Regarding the recent development in the US. To me it seems marriage shouldn’t be part of the legal system at all. If anything, legal marriage is a legacy of the days when women were treated as chattel.
EDIT: I dont know why this comment received downvotes, but maybe some readers took it to be criticisim of same sex marriage. That can hardly be further from the intent! Allowing same sex marriage is a great improvement that I applaud, but abolishing legal marriage entirely would be even better.
EDIT: I was asked to provide reasoning for my position. Well, it seems to me that in some sense the burden of proof is on the other side. In general, the less complexity we have in the legal system the better. IMO the primary reason marriage is a legal status is historical: in previous eras, a woman who entered into marriage became something close to a slave of her husband, and this relationship was legally important for approximately the same reasons property rights are legally important. Nowadays there are all sorts of laws associated with marriage but IMO they are all better implemented differently. To put in other words, if we had to reinvent the state without relying on history, I see no reason we would have invented legal marriage at all.
Practically speaking, even after resolving the issue of same sex marriage we still have the issue of polyamorous marriage. And trying to legalize it would lead to all sorts of complications (How do we formalize polyamorous marriage? Is it a graph? Is it a system of subsets? Are the subsets disjoint?) It seems much simpler to get rid of the entire concept.
Of course, if I’m missing some really good arguments why we should have legal marriage after all, I would be glad to hear them.
EDIT: To clarify, my comment’s intent was starting a discussion rather than stating a final verdict on the subject. Obviously a well-grounded conclusion would require a much deeper analysis than the few paragraphs above.
EDIT: I dont know why this comment received downvotes
You voiced a political opinion on LW and you provided no proper reasoning for why other people should agree with you. You didn’t steelman the opposing site and showed why you think they are wrong.
in previous eras, a woman who entered into marriage became something close to a slave of her husband
If it was Reddit, I would reach for the downvote button. Since it is not, I will try to make a shot why this type of argument is problematic. The Past is a big place, ranging from the beginnings of written history to the recent minute and over the planet. While on the conservative side there is an equally erroneous tendency to glorify the whole of this range, often on the progressive side there is an equally erroneous tendency to vilify the whole of it. These tendencies come from various philosophies of history, “kali yuga” in the first case and “whig theory” in the second case, your one. This—both—simply puts the politics of today into an unrealistic perspective. Both errors set up the mood of discussing political changes into a distorted “one more step away from our glorious past” vs. “one more step away from the horrors of our past”.
Your example illustrates this meta problem excellently. The last time I remember men were actually allowed to sell their wives to slave traders was Pagan Rome. What matters of the past for current politics is largely the last 250 years of largely western nations, so the Enlightenment era, where none of the actual characteristics of slavery were present in marriage. What there was instead is broadly the status of women in marriage as minors, not slaves, i.e. comparable to children but even that was changing was early as 1809-1848 in the US and in similar developed nations. So plain simply in that kind of past that matters, that is relevant, because it affects the present through the weight of being an established tradition it is not so. None of your grandmothers even remembers what it was like to not own property in a marriage and similar things. Non-equality does not imply being a slave unless you felt like a slave at 17.
You seem to define slavery as the right to sell slaves. This is usually called “chattel slavery” because it is a very small fraction of all the people called “slaves” throughout history.
It is true that a Roman husband had great rights over his wife, but that has nothing to do with marriage. The husband simply assumed the rights previously held by the father, the same rights the father had over his sons.
This is true but also true that non-chattel slavery used to have a lot of other names as well, serfdom, indentured servitude etc. I generally don’t know many examples where non-chattel slavery did not have some other name as well.
No, I am not talking about serfs and indentured servants. I am talking people called slaves. Almost every example where you think slaves are chattel is because you are wrong about history. For example, the great diversity of slaves in the Bible are not chattel.
I mostly agree with the object level statements. IMO an adult treated a minor qualifies as “something close to a slave”, but let’s not argue over terminology.
The problem of your view is that you really see marriage as being about the people who marry. In reality it is largely about their children. Even gay marriage is seen as a way to pave the way to allowing adoption / surrogate parenthood and thus enabling gays to have full families, including children, although not necessarily biologically theirs—at least that is part of the story, although using it as a vehicle for social validation, and some weird US-specific rules like hospital visits play a role too. While childfree and old people marry too, this is broadly the same as eating ice-cream vs. actually eating a meal. The meat is missing. Which does not mean that it should not be allowed, because just why not, but it does not mean either that it is valid to see marriage as an institutionalization of a relationship of adults and see how could we make better institutions for this? But marriage is not for adults primarily. For adults the whole thing is simple—ideally everybody should be able to marry but people who are dedicatedly childfree should probably realize there is no good reason to. There is hardly any good reason for two modern, income-earning people to pool resources unless one of them is becoming a housewife / houseman and really the only good reason to do that ever is children otherwise you are just being a maid. The primary thing marriage is optimized for is children. I predict most gay couples who bother about the whole marriage thing intend to adopt or have a surrogate child. Otherwise there would be little point to.
Gay marriage does not hurt children but abolishing marriage would. It would be one step towards making it less and less sure that children will always have their mother and father, and their property, around.
The answer to poly marriage is that first figure out how to sort out parenthood and then you will have your answer. If you would see it as an “it takes a village to raise a child” kind of setup, sure, just consider it a group thing, everybody pooling their property for the sake of raising children, no matter who is the father or the mother. I think Robert Heinlein proposed this in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress in 1966. However if you think even in a poly thing primarily the two biological parents would be responsible for the children, things could really get a bit complicated.
In short, I think you really need to update the view that marriage is about two or more adults for some weird reason wanting to make their love institutional. No, it is primarily about children, own or adopted, although due to the social customs associated to it it is often used for other purposes, but that is not the main purpose.
I should add that in the wedding ceremony where my wife and me are from this is halfway explicit. After the promise we gave our parents flower / wine thanking them to raising us—this can be seen as the childhood being over (at 34 it was about time) and now we are going to take up the mantle of becoming parents and continuing the family lines. During the dinner and party, people kept asking when do we plan the first kid. So the generic mood was “nice you guys chose to reproduce” and not something like “nice you guys made your love public”. I don’t need to make my love public and I could do that without wearing a ridiculous penguin costume...
Gay marriage does not hurt children but abolishing marriage would. It would be one step towards making it less and less sure that children will always have their mother and father, and their property, around.
I don’t understand why. Possibly you misunderstood me: I was arguing for abolishing legal marriage, not abolishing the cultural institution of marriage. I am not legally married to my wife, we have a 5 year old son and everything seems to be ok.
It does not make much of a difference. In the jurisdictions I am familiar with, cohabitation esp. with a child is practically interpreted as marriage, such as in case of separation commonly acquired property gets split etc. Let me ask, precisely what aspect of legal marriage you object to? Because there is a chance your cohabitation already has that legally.
Well, it seems to me that in some sense the burden of proof is on the other side.
No. If you call for the abolition of an significant public institution you have to provide proof.
In general, the less complexity we have in the legal system the better.
You haven’t shown how handle every single aspect in which marriage is involved by a new rule will reduce complexity.
To put in other words, if we had to reinvent the state without relying on history, I see no reason we would have invented legal marriage at all.
That’s argument from ignorance. “I’m to stupid or uninformed about the subject to think of arguments for the opposing site” is not something that should encourage people to adopt your position.
Or to reference the sequences: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
On LW rational debate is a core goal. How to reason about political issues matters more than the question of whether or not marriage should be abolished.
Posts that advocate for good political ideas but do so in an irrational way have no place on LW.
Rational debate is indeed a core goal. Object level arguments are essential to rational debate in most cases. Avoiding ad hominem subtext is also important.
You said that you can’t think of any reason.
I can’t address that without using the word “you”.
There are indeed two options: 1) You didn’t put enough time into understanding the subject. 2) You lack ability to understand it.
Okay maybe there a third: 3) You lied about not seeing any reason
“Argument from ignorance” does not have any place on LW. Discouraging it by calling it out is valuable. It’s not something that should stand unchallenged.
Not just because it’s wrong, but for garden purposes. It lowers the quality of the debate.
I disagree. It seems to me completely rational to say “Guys, why are we doing X? It looks like there was a reason why we were doing X before but the reason is irrelevant by now and we still keep doing it. Since I see no reason to keep doing it, I suspect it is pure inertia and we should stop doing it. If there is a reason I missed, please point it out”.
Imagine you start working in a software company, and you discover the codebase is a jumble of spaghetti. You say “what is going on here? why don’t we remove all of this legacy code?” and the other person goes “this is a arguing from ignorance, the fact you don’t know why we need this code doesn’t mean there is no reason!”.
Instead the other person should have either
a. Agreed that we need to schedule refactoring
or
b. Explained the reasons why we need all this complex code
And in case b it might still turn out the reasons are mere rationalisations i.e. the code would never have been written this way if we wrote the system from scratch. Or not. But establishing which requires an actual object level debate.
I think the true issue here is that you may not have much of a trust in other people’s rationality. In this example you sound like you work from the assumption that they have no reasons at all, while in your marriage opinion it sounds like people of “previous eras” (too unspecific) had largely unethical reasons (marriage-as-slavery).
Well this sounds like me when I was 20 :) But what I have learned since is that it is better to assume people are not stupid and not evil unless evidenced otherwise. Now of course this sounds entirely trivial, but at 20 I did not realize the full extent of that principle of charitability. Namely that this also implies that may have entirely valid reasons of which I am entirely ignorant of, and that implies I am not as smart and knowledgeable as I like to think. I had to realize the whole chain of it. Starting from liking to think I am smart and knowledge, when I was younger I too easily went to thinking if I don’t understand the reasons for a thing then there aren’t any or no good ones just stupid or evil ones, and this led to me ignoring the principle of charity and implicitly thinking other people are stupid and / or evil.
Antoher thing I learned since that reasons are not always explicit. I learned to accept reasons like “because we tried stuff, and this one worked, we have no idea why but it did”.
I do not assume other people are stupid or evil. However, in this particular case my best current hypothesis is that the reasons are mostly historical. That said, I will gladly update on information to the contrary.
I disagree. It seems to me completely rational to say “Guys, why are we doing X? It looks like there was a reason why we were doing X before but the reason is irrelevant by now and we still keep doing it. Since I see no reason to keep doing it, I suspect it is pure inertia and we should stop doing it. If there is a reason I missed, please point it out”.
It’s rational to say that about a topic that you don’t understand.
It’s no sin to not put significant time into understanding every topic one wants to speak about and asking other people for insights.
Imagine you start working in a software company, and you discover the codebase is a jumble of spaghetti. You say “what is going on here? why don’t we remove all of this legacy code?” and the other person goes “this is a arguing from ignorance, the fact you don’t know why we need this code doesn’t mean there is no reason!”.
If you start working at a company you are ignorant about why the company is acting the way it is. If you are starting at a company you haven’t put significant time into understand it’s inner workings.
You didn’t focus on asking a question. Your posts doesn’t contain any question marks expect in the part about polyamous marriage.
There a huge difference between: “I don’t know why we do X, we shouldn’t do it.” and “Can you please explain to me why we do X?”
When all is well and people are living peacefully and amicably, you don’t really need the law. When problems come up, you want clear laws detailing each party’s rights, duties, and obligations. For example, when a couple lives together for a decade while sharing assets and jointly building wealth, what happens when one party unilaterally wants to end the relationship? This situation is common enough that it’s worth having legal guidelines for its resolution.
The various spousal privileges are also at issue. Sure, you can file all kinds of paperwork to grant the individual legal rights to a romantic partner. At this point the average person needs to consult an attorney to make sure nothing is missed. What happens when someone doesn’t? You can expedite the process by drafting a special document that allows all these rights to be conferred as part of a package deal, but now you’re on the verge of reinventing marriage.
The legal issues surrounding the circumstances of married life will still remain whether marriage is a legal concept or no.
You can expedite the process by drafting a special document that allows all these rights to be conferred as part of a package deal, but now you’re on the verge of reinventing marriage.
But if different groups (e.g. different churches or other kinds of organizations) hired lawyers to prepare different standardized packages, they would be able to offer different kinds of contracts that would correspond to that group’s concept of marriage. That would give an individual more freedom to choose and would make it unnecessary to solve issues of non-traditional marriages at the political level, and I think that making things less political is usually a good thing.
Of course, there would be more legal paperwork, and, as you’ve mentioned, there are various risks related to that, in addition to other things.
The legal issues remain, but I see no reason to delegate them to the government. The people involved should be able to come up with any contract they like, regardless of their gender, number or the nature of their relationship. After all, we don’t have special legal status for relationships between landlord and tenant, employer and employee etc.
Do you think that a state shouldn’t give spouses special immigration rights?
What about spousal rights when it comes to making medical decisions for an incapacitated partner?
Regarding medical decisions, I agree with Sarunas: one should have the ability to assign this right to anyone.
Regarding immigration rights, it seems reasonable to take romantic relationships and even more so common children into consideration when granting such rights. I’m not sure we gain anything here by having a legal status called “marriage”.
It is not strictly necessary that all these rights should go to the same person, neither it is necessary that such rights have to be related to marriage. It is simpler that way, but it does not seem to be strictly necessary. For example, a person could designate another person (whom they trust and who doesn’t have to be their spouse, e.g. it could be a sibling, a parent, or simply a friend they respect) to make medical decisions in such cases and that would be analogous to a testator being able to name an executor of his/her will. If in a similar way other legal things that are currently associated with marriage were decoupled from it and each such right or duty would go to a designated person (not necessarily the same in all cases), marriage wouldn’t require any government involvement.
Regarding the recent development in the US. To me it seems marriage shouldn’t be part of the legal system at all. If anything, legal marriage is a legacy of the days when women were treated as chattel.
EDIT: I dont know why this comment received downvotes, but maybe some readers took it to be criticisim of same sex marriage. That can hardly be further from the intent! Allowing same sex marriage is a great improvement that I applaud, but abolishing legal marriage entirely would be even better.
EDIT: I was asked to provide reasoning for my position. Well, it seems to me that in some sense the burden of proof is on the other side. In general, the less complexity we have in the legal system the better. IMO the primary reason marriage is a legal status is historical: in previous eras, a woman who entered into marriage became something close to a slave of her husband, and this relationship was legally important for approximately the same reasons property rights are legally important. Nowadays there are all sorts of laws associated with marriage but IMO they are all better implemented differently. To put in other words, if we had to reinvent the state without relying on history, I see no reason we would have invented legal marriage at all.
Practically speaking, even after resolving the issue of same sex marriage we still have the issue of polyamorous marriage. And trying to legalize it would lead to all sorts of complications (How do we formalize polyamorous marriage? Is it a graph? Is it a system of subsets? Are the subsets disjoint?) It seems much simpler to get rid of the entire concept.
Of course, if I’m missing some really good arguments why we should have legal marriage after all, I would be glad to hear them.
EDIT: To clarify, my comment’s intent was starting a discussion rather than stating a final verdict on the subject. Obviously a well-grounded conclusion would require a much deeper analysis than the few paragraphs above.
You voiced a political opinion on LW and you provided no proper reasoning for why other people should agree with you. You didn’t steelman the opposing site and showed why you think they are wrong.
Fair enough. See edit.
If it was Reddit, I would reach for the downvote button. Since it is not, I will try to make a shot why this type of argument is problematic. The Past is a big place, ranging from the beginnings of written history to the recent minute and over the planet. While on the conservative side there is an equally erroneous tendency to glorify the whole of this range, often on the progressive side there is an equally erroneous tendency to vilify the whole of it. These tendencies come from various philosophies of history, “kali yuga” in the first case and “whig theory” in the second case, your one. This—both—simply puts the politics of today into an unrealistic perspective. Both errors set up the mood of discussing political changes into a distorted “one more step away from our glorious past” vs. “one more step away from the horrors of our past”.
Your example illustrates this meta problem excellently. The last time I remember men were actually allowed to sell their wives to slave traders was Pagan Rome. What matters of the past for current politics is largely the last 250 years of largely western nations, so the Enlightenment era, where none of the actual characteristics of slavery were present in marriage. What there was instead is broadly the status of women in marriage as minors, not slaves, i.e. comparable to children but even that was changing was early as 1809-1848 in the US and in similar developed nations. So plain simply in that kind of past that matters, that is relevant, because it affects the present through the weight of being an established tradition it is not so. None of your grandmothers even remembers what it was like to not own property in a marriage and similar things. Non-equality does not imply being a slave unless you felt like a slave at 17.
You seem to define slavery as the right to sell slaves. This is usually called “chattel slavery” because it is a very small fraction of all the people called “slaves” throughout history.
It is true that a Roman husband had great rights over his wife, but that has nothing to do with marriage. The husband simply assumed the rights previously held by the father, the same rights the father had over his sons.
This is true but also true that non-chattel slavery used to have a lot of other names as well, serfdom, indentured servitude etc. I generally don’t know many examples where non-chattel slavery did not have some other name as well.
No, I am not talking about serfs and indentured servants. I am talking people called slaves. Almost every example where you think slaves are chattel is because you are wrong about history. For example, the great diversity of slaves in the Bible are not chattel.
I mostly agree with the object level statements. IMO an adult treated a minor qualifies as “something close to a slave”, but let’s not argue over terminology.
The problem of your view is that you really see marriage as being about the people who marry. In reality it is largely about their children. Even gay marriage is seen as a way to pave the way to allowing adoption / surrogate parenthood and thus enabling gays to have full families, including children, although not necessarily biologically theirs—at least that is part of the story, although using it as a vehicle for social validation, and some weird US-specific rules like hospital visits play a role too. While childfree and old people marry too, this is broadly the same as eating ice-cream vs. actually eating a meal. The meat is missing. Which does not mean that it should not be allowed, because just why not, but it does not mean either that it is valid to see marriage as an institutionalization of a relationship of adults and see how could we make better institutions for this? But marriage is not for adults primarily. For adults the whole thing is simple—ideally everybody should be able to marry but people who are dedicatedly childfree should probably realize there is no good reason to. There is hardly any good reason for two modern, income-earning people to pool resources unless one of them is becoming a housewife / houseman and really the only good reason to do that ever is children otherwise you are just being a maid. The primary thing marriage is optimized for is children. I predict most gay couples who bother about the whole marriage thing intend to adopt or have a surrogate child. Otherwise there would be little point to.
Gay marriage does not hurt children but abolishing marriage would. It would be one step towards making it less and less sure that children will always have their mother and father, and their property, around.
The answer to poly marriage is that first figure out how to sort out parenthood and then you will have your answer. If you would see it as an “it takes a village to raise a child” kind of setup, sure, just consider it a group thing, everybody pooling their property for the sake of raising children, no matter who is the father or the mother. I think Robert Heinlein proposed this in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress in 1966. However if you think even in a poly thing primarily the two biological parents would be responsible for the children, things could really get a bit complicated.
In short, I think you really need to update the view that marriage is about two or more adults for some weird reason wanting to make their love institutional. No, it is primarily about children, own or adopted, although due to the social customs associated to it it is often used for other purposes, but that is not the main purpose.
I should add that in the wedding ceremony where my wife and me are from this is halfway explicit. After the promise we gave our parents flower / wine thanking them to raising us—this can be seen as the childhood being over (at 34 it was about time) and now we are going to take up the mantle of becoming parents and continuing the family lines. During the dinner and party, people kept asking when do we plan the first kid. So the generic mood was “nice you guys chose to reproduce” and not something like “nice you guys made your love public”. I don’t need to make my love public and I could do that without wearing a ridiculous penguin costume...
I don’t understand why. Possibly you misunderstood me: I was arguing for abolishing legal marriage, not abolishing the cultural institution of marriage. I am not legally married to my wife, we have a 5 year old son and everything seems to be ok.
It does not make much of a difference. In the jurisdictions I am familiar with, cohabitation esp. with a child is practically interpreted as marriage, such as in case of separation commonly acquired property gets split etc. Let me ask, precisely what aspect of legal marriage you object to? Because there is a chance your cohabitation already has that legally.
No. If you call for the abolition of an significant public institution you have to provide proof.
You haven’t shown how handle every single aspect in which marriage is involved by a new rule will reduce complexity.
That’s argument from ignorance. “I’m to stupid or uninformed about the subject to think of arguments for the opposing site” is not something that should encourage people to adopt your position. Or to reference the sequences: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
I don’t think we are going to make progress without going to object level.
On LW rational debate is a core goal. How to reason about political issues matters more than the question of whether or not marriage should be abolished.
Posts that advocate for good political ideas but do so in an irrational way have no place on LW.
Rational debate is indeed a core goal. Object level arguments are essential to rational debate in most cases. Avoiding ad hominem subtext is also important.
You said that you can’t think of any reason. I can’t address that without using the word “you”.
There are indeed two options:
1) You didn’t put enough time into understanding the subject.
2) You lack ability to understand it.
Okay maybe there a third:
3) You lied about not seeing any reason
“Argument from ignorance” does not have any place on LW. Discouraging it by calling it out is valuable. It’s not something that should stand unchallenged. Not just because it’s wrong, but for garden purposes. It lowers the quality of the debate.
I disagree. It seems to me completely rational to say “Guys, why are we doing X? It looks like there was a reason why we were doing X before but the reason is irrelevant by now and we still keep doing it. Since I see no reason to keep doing it, I suspect it is pure inertia and we should stop doing it. If there is a reason I missed, please point it out”.
Imagine you start working in a software company, and you discover the codebase is a jumble of spaghetti. You say “what is going on here? why don’t we remove all of this legacy code?” and the other person goes “this is a arguing from ignorance, the fact you don’t know why we need this code doesn’t mean there is no reason!”.
Instead the other person should have either
a. Agreed that we need to schedule refactoring
or
b. Explained the reasons why we need all this complex code
And in case b it might still turn out the reasons are mere rationalisations i.e. the code would never have been written this way if we wrote the system from scratch. Or not. But establishing which requires an actual object level debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton’s_fence
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2012/08/proxy-measures-sunk-costs-and.html
I think the true issue here is that you may not have much of a trust in other people’s rationality. In this example you sound like you work from the assumption that they have no reasons at all, while in your marriage opinion it sounds like people of “previous eras” (too unspecific) had largely unethical reasons (marriage-as-slavery).
Well this sounds like me when I was 20 :) But what I have learned since is that it is better to assume people are not stupid and not evil unless evidenced otherwise. Now of course this sounds entirely trivial, but at 20 I did not realize the full extent of that principle of charitability. Namely that this also implies that may have entirely valid reasons of which I am entirely ignorant of, and that implies I am not as smart and knowledgeable as I like to think. I had to realize the whole chain of it. Starting from liking to think I am smart and knowledge, when I was younger I too easily went to thinking if I don’t understand the reasons for a thing then there aren’t any or no good ones just stupid or evil ones, and this led to me ignoring the principle of charity and implicitly thinking other people are stupid and / or evil.
Antoher thing I learned since that reasons are not always explicit. I learned to accept reasons like “because we tried stuff, and this one worked, we have no idea why but it did”.
I do not assume other people are stupid or evil. However, in this particular case my best current hypothesis is that the reasons are mostly historical. That said, I will gladly update on information to the contrary.
It’s rational to say that about a topic that you don’t understand. It’s no sin to not put significant time into understanding every topic one wants to speak about and asking other people for insights.
If you start working at a company you are ignorant about why the company is acting the way it is. If you are starting at a company you haven’t put significant time into understand it’s inner workings.
You didn’t focus on asking a question. Your posts doesn’t contain any question marks expect in the part about polyamous marriage.
There a huge difference between: “I don’t know why we do X, we shouldn’t do it.” and “Can you please explain to me why we do X?”
Fair enough. See edit.
When all is well and people are living peacefully and amicably, you don’t really need the law. When problems come up, you want clear laws detailing each party’s rights, duties, and obligations. For example, when a couple lives together for a decade while sharing assets and jointly building wealth, what happens when one party unilaterally wants to end the relationship? This situation is common enough that it’s worth having legal guidelines for its resolution.
The various spousal privileges are also at issue. Sure, you can file all kinds of paperwork to grant the individual legal rights to a romantic partner. At this point the average person needs to consult an attorney to make sure nothing is missed. What happens when someone doesn’t? You can expedite the process by drafting a special document that allows all these rights to be conferred as part of a package deal, but now you’re on the verge of reinventing marriage.
The legal issues surrounding the circumstances of married life will still remain whether marriage is a legal concept or no.
But if different groups (e.g. different churches or other kinds of organizations) hired lawyers to prepare different standardized packages, they would be able to offer different kinds of contracts that would correspond to that group’s concept of marriage. That would give an individual more freedom to choose and would make it unnecessary to solve issues of non-traditional marriages at the political level, and I think that making things less political is usually a good thing.
Of course, there would be more legal paperwork, and, as you’ve mentioned, there are various risks related to that, in addition to other things.
The legal issues remain, but I see no reason to delegate them to the government. The people involved should be able to come up with any contract they like, regardless of their gender, number or the nature of their relationship. After all, we don’t have special legal status for relationships between landlord and tenant, employer and employee etc.
Do you think that a state shouldn’t give spouses special immigration rights? What about spousal rights when it comes to making medical decisions for an incapacitated partner?
Regarding medical decisions, I agree with Sarunas: one should have the ability to assign this right to anyone.
Regarding immigration rights, it seems reasonable to take romantic relationships and even more so common children into consideration when granting such rights. I’m not sure we gain anything here by having a legal status called “marriage”.
It is not strictly necessary that all these rights should go to the same person, neither it is necessary that such rights have to be related to marriage. It is simpler that way, but it does not seem to be strictly necessary. For example, a person could designate another person (whom they trust and who doesn’t have to be their spouse, e.g. it could be a sibling, a parent, or simply a friend they respect) to make medical decisions in such cases and that would be analogous to a testator being able to name an executor of his/her will. If in a similar way other legal things that are currently associated with marriage were decoupled from it and each such right or duty would go to a designated person (not necessarily the same in all cases), marriage wouldn’t require any government involvement.