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I really liked this, namely because I had never thought about this from this angle. The interaction most people have with marriage and the state is taxation on income. It would seem like it wouldn't be too difficult to just eliminate the option to file jointly and be done with it -- the state is no longer involved with marriage! This article does a good job explaining it's hardly that trivial. It reminded me of Steve Yegge's blog post about legalizing marijuana[0], and a simple concept becomes impossibly complicated when you consider all the practical scenarios and edge cases. Hopefully, you'll never be in a situation where the government has to rule on something like a disputed inheritance, but it has and will do so, often basing its decision on previously established precedent. What struck me was the logical step that this is a good defense against the slippery slope arguments, because gay marriage is ultimately an incremental step. We have laws and legal precedent for marriage between two people, and we're effectively just saying those laws can apply to a marriage of two people of the same gender. A typical Republican counterargument to the legalization of gay marriage is that you open the door for marriage to be between multiple partners, or between children, or animals, or whatever absurdity. It's impossible for gay marriage to trivially lead to say, marriage to an animal, because the state will have to define and rule on an entire cohort of new edge cases. If you're gay and married and have a child and you die, it's pretty uncontroversial that your partner would maintain custody of the child. But if you are married to your dog and adopt a child and die, does your dog get custody of the child? That's basically absurd. So, I feel this essay gives me a good answer the next time a right-winger asks me if the government allows gay marriage, what's to stop them from allowing other sorts of bizarre marriage scenarios: the government would have to come up with a bunch of different rules that are way more complex than gay marriage, and we probably won't want to do that. [0] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali... |
But what do you think about this?
I think there's something interesting in there, though. In some ways, this argument really acknowledges that laws really are tethered to reality. It's not so much a matter that we can simply will a legal situation into reality. What's fascinating, though, is that this idea that things are sort of stuck in the realities of the past-- that people really do like to be monogamous, that kids really are something that people do, that inheritance issues are going to be there--is a very conservative position relative the progressive approach, which really does sort of say 'we can decide how to structure society'. I mean when was the last time you heard someone say that 'we can educate this demographic because there's 200,000 years of historical precedent'.
I don't care either way. But I'm just noting that there is a profound conservatism within the push to state-defined marriage. Why now want to respect historical precedent as more or less permanent and yet disregard tradition elsewhere?