Redefining Marriage By Getting Rid of It?
March 5, 2011 by Amanda Litman
Introduced in January in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, HB569 would get rid of marriage. Sort of.
To be exact, the proposed bill, currently in committee, privatizes marriage. The New Hampshire state government would no longer issue marriage licenses; instead, it would grant domestic partnerships. If you wanted to get married in the traditional sense, you'd go to your religious house of choice. If you wanted the legal benefits of marriage as it currently stands, you'd get a domestic partnership. And all this would apply to gay and straight couples alike.
A group of Republican members of the New Hampshire state house proposed the bill, coming from the libertarian position that marriage is a contract:
- that should be recognized and applied by the courts, but that the government has no business, in general, decreeing who may or may not make the contract or imposing any prior conditions, as licensure does.
On one hand, the government has a monopoly on marriage, and government-sanctioned marriages have been disintegrating for years just look at the divorce rate in the United States [PDF]. Since all 50 states issue no-fault divorces, it's sometimes easier to end a marriage than it is to end a corporate partnership.
David Boaz explained the benefits of privatized marriage for both heterosexual and homosexual couples in his 1997 Slate article:
- Make it a private contract between two individuals. If they wanted to contract for a traditional breadwinner/homemaker setup, with specified rules for property and alimony in the event of divorce, they could do so. … Marriage contracts could be as individually tailored as other contracts are in our diverse capitalist world…
- And what of gay marriage? Privatization of the institution would allow gay people to marry the way other people do: individually, privately, contractually, with whatever ceremony they might choose in the presence of family, friends or God. Gay people are already holding such ceremonies, of course, but their contracts are not always recognized by the courts and do not qualify them for the 1,049 federal laws that the General Accounting Office says recognize marital status.
- And what of gay marriage? Privatization of the institution would allow gay people to marry the way other people do: individually, privately, contractually, with whatever ceremony they might choose in the presence of family, friends or God. Gay people are already holding such ceremonies, of course, but their contracts are not always recognized by the courts and do not qualify them for the 1,049 federal laws that the General Accounting Office says recognize marital status.
- As Nancy Polikoff, an American University law professor, argues, the marriage license no longer draws reasonable dividing lines regarding which adult obligations and rights merit state protection. A woman married to a man for just nine months gets Social Security survivor's benefits when he dies. But a woman living for 19 years with a man to whom she isn't married is left without government support, even if her presence helped him hold down a full-time job and pay Social Security taxes. A newly married wife or husband can take leave from work to care for a spouse, or sue for a partner's wrongful death. But unmarried couples typically cannot, no matter how long they have pooled their resources and how faithfully they have kept their commitments.
Gay couples may actually be the ones most resistance to having domestic partnerships replace "marriage" on a legal level. Time magazine pointed this out after the California Supreme Court ruled against the ban on gay marriage:
- After all, what was the most sweeping part of the May 2008 decision Ming and his colleagues issued that granted gays the right to marry? It was the idea that the word marriage is so strong that denying it to gay couples violates the most sacred right enshrined in the state constitution: the right for all people to be treated with dignity and fairness. Just 10 months later, gay couples–whether or not they are among the 18,000 who married in the state before Prop 8 stopped the ceremonies–are loath to lose a word for which so many fought so hard and so long to have apply to themselves.
http://bit.ly/dICXMA
No comments:
Post a Comment