Kaffis Mark V wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
Kaffis Mark V wrote:
You don't need marriages for that. Private contracts (or, if you prefer, publicly recognized statuses that don't discriminate against, say, polygamy and polyamory) can suffice for that purpose.
No they can't. Polygamy is part of the reason. No person should be entitled to have more than one spouse recognized as next of kin or entitled to financial benefits.
Why not?
Or, more specifically, break it down by "marital right" (I stick that in quotes because I don't think all of the things commonly referred as such are rights, and none of them need to be associated exclusively with marriage).
Why not have more than one person recognized as next of kin? If somebody who practices polygamy, for instance, as part of their religion dies without a will, currently some of his or her spouses get screwed by the state's allocation of his estate, because the state refuses to recognize his freedom-of-religion-protected situation.
I don't see that freedom of religion does protect polygamy. Freedom of religion does not protect all sorts of behaviors that are harmful, and polygamy is harmful if you have more than one legal spouse because it ends up costing the taxpayr more to probate such a mess, if nothing else. Depending on the individual situation in question, there's potential for far more. How about Social Security? Retirement checks? Do they get chopped up amongst the wives or do they go to the wives as a group as a whole check? Are the wives even married to each other, or are they each individually married to one guy? All this does is create a big mess we have to spend money to sort out.
Moreover, it would create a huge mess with things like someone being on life support; which wife gets to make the call to shut the machine off? What if they disagree with each other?
I don't have any problem with people getting married multiple times within their religion, and they do, in fact, do that. That's what their freedom of religion entitles them to do. That doesn't mean we need to get government out of religion, or have a legal definition of marrige in order to make it
more convenient for them to practice their religion.
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Why not have more than one person entitled to financial benefits? In fact, let's take that further -- defend the reason to HAVE financial benefits, and then we can get down to the nuts and bolts and determine whether it's actually appropriate to limit each of those financial benefits to one or more people on their own merits.
I don't need to define a reason for financial benefits any more than I need to define a reason for any other form of job compensation. It's a form of pay. What we don't need is people ripping off buisnesses, the government, and the taxpayer by piling more wives on.
If you think we just shouldn't pay people with various benefits other than actual salary, fine, but that's a separate issue.
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How about divorce case standards? Currently, our legal endorsement of marriage as a blended religious and social construct condemns infidelity and punishes it in marriage proceedings. However, there are polyamorous people out there who have "open marriages" (I don't claim to understand them, but they say they're fine with that). However, to my understanding, if an open marriage goes south, the "infidelity" (in the laws eyes) can be used as a tool in the divorce proceedings, even though it has no validity in the relationship, simply because our law recognizes a religiously based construct of marriage, that indicates that infidelity is a sin, and thus should not be endorsed by the law.
To my understanding, some states now no longer recognize adultery as grounds for precisely that reason, so I'd say that's well on the way to being remedied. In any case, it really doesn't matter what the reason behind divorce laws are any more than it matters what the reasoning behind any other law is. Divorce recognized infidelity as a problem because 1) for the
vast majority of the population, multiple sex partners while married is not just not acceptable, but a source of major emotional harm 2) it greatly affects any children involved and c) it calls into question responsibility for parantege of the children; is it the mother's husband, or her lover? Or, if it's a cheating husband, is his mistress's child his or someone else she was dalying with?
Part of the problem here is the fact that the law lets a woman simply declare the parantege of her child, and gives the man only a limited time to respond whether he's notified or not, but that's a separate issue.
Besides, we already have tools like prenuptual agreements that can protect you if you want to be polyamorous.
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These are just a few of the situations that could be rectified by putting an end to recognizing marriage, legally, and instead constructing more sensible and broadly applicable purely *social* constructs instead.
I see nothing sensible about them, and as they are, they are purely social. The fact is that our society has a strong religious history, and that may affect our laws. However, these laws are also similar to those in many other parts of the world with different religious histories, and in any case, there's nothing wrong with a law having a religious background as long as the effect is not religious. We've been over this before in regard to other things like Blue Laws. The courts have already ruled that such laws are constitutional regardless of their impetus; it's their effect that matters. Do they promote a legitimate state interest? In the case of blue laws, I wwould argue they're stupid, but that's not the same thing as unconstitutional.
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What we really need to do is stop thinking we can solve problems by "getting the government out of it", and in this case, you couldn't anyhow. The courts would end up defining it all over again trying to enforce private contracts, and that definition would be based largely on precedent.
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