JessicaBurde
New member
"Why privatizing marriage would be a disaster"
http://theweek.com/articles/564916/why-privatizing-marriage-disaster
http://theweek.com/articles/564916/why-privatizing-marriage-disaster
I don't know. Some of the rights that marriage gives are pretty easy to extend to multiple spouses--such as the ability to immigrate to the US if you've married a US citizen. Others, like employer-sponsored insurance coverage would be a hassle, but I can think of ways to make it work. I have no idea how multiple marriage would impact the way marriage establishes a legal-next-of-kin for legal, financial and medical purposes. And there are, what, 1,000 other rights associated with marriage? Some of them will scale as easily as immigration rights. Some of them...won't.
And she's saying all this as if it were a bad thing. Completely bizarre.Furthermore, true privatization would require more than just getting the government out of the marriage licensing and registration business. It would mean giving communities the authority to write their own marriage rules and enforce them on couples. This would mean letting Mormon marriages be governed by the Church of the Latter Day Saints codebook, Muslims by Koranic sharia, Hassids by the Old Testament, and gays by their own church or non-religious equivalent. Inter-faith couples could choose one of their communities — but only if it allowed interfaith marriages. But here's what they couldn't get: a civil marriage performed by a Justice of the Peace. Why? Because that option would have to be nixed when state and marriage are completely separated.
This would mean that couples would be subjected to community norms, many of them regressive, without any exit option. For example, a Muslim man could divorce his Muslim wife by saying "divorce" three times as per sharia's requirement and leave her high-and-dry with minimal financial support (this actually happens in India and elsewhere). Obviously, that would hardly be an advance for marriage equality.
"It won't be easy" should never be a reason to avoid reform. Legislators are paid more than handsomely for their jobs - let them earn that cash with doing actual, neccessary work to instate a wonderful reform.I'm not saying these rights couldn't be addressed. Simple solution to paternity: do away with automatic paternity, or start giving legal recognition to more than two parents (some states are already moving on this.) But there would still need to be a great deal of legislation and bureaucratic revision to make many marriage rights accessible in poly marriage. You own comment on insurance is an example of this. While it is a simple fix, insurance regulations would still need to be re-written in order for it to happen.
These are issues that will need to be addressed no matter what form marriage takes, if poly marriages are going to have legal equality with monogamous marriages. Can it be done? Yes. Will it be hard or easy? My experience with the legal system leads me to think it will be harder than you think, but I'm not an expert, and my experiences have definitely biased me. Will it be as simple as the supreme court striking down the anti-bigamy laws (which I sincerely hope they will do some day) or ordering legal and religious marriages to be separate matters? No.
Adding an additional spouse would automatically dilute the financial/property rights of the existing spouses.
"It won't be easy" should never be a reason to avoid reform. Legislators are paid more than handsomely for their jobs - let them earn that cash with doing actual, neccessary work to instate a wonderful reform.
Without marriage, every aspect of a couple's relationship would have to be contractually worked out from scratch in advance. This may — or may not — prove to be an onerous inconvenience (some people speculate that companies would start marketing canned contracts to couples)
You could say the same thing about adding more children.
"It won't be easy" should never be a reason to avoid reform. Legislators are paid more than handsomely for their jobs - let them earn that cash with doing actual, neccessary work to instate a wonderful reform.
I've been told that the government should change what it does from "issuing marriage licenses" to "issuing civil unions." A civil union would (in this hypothetical) grant all the legal rights that a marriage currently grants. That would get government out of marriage without changing the essence of what it does. It would help separate church and state. The marriage a church could offer would have no legal benefits; presumably most people would get both a marriage and a civil union.
True to an extent. Children don't have the same financial rights as spouses though.
I never said it would be hard to make these rights accessible. I said that simply creating two separate institutions, civil unions (granting federal and state rights) and marriage (private/religious matter) wouldn't address the issues created by poly marriage.
How does next-of-kin scale? Are all of your spice legal next-of-kin and you get legal/medical/financial decisions by committee? That sounds like a recipe for a couple thousand Terry Shiavos.
Or how about the "right" that a woman's husband automatically has legal paternity of her children (granted in at least three states). How does this scale?
I'm not saying these rights couldn't be addressed. Simple solution to paternity: do away with automatic paternity, or start giving legal recognition to more than two parents (some states are already moving on this.) But there would still need to be a great deal of legislation and bureaucratic revision to make many marriage rights accessible in poly marriage. You own comment on insurance is an example of this. While it is a simple fix, insurance regulations would still need to be re-written in order for it to happen.
These are issues that will need to be addressed no matter what form marriage takes, if poly marriages are going to have legal equality with monogamous marriages. Can it be done? Yes. Will it be hard or easy? My experience with the legal system leads me to think it will be harder than you think, but I'm not an expert, and my experiences have definitely biased me. Will it be as simple as the supreme court striking down the anti-bigamy laws (which I sincerely hope they will do some day) or ordering legal and religious marriages to be separate matters? No.
True to an extent. Children don't have the same financial rights as spouses though.
They do if it's an inheritance of a parent without a spouse... so the comparison fits.