting sex for marriage. Sex does require some regulation to shield children from it (in that they are not deemed capable of giving consent). > > The remaining aspects of a union (buying a house, sharing bills, what have you) do not need marriage to be regulated as they already are regulated by banks, providers, etc. mostly by a simple age limit. So you would be just fine with a 40-year-old man and an 11-year-old girl setting up housekeeping together, with or without her parents’ consent, so long as they don’t touch each other’s peepees? > [@](#): > > “Marriage does not require fertility” > > You are assuming that you need marriage for child rearing. I think the numbers of single parents out there will beg to differ. > > The reality is that marriage is everyday less linked to procreation and rearing. Married couples are outnumbered by all the other possible situations (according to the USCB). Yeah, but you’re reasoning from the converse here. I did not say “Fertility does not require marriage” but the converse of it. If two people choose to commit to live together as spouses _because they want to_, for whatever reasons happen to float their mutual boat, there is no need that they need to be able to reproduce. That was the gist of the point I was trying to make that marriage is **not** tied to biological parentage – which you’re seemingly arguing against. > [@](#): > > Every need for marriage you are offering is a need for parenting, not for marriage. The protection of marriage is just a relic from a different time when marriage was linked to procreation. Marriage is the institution which historically provided a means of ensuring safe, effective child-rearing at minimal cost to the community. And it is something which a large number of couples desire to enter into, for reasons defined by the pair-bonding hypothesis. Hey, let’s abolish marriage, because some people don’t want to marry. And then we can abolish gay sex, because some people don’t like it. And then we can abolish religion, because some people don’t believe in any god. And then we can abolish freedom of speech, and the combatting of ignorance. _Because you don’t happen to like or want something, or because some lackwits think they have the sole right to define something, **does not give you any right to make decisions for others** who may disagree with you._ Around here, they call that freedom. My great-great-great-grandfather fought for that, with the Green Mountain Boys. I happen to think it’s not something we should give up willingly. ---
**Author:** ![Sapo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ec9cab/32.png) [@Sapo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sapo)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/27 "2006-12-22T18:11:59Z")
[QUOTE=Ethilrist] Do employers get to weigh in on how many spouses they’re willing to help support? Suppose I’m in a group marriage with 3 husbands, 7 wives, and 22 children, all of them legally within my civil union. How many of them does my employer have to provide medical benefits for? [/QUOTE] Just taking a stab here, don’t shoot me. How about to all of them in a proportion to the number of other spouses? If in a couple they provide 100%, in a three-some they are responsible for 50%, in a foursome 33% and so on. This on the assumption that the rest of the spouses will provide the rest. If one of them is uninsured, tough nuggets. ---
**Author:** ![Keeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f07891/32.png) [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/28 "2006-12-22T18:23:11Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] As far as I’m concerned, a couple who choose to commit to each other to live together in a romantic/sexual relationship are in fact married, by their own standards. Whether state or church recognize that marriage is their problem, not the couple’s. What everybody’s been doing a song and dance about “make a civil union” available to everybody regarding, is an institution that precedes civilization, and for which there is a good term in English. That term is “marriage.” That the Full Gospel Free Will Baptist Congregations of America and Used Car Brokerage, U.S.A., Inc., thinks that marriage should be what **they** consider it to be, has no bearing on the social institution. Two atheists saying, “Let’s live together and have sex with each other, for the foreseeable future,” are in fact contracting marriage. No license or sacerdotal blessing changes that. [/QUOTE] From this portion, it sounds to me like we agree. If they are married regardless of what the gov’t says, then the gov’t ought to stop getting involved. They can do that easily by changing the names of the rules and laws from “marriage” to “civil union”. It sounds like semantics, it seems to me that many people (including you) care deeply about how “marriage” is defined, and do not care much about which unions the gov’t chooses to endorse. ---
**Author:** ![Keeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f07891/32.png) [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/29 "2006-12-22T18:25:24Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] So you would be just fine with a 40-year-old man and an 11-year-old girl setting up housekeeping together, with or without her parents’ consent, so long as they don’t touch each other’s peepees? [/QUOTE] Not exactly. The laws about civil unions will have lots of rules, just like the laws about other sorts of contracts. Including age limitations and such. ---
**Author:** ![Sapo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ec9cab/32.png) [@Sapo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sapo)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/30 "2006-12-22T18:34:49Z")
I will rearrange some of your points to address some of them together. I hope I am not altering your meaning. I am also doing some clipping to keep the page short. [QUOTE=Polycarp] Good point. But consider this: … Contrast this with: … There’s a net savings to the community as represented by its government in having marriages work. [moved:] Marriage is the institution which historically provided a means of ensuring safe, effective child-rearing at minimal cost to the community. And it is something which a large number of couples desire to enter into, for reasons defined by the pair-bonding hypothesis. [/QUOTE] Agree with you 100%. Marriage is practical and helps keep the costs of governance down. As a practical concern, though, it is open to debate and reconsideration. If someone discovers/proposes a different way to provide the same benefits, would it not be worthy of consideration? [QUOTE=Polycarp] [moved:] What everybody’s been doing a song and dance about “make a civil union” available to everybody regarding, is an institution that precedes civilization, and for which there is a good term in English. That term is “marriage.” [/QUOTE] well, no. What they are asking for are the benefits of marriage. Not marriage. And as I said before, if by extending those benefits you continue to lower the cost of governance, then that is a good thing, isn’t it? [QUOTE=Polycarp] As far as I’m concerned, a couple who choose to commit to each other to live together in a romantic/sexual relationship are in fact married, by their own standards. Whether state or church recognize that marriage is their problem, not the couple’s. … That the Full Gospel Free Will Baptist Congregations of America and Used Car Brokerage, U.S.A., Inc., thinks that marriage should be what **they** consider it to be, has no bearing on the social institution. Two atheists saying, “Let’s live together and have sex with each other, for the foreseeable future,” are in fact contracting marriage. No license or sacerdotal blessing changes that. [/QUOTE] Exactly, so if two atheists living together are married, why not extend the same courtesy to two women? They are “by their own standards” married but are deprived of the material benefits of marriage. And won’t the governance costs of regulating that union also be lowered if you codify it? [QUOTE=Polycarp] So you would be just fine with a 40-year-old man and an 11-year-old girl setting up housekeeping together, with or without her parents’ consent, so long as they don’t touch each other’s peepees? [/QUOTE] well, she is not free to make that decision. She has guardians (be them parents, the State, or whatever) who are responsible to safeguard her from this kind of stuff (which I find, of course, highly objectable) [QUOTE=Polycarp] Yeah, but you’re reasoning from the converse here. I did not say “Fertility does not require marriage” but the converse of it. If two people choose to commit to live together as spouses _because they want to_, for whatever reasons happen to float their mutual boat, there is no need that they need to be able to reproduce. That was the gist of the point I was trying to make that marriage is **not** tied to biological parentage – which you’re seemingly arguing against. [/QUOTE] well, no. I am not fighting against it. Quite the contrary, I think that the fact that marriage and fertility are NOT associated is what makes it possible to extend it beyond the traditional heterosexual couple. [QUOTE=Polycarp] Hey, let’s abolish marriage, because some people don’t want to marry. [/QUOTE] I don’t think anyone is asking for that. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/31 "2006-12-22T18:50:12Z")
Did I somehow, somewhere, give the impression that I _opposed_ gay marriage? Considering that I’ve been arguing, rather vehemently, in favor of legalizing it since 2000 or so, I’m a bit chagrined at being mistaken for an opponent of it. :eek: ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/32 "2006-12-22T19:00:54Z")
I think what happend, **Poly,** is that by demonstrating sufficient reluctance to separate marriage and civil (union) responsibilities, it gave the impression of being opposed to gay marriage, insomuch that the thread is about the issues with separating marriage & civil unions so that gay people can both have a union _and_ get married; it just needs to be legal for them to get unioned, and they need to find a church that will marry them. The third option, of convincing everybody involved to grant people who are married all the rights under the law regardless of the number and type of working reproductive organs involved, is outside the scope of this discussion. ---
**Author:** ![Lilairen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8491ac/32.png) [@Lilairen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lilairen)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/33 "2006-12-22T19:30:19Z")
[QUOTE=levdrakon] I’m not sure I understand. A civil union should accomplish everything you and **Polycarp** want. The only difference would be what you choose to _call_ it, as opposed to what it _is_. What you have is a union, as defined by DOMA. [/QUOTE] A civil union _is_ a concept invented specifically to create a second-class citizen status for some marriages. It would not exist in the conceptual space at all if people were willing to accept people’s marriages as marriages, which is what _I_ want. ---
**Author:** ![Sapo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ec9cab/32.png) [@Sapo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sapo)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/34 "2006-12-22T19:39:13Z")
ok, so is there anyone arguing AGAINST separating civil unions (legal contract for benefits), marriage (the personal decision to join your life to someone of your chosing) and matrimony (the religious ceremony which grants mostly duties depending on the religion)? ---
**Author:** ![Gorsnak](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gorsnak/32/7587_2.png) [@Gorsnak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gorsnak)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/35 "2006-12-22T19:44:18Z")
[QUOTE=Sapo] ok, so is there anyone arguing AGAINST separating civil unions (legal contract for benefits), marriage (the personal decision to join your life to someone of your chosing) and matrimony (the religious ceremony which grants mostly duties depending on the religion)? [/QUOTE] No, because that’s the way things currently are, and it works fine. What people are objecting to is this new-fangled notion that it would be a good idea to stop calling civil marriages marriages and start calling them unions instead so that some religious folk can feel that they’re more specialler than everyone else. ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/36 "2006-12-22T19:44:31Z")
> [@](#): > > ok, so is there anyone arguing AGAINST separating civil unions (legal contract for benefits), marriage (the personal decision to join your life to someone of your chosing) and matrimony (the religious ceremony which grants mostly duties depending on the religion)? Eh? It seems Lilairen (the post above yours) is arguing against calling Same Sex marriages anything other than marriage. The reason being, calling it “Civil Unions” _may_ have some stigma attached, or _might_ be valued differenty (less), merely because it has a different name. ---
**Author:** ![Keeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f07891/32.png) [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/37 "2006-12-22T21:00:21Z")
[QUOTE=Lilairen] A civil union _is_ a concept invented specifically to create a second-class citizen status for some marriages. It would not exist in the conceptual space at all if people were willing to accept people’s marriages as marriages, which is what _I_ want. [/QUOTE] Yes, that is a good description of what civil unions are _currently_. My proposal is for ALL marriages to have that status. If two (or however many) people want the government to recognize them as a couple for inheritance etc, it should not be sufficient that their clergyperson performed some ceremony. That ceremony should be irrelevant. There should be an official goverment registration to recognize their union. As a totally indepent act, before or after it, the couple could do a religious ceremony, or they could invent their own ceremony, or they could even simply start referring to themselves as married. My only suggestion is for the goverment to stop using that word, and let everyone, **including you** decide for yourself whether you’re married and to whom. Why don’t you like that idea? ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/38 "2006-12-22T21:21:09Z")
[QUOTE=Keeve] Yes, that is a good description of what civil unions are _currently_. My proposal is for ALL marriages to have that status. If two (or however many) people want the government to recognize them as a couple for inheritance etc, it should not be sufficient that their clergyperson performed some ceremony. That ceremony should be irrelevant. There should be an official goverment registration to recognize their union. As a totally indepent act, before or after it, the couple could do a religious ceremony, or they could invent their own ceremony, or they could even simply start referring to themselves as married. My only suggestion is for the goverment to stop using that word, and let everyone, **including you** decide for yourself whether you’re married and to whom. Why don’t you like that idea? [/QUOTE] And you are courteously invited to move to France, where that is precisely the procedure in place. I don’t see any need to throw out a perfectly functional concept and term because some people want to claim it as their private property to define it as they see fit, and you can go form Local #1 of your city’s Civil Union. My wife and I are **married**. So are the Lesbian couple we know. So are the Bloomsburgs (an atheist former moderator here and his wife). **Gorsnak** nailed it – reread his post. By the way, the term “civil marriage” has been around for 99 years to my certain knowledge, to distinguish between one created by a wedding officiated over by a civic official as opposed to a clergyman. But I’ll be happy to call whatever it is you want to contract with someone whatever you want it to be called. That will make it no less a marriage as the dictionary defines the term. ---
**Author:** ![Lilairen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8491ac/32.png) [@Lilairen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lilairen)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2006, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/39 "2006-12-23T06:00:10Z")
[QUOTE=Keeve] My only suggestion is for the goverment to stop using that word, and let everyone, **including you** decide for yourself whether you’re married and to whom. Why don’t you like that idea? [/QUOTE] Why _should_ I like the idea? The concept of civil union is, as far as I’m concerned, one that only exists because of bigotry, and I see no reason to enshrine that sort of filth as law. The idea that marriage is a religious thing only exists because of ignorance, some of it wilful, and I see no reason to enshrine _that_ as law either. The major problem with your suggestion is that it does not recognise that the concept of marriage – the word itself – is important. If the word were _not_ important, than nobody would be making the argument “It’s okay if they have legal protections, so long as they don’t use the word”, and nobody would be waving the idea of ‘civil unions’ around in the first place, some way of indicating a marriage without giving it the respect of actually calling it a marriage. To some people, the actual terminology really does matter. So long as you suggest that the terminology be discarded, you are dismissing something that I and many others consider to actually have value, and attempting to substitute something that not only does not have value, but which was created specifically to _deny_ that value. This is an _extremely_ hard sell, to say the least. To refer amusedly to other ongoing threads – the accidents may be the same, but the substance differs greatly. Marriage is ancient, resonant, culturally important; civil union is, well, not. But hey, I live somewhere where civil marriage has been the law at least as long as there have been English speakers. Those liberal atheists the Puritans set it up that way. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2006, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160/40 "2006-12-23T06:38:40Z")
I guess I just don’t see the point of renaming all marriages “civil unions”. It seems to be just giving in to the claims of some Christians that they somehow invented and hold a patent on the concept, when as I said before that’s simply not the case. And are we going to go back through all our history books and replace “marriage” or “married” with “civil union” or “contracted a civil union with” in any of the countless references to non-Christians in diverse societies who were monogamously pair-bonded (or polygamously “group-bonded”) without the benefit of a religious marriage ceremony in a Christian church? “In 175 B.C.E. Ptolemy VI Philometor entered into a civil union with his sister, Cleopatra II…Julius Caesar commenced to legally shack up with Cornelia Cinna in 83 B.C.E…” The English language has had the word “marriage” to describe these assorted relationships–between one man and one woman, one man and several women, (occasionally) one woman and several men, or (nowadays) one man and one other man or one woman and one other woman–for at least 700 years, and I don’t see any reason why we should have to drop it now. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-government-involved-in-marriage-at-all/385160.md?page=3)