In Which Someone Complains About Thread Closure And People Discuss Marriage

Sir_Brizz said:

You're saying that there is no other simple way to solve this problem than to have the government recognize marriage.

Because it makes no sense to be able to assign all those rights to your sister or your first cousin you are very close with or your daughter or your brother or your close friend that you have lived with for years because both of your spouses died and you have no interest in remarrying or any number of other legitimate scenarios that the current system is too broken to support right now.

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Birth certificates or equivalent.

Sir_Brizz said:

I would also like to point out that none of the issues you mentioned are foregone conclusions with this "one document". Otherwise, we wouldn't have divorce lawyers.

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What about medical proxy? A spouse can make all medical decisions for the other spouse with nothing more than a marriage license. Can lawyers be brought into the equation? Certainly, they always can, but in this case they are usually not. The point being that the spouse need not produce reams of legal documents to prove anything. As simple non-government church wedding can not do this, the couple would be required to hire lawyers and negotiate a marriage contract. And then, in an emergent medical situation, one spouse would have to produce that contract to prove medical proxy, then the hospitals lawyers would have to review the contract to make sure everything was on the "up-and-up", before they could do anything. Not only does this apply to medical proxy, but also to just about all the things I listed above.

Marriage is a legal matter just as much as it is an emotional one. What we need to do is get those bigoted churches removed from the process.

Sir_Brizz said:

Most of what is supposedly handled in the marriage contract is not actually handled that well as it is.

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Examples?

Sir_Brizz said:

I honestly don't care if church marriages have anything to do with the government. It's not the government's job to care what people are doing in their respective churches.

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See the smiley? It means I was joking.

Sir_Brizz said:

Certain associated rights get applied, but my point is that attaching it to marriage is only done out of convenience. You have not contradicted my primary point here, which is that the government should not deal in the business of how two people are associated with each other. There are dozens of legitimate cases where the current "marriage contract" is too restrictive to handle. And extending "marriage" to additional small groups is not the correct way to solve the actual problem. Most of what is supposedly handled in the marriage contract is not actually handled that well as it is.

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You can get all libertarian, but the fact remains that as the system is set up, marriage is an amazing legal shorthand that makes life IMMEASURABLY easier and more secure for people in committed, long term relationships. It may be true that getting rid of legal involvement in marriage is what is best and that a more inclusive, less arbitrary (who you're having sex with exclusively) basis for assigning such rights would be nice, this is NOT going to happen in the forseeable future (because, you know, it would require a MASSIVE rewriting of rules). Therefore, the easiest thing to extend rights to the most amount of people is by allowing gay marriage. Don't let silly ideas of what you wish would happen in a completely different world affect the rights and possibilities of people in the one we live in.

Ka-POWWWWW!