Dichroic Reflections

a modest proposition

Here's a plan that's been fermenting in my head for a while, though I've been thinking about it more since the election. I don't understand why the government should have anything to do with marriage as a sacred rite. If it's "sacred", how can it be relevant to a state proclaiming its separation from any and all churches? Rudder and I had no problems getting married - there's one of us of each sex, both of us are US citizens, neither had been married before, neither had syphilis (we were married in Pennsylvania, where they test for syphilis - but not (at that time) AIDS) and so on. We had to go to the registrar, tell them our parents names and where they were born, go through an odd rigmarole to get our blood tested because we were living in another state, and then a few months later we had to pay an additional $1000 in taxes beyond what we would have aid if we'd just been living together.

I don't understand any of it - no, that's not true. I understand why the government needs to be involved when it's about to hand out a bunch of new rights, like right of survivorship, right to visit in hospitals, rights to make decisions for each other. common proprty in some states, and (putative) tax benefits (that turned out to be penalties in our case). What I don't understand is why any of that would need to be coupled (oops) to what a lot of people currently in government keep describing as the sacred union of a man and a woman.

Clearly we need to legislate civil partnerships - give declared partners tax benefits and rights of survivorship and next-of-kin and so on. But why should that privilege be limited to hitherto-unrelated pairings of one man and one woman? Instead, we could let *any* two people who intend to spend the rest of their lives declare themselves partners, not just straights and not even just romantic couples.

For instance, when their husbands died in the 1918 influenza epidempic and World War I, my great-grandmother and her sister moved into together. They raised their children as one family, and they stayed together a long time, until my grandmother was grown up and my great-grandmother remarried. I cannot see any logical or moral reason why those two sisters should not have had the same benefits a married couple could have had. Under today's laws they'd have gotten some of the tax breaks by filing head-of-household, and might have been able to claim to be each others' next of kin, but what if they had been unrelated friends rather than sisters? Or what if one had died and other siblings had wanted to split proceeds from a house the two had lived in?

This will only work if the partnerships are long-term, Restrict them any way you want - require people to be in only one civil partnership at a time, require cohabitation, make it difficult to get out of to discourage easy "divorce", whatever. That's fine. But don't restrict any unpartnered adult from entering into a partnership with anyone she chooses.

That leaves "marriage", as a religious rite joining two people in romantic love, just where it belongs, in the churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, meeting-houses, and so on. No religion should be forced to marry anyone they don't approve of, but conversely anyone who did want a religious wedding should be able to find someone to perform it.

The beauty of this system is that it ought to be hard for anyone to disapprove of it. (What? You want two little old ladies on Social Security not to have the benefits a million-dollar sports star and his wife can have??) The only flaw I can see is that it wouldn't help people who want to form families with more than one other adult - again, not necessarily polyamorists, but potentially also, say, a daughter living with her elderly parents. It would seem any number of people should be able to form a partnership, but not only would that likely not fly past at least 11 states I can think of offhand, it could also create some nasty situations when more than one person claims the right to make decisions in cases of incapacitation. ("What do you mean, you approved donating her heart after the fatal accident? I planned to have it bronzed and keep it under my pillow forever!") So for practical purposes, it may need to be limited to pairs of people, and larger families would just have to aggregate in even numbers.

Posted by dichroic at November 8, 2004 03:27 PM