Traditionally marriage is about property rights, for the spouses and children. As such it was effectively a contract, and this is very much in what the government is for, since they will be the ones enforcing the contract if the parties disagree.
In the modern USA especially, a whole package of benefits is tied to being married, from health care to pensions and so on. Again, the government literally must be involved.
All of this is probably the main reason that people pushed so hard for gay marriage. Not having access to all of that was real discrimination.
I would love for marriage to move from being a special thing to being like any other contract, but it would take decades of work to begin to untangle it from the current model.
The amount of religious Americans does keep falling. That is probably the biggest hurdle to getting rid of state involvement in marriage. But you’re looking at probably 50 or 100 years before enough people stop believing in Christianity for this to be possible.
Well, assuming any kind of democratic government. If some authoritarian takes over, then what the people want won’t matter. Although it’s looking more like a Christo-Fascist state than anything else…
Sorry guys, I agree with this take. The tricky part is the legal stuff tied to “single” or “married”, etc but we shouldn’t have distinguished based on that anyway.
Marriage isn’t a legal construct. The government doesn’t have the right to own people’s relationships. They can say they do, it doesn’t make it true.
Traditionally marriage is about property rights, for the spouses and children. As such it was effectively a contract, and this is very much in what the government is for, since they will be the ones enforcing the contract if the parties disagree.
In the modern USA especially, a whole package of benefits is tied to being married, from health care to pensions and so on. Again, the government literally must be involved.
All of this is probably the main reason that people pushed so hard for gay marriage. Not having access to all of that was real discrimination.
I would love for marriage to move from being a special thing to being like any other contract, but it would take decades of work to begin to untangle it from the current model.
Then we should just get rid of it
The amount of religious Americans does keep falling. That is probably the biggest hurdle to getting rid of state involvement in marriage. But you’re looking at probably 50 or 100 years before enough people stop believing in Christianity for this to be possible.
Well, assuming any kind of democratic government. If some authoritarian takes over, then what the people want won’t matter. Although it’s looking more like a Christo-Fascist state than anything else…
Sorry guys, I agree with this take. The tricky part is the legal stuff tied to “single” or “married”, etc but we shouldn’t have distinguished based on that anyway.