> Wow. Just wow. For some people, marriage is more than a financial arrangement.
Marriage in the legal sense and marriage in the religious/personal/emotional commitment sense are not the same thing. I don't think you're necessarily _always_ wrong, but I also don't see why you think it's so universal that people should load a specific legal status with so much emotional weight and be unable to separate it from the actual commitment, in the context of meaningfulness.
If I have a religious ceremony during which I get married to someone, I would consider myself married even if I didn't file the papers at the courthouse. The latter is just paperwork. I can't say I relate to the notion that a relationship between two people doesn't have meaning until you get the government to approve it.
It sounds like you've never been married. It's not a matter of getting the government to approve, it's a matter of getting other people to recognize it. If you have a common-law marriage but it's not documented then if your spouse falls ill and taken to hospital you might be denied visitation rights, for example.
I suggest you read some court filings/legal articles on the gay marriage cases from a few years ago to get an understanding of why people sued to have the right to get legally married, over and above just having an emotional commitment.
It sounds like you haven't read the thread you're commenting on. Those issues (visitation rights etc) are explicitly stated in the GP comment, and the comment was speculating that it may be worth the trade-off. The comment _I_ was responding to was talking entirely about legal marriage _meaning_ more to its participants.
I suggest you read the threads you're participating in before smugly assuming that someone else is the one who doesn't know what they're talking about.
I'd read it, and I stand by my original comment. Your understanding of this seems to be abstract rather than concrete and I'm suggesting reading material you could examine to concretize your understanding. I don't know why you're being so rude about it.
There are obviously real benefits to being legally married.
That said the #1 reason that marriages fail is finances and I can imagine divorce would be massively net positive it if alleviated the financial desperation this family feels, allows them to spend time together vs working overtime and gives them healthcare they wouldn't have access to otherwise.
The downsides of not being legally married honestly seem trivial in comparison to the realities of poverty.
I concur about the corrosive effects of poverty, but it seems to me that you're ranking different circumstances in a one-dimensional utility calculus, and I'm arguing that many aspects of a long-term relationship are orthogonal to each other.
Marriage and family are contexts within which people are willing and/or liable to make life and death decisions which transcend fiscal considerations. The combination of a tax code and economic circumstances that (perhaps unintentionally) incentivize the breakup of families and the loss of rights for short-term economic reasons is not politically sustainable.
While I support marriage equality I think that was a suboptimal solution. A better, although more complex, option would have been to eliminate civil marriage from the legal code altogether. Currently a civil marriage is a fixed bundle of legal rights, penalties, and responsibilities. But it doesn't have to be that way. Issues like hospital visitation rights could be easily handled through standardized written agreements instead.
Marriage should be strictly a religious or social status with no official government recognition.
I don't understand this. If I turn up at the hospital you're in and claim you are my (opposite sex) spouse (with the same surname), do the hospital staff demand to see a certificate of marriage registration and then perform a search to ensure there is no state issued marriage annulment?
No, but consider the situation where A elopes with B (but doesn't get legally married) against the wishes of A's parents, and they have a child C. A tragic car accident puts A and C in the hospital but A is in a coma, and by the time B gets to the hospital A's parents are there and disputing B's eligibility to attend at the bedside of family members.
Their ID shows them to have the same last name, and they can probably dig up other documentation to prove their case. B has no such documentation, his last name doesn't match, etc.
No, you don't need to have the same last name to visit your sick partner, but when people start accusing eachother of lying, it will sure help.
Asserting counterfactuals is the short track to a loss. I encourage you to think through the ramifications of a situation or consult some case histories rather than just documenting your reflexive response.
> Wow. Just wow. For some people, marriage is more than a financial arrangement.
In the eyes of the government the only thing in marriage that's more than a financial arrangement is hospital visitation privileges and the right to not testify against your spouse.
I didn't say to annul their wedding vows or diminish whatever non-financial meaning their marriage has.
> They'd also save a bundle by not having kids. Maybe they should sell one of them, it would help pay for the others?
I believe the point was that selling a kid to pay for the others is a suggestion similarly (if not identically) indifferent to emotional realities as suggesting that a committedly-married couple get a divorce to change their tax status.
> For some people, marriage is more than a financial arrangement.
For sure, but you don't have to tell the government about it. You can still have a ceremony and wear rings and swear you'll live together until you die. Informally, you can pretty much have whatever kind of marriage you want, even a polygamous one. No-one is going to stop a bunch of people from living together as roommates in some kind of committed relationship. Although I just checked, and some of these relationships are actually illegal in Canada [1]. I think it's really just to protect minors, and they don't care what a bunch of adults are doing.
There's no federal law against it, but many parts of the US have laws against "unlawful cohabitation". Which is the main tool used to enforce the ban on polygamy. The laws could apply to unmarried couples that live together, but have only ever been used against polygamists. The supreme court recently turned down hearing a case to overturn such laws, keeping the practice illegal: http://www.sltrib.com/home/4848475-155/polygamy-remains-a-cr...
-Legally- married. There's usually a difference between legal recognition and personal recognition. Though I agree (as does the OP) that even having a situation where that might be an advantageous distinction is messed up.
Sadly, the US tax code rewards not getting married, doubly so if both partners are high earners (see the marriage penalty). If you don't like this, don't concern troll, instead, ask your representatives why this continues to exist.
The US tax code also rewards people getting married, typically when the partners have very different incomes (see marriage bonus).
Marriage penalties and bonuses are a consequence of joint filing combined with a progressive rate structure. They continue to exist because to get rid of them would require giving up either join filing or progressive rates, and it is very unlikely that people would go for giving up one or both of those.
So what you're saying is that the US tax code continues to reward one partner sacrificing their career and penalizes partners who wish to both continue their careers?
There's more than one way to make ends meet and I'd be happy to see the wide variety of elaborate tax breaks available to high-income sorts based on elaborate business constructs removed to make up for this rather than punish young married couples. But then, I'm all for a mostly flat tax, warts and all, no deductions whatsoever, past a certain level of income, say the national median.
Marriage being for love is a fairly recent re-definition of the institution. For most of human history the social and financial contract has been far more important than peoples' feelings.
Marriage in the legal sense and marriage in the religious/personal/emotional commitment sense are not the same thing. I don't think you're necessarily _always_ wrong, but I also don't see why you think it's so universal that people should load a specific legal status with so much emotional weight and be unable to separate it from the actual commitment, in the context of meaningfulness.
If I have a religious ceremony during which I get married to someone, I would consider myself married even if I didn't file the papers at the courthouse. The latter is just paperwork. I can't say I relate to the notion that a relationship between two people doesn't have meaning until you get the government to approve it.