OK, I’ve said this before, and it matches the tripartite distinction that Sapo was making: marriage is thre different things: (a) a contract between two people, (b) a civil institution, and © a religious institution. And anyone who wants to seems to be free to play three-card monte with those terms, and invite us to guess which kind of “marriage” the pea is hidden under at this moment.
The reason that Keeve’s proposal, and all similar ones, will never fly, is that people have invested a great deal in what they mean by the term “marriage.” And Lil points against them are, I think, worth repeating: The whole idea behind coming up with the nonsense of “civil union” is that some people are so dog-in-the-manger-ish about their own private use of the term “marriage” that they will consent to “It walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, but it’s not our kind of duck, so we won’t accept it can be called a duck, and insist that the rest of the world term it an anseriform waterfowl – because only our kind of duck is a real duck.” This kind of mallard will fill more pages in any political-argument forum than almost any other.
The only real problem with the current system is that it is being hijacked into an exclusively religious definition by the so-called “social conservatives” (who are quite frankly no more “conservative” in the strict sense of the word than Al Sharpton is, preferring to substitute their own image of an idealized America where their prejudices are enforced by law for the free country that a conservative would choose to preserve).
For me, the key point is to establish a national policy whereby any two people not already otherwise contracted and of sufficient maturity may undertake to contract marriage with each other and have it fully recognized and portable. This includes gay marriage, and it includes substituting for the presumption that you have no common sense until you reach a magic birthday, at which time you magically become a mature adult, some means to test for maturity among the younger prospective contractors-of-marriage. It means eliminating the “yuck” factor from people’s judgments of other people’s marriages.
Then, eventually, we sit down and intelligently review what the polyamorists want to be able to contract – and, frankly, this gets more complex every time I encounter it. Is it a group marriage where Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice are all married, each one to the other three? Is it a sexually distinct group marriage in which each of the men is married to all the women but not to the other men, and likewise for each of the women? Is it a series of bipartite contracts in which Bob is married to Carol and Alice, but they are no married to each other, and Alice is married to Sam, whom neither Carol or Bob is, and Sam married to Ruthie, who wants nothing to do with the rest of the group but, being a bit kinky herself, is married to Heather? If each of these arrangements needs to have an individual contract rather than a one-size-fits-all marriage law, family law is going to end up a lucrative practice.
But, to revert to the OP – why should we surrender a perfectly valid word that has been doing duty in the language for hundreds of years to mean exactly what everyone understands it to mean – including polygamous and gay unions (look up “Boston marriage”) – because some small group of prejudiced people wants to lay claim to it as their exclusive possession?
If you want to say, “marriage as recognized by law should be a civil institution,” that’s fine. I think it’s silly for the religious among us to be required to contract marriage twice, à la France, and makes unnecessary extra work for the civic marriage-solemnizers to boot – but if you insist, I can live with that. But you are not surrendering the right to define our civic institutions to some fundayahoos who think they have God’s own authority to run things!
