[task_queue]

> So who is picking up one aspect of the complex relationship here?

Who is making it hard to believe you're arguing in good faith here? You've consistently harped on a reductionist definition of marriage in this thread.

>If I get together with an AI in the future you'll call it marriage too?

Personally, I truly do not care what you call it. If they're able to give consent and you can find a place to have wedding, good for you. If the law wants to respect it, congratulations.

[alexro]

That's the problem - your abstraction is leaking, whereas the man/woman/kids abstraction of the marriage is not.

[mrgoldenbrown]

Of course the man/woman/kids abstraction leaks - many cultures use marriage to describe the legal union of old people, infertile people, and people who just plain don't want to have kids.

[vidarh]

> many cultures use marriage to describe the legal union of old people, infertile people

And in fact some cultures has "weird" forms of marriage that deviates from the man + woman norm explicitly over things like fertility.

E.g. in some parts of Africa, two women marrying (but not, at least in principle, lesbian marriages, though I'm sure this institution have been conveniently used to obscure lesbian relationships) have centuries of history as a means for infertile women to gain heirs by taking a fertile wife who will find a man to get her pregnant, who will have no rights to any children. In these cultures, one of the women will generally be considered a husband, and take on many traditionally male roles (to the extent that in some places such a "female husband" gain access to e.g. take political offices not available to women etc.) [1]

African cultures are full of still extant examples where marriage is treated as a pragmatic means to secure economy, social stability and inheritance to the point where bending gender norms too is seen as a perfectly sensible hack if it furthers those goals.

Given the long history of such varied forms of marriage (including e.g. polygamy too), it would be much more reasonable to claim that marriage historically is about securing a family units financial situation and inheritance, and furthering social stability than having anything to do with "a man and a woman procreating"...

[1] http://www.osisa.org/buwa/regional/female-husbands-without-m...