The law shouldn't and for the most part doesn't treat marriage as anything more than a partnership. Partnerships have property, income, debts; so do marriages. Divorce therefore deals with marriage as a partnership being dissolved. Legal rights and obligations of parents and children aren't dependent on the marital status of parents. A parent has certain rights and obligations whether or not they're married. Children have certain rights regardless of the marital status of their parents.

From the legal standpoint, then, it should make no difference if a marriage is same sex or opposite sex based. Personally, I think what is called marriage should be considered a civil union regardless of the sex of those entering into the union. "Marriage" carries too much baggage, moral and religious. Religions may impose what requirements, rituals and ceremonies needed for the existence of a marriage they may please, but that shouldn't be any concern of the law.

Marriages resulting from incest and marriage to children won't be an issue until incest and sex with minors is legalized.

Thanks for your perspective, this makes a lot of sense and is a good answer. As you said I think what the government (and what most people think) is best described as a “civil union,” as religions have the freedom to say and deem what they don’t think is “true marriage.”

I agree that Marriage tends to be a more religious term. Even the etymology of matrimony comes from mātrimōnium which is a combination of “mother” (matria) and monium (obligation) from Latin. This makes sense with many religious traditions such as the Catholic Church which sees the main “purpose” of marriage being having children.

If incest and sex with minors are legalized, then while I imagine most Protestant and Catholic Churches will still refuse to consider these “marriages”, the government will likely have to protect it too for much of the same reasoning.

I'm in the US and I'm looking to get married some day (I am a lesbian). However, I have sometimes felt like marriage should be a personal affair for many of the reasons that you cite. I feel as though some of the legal aspects to marriage (involving things like visitation, inheritance, household taxes, etc.) should have some "marriage secular" equivalent and then leave the aspect of some kind of formal union up to people themselves altogether.

For instance, I've had family members that had permanent roommates in their old age: not sexual partners, just "life partners," friends. Why should they get a different legal status if they just happened to be in a romantic relationship? It's kind of silly.

So I think really the government should just stay out of marriage but give the same sorts of legal protections to those who want them ("married" or not) in some kind of reasonable way (e.g., in the case of a polyamorous marriage, someone that's better at policy than I can figure that out; but a group of people in a household that aren't "married" should be able to get the same sort of status).

Once upon a time, this topic would have yielded many pages of responses. Not now, not from this crowd, anyway.

I'm 75; gay; was in a relationship for 30+ years, till death did us part. We did not get married; we did not have a civil union. My theory is that couples should stay together because they want to stay together. If they want to stay together, they will. Otherwise, they will eventually go their separate ways. I haven't been in favor of gay couples raising children, either. Of course I know gay and lesbian couples who did raise children, and they did well, as far as I could tell.

What SHOULD gay or lesbian relationships look like? They WILL look like what the partners make of them. Heterosexual married relationships seem to be burdened by a lot of expectations (by both parties). The heterosexual marriage success rate isn't as good as people wish. I'm not sure what the success rate for formally married gays and lesbians is.

A long relationship was never in my 5 year plans, but it happened, and I'm glad about that. Life with someone else is generally better than life alone.

It took me a while to think about this one. But depending on people's point of view, marriage and family are the core building blocks of a society. Freud would argue that developmental issues that come from this building block follow us the rest our lives. Therefore there would be great interest in arguing for one form of marriage or the other.

and I guess laws protecting incest or child marriage would also be easy to make legal, so perhaps those would be next. — Paulm12

How are these even vaguely comparable to same sex marriages?

I think science and technology play a role here.
Now that we know better how genetics work, don't you think heterosexuality should have a kind of social advantage because of the fact that they re the ones transferring their ADN to their children? Or you think this does not make any difference?

All systems change in time. What will 'marriage' mean 10,000 years from now?
Will future transhumans marry? How much can you be cybernetic and still get married with full legal protections? Do you have to have a minimum organic content, such as a human brain? Perhaps in the future, every other part can be replaced by cybernetic system that look and function in the exact same way the flesh did but is a lot more robust and lasts a lot longer.
Will gender even make any sense for such transhumans?

Same sex marriage and other lgtbq issues are about how people make moral decisions. A big topic obviously, but I simplify it as two different common sense approaches. The first appeals to instinct and structure, which resists lgtbq and the second appeals to health: to not remain dissonant and maladaptive to popular social movement and government mandate, which supports lgtbq. Obviously in the first case people make decisions based on their sexuality: if they are not gay they generally are against gay marriage and defend the structure of marriage between a man and a woman as it has always been. On the flip side a gay person follows their instinct and wants to become married to the same sex because of the same appeal to instinct and structure. With sufficient lgbtq people wanting to marry there becomes a social issue arising from the same moral appeal. Most people originally opposed gay marriage when it first became an issue, but over time a strong amount of support has emerged. I believe this is because in liberal western society the legal challenges were found to have constitutional merit and basically became law. After that people are given the choice to live in distress and anger or to adapt and simply become a supporter and live healthily with a good attitude about the world as it is.

Now that we know better how genetics work, don't you think heterosexuality should have a kind of social advantage because of the fact that they re the ones transferring their ADN to their children? Or you think this does not make any difference?

Good point but I think it depends on the perspective. There are some people who think it is not worthy to have kids at all.

It is not about willing to have kids or not but what value do we give to the DNA as a society.
When we grow and start wondering about ourselves, the biological parents play 2 very important roles: psicológical and health related as well.
Same sex couple would then have a kind of challenge that other couples that raise their own children don't have.

I would not go to futuristic scenarios at the moment as that is quite sterile thinking but, staying pragmatic, pragmatic: a society that foster heterosexual couples?
The law is anyway the interpretation of how a society sees nature and the world and it makes sense, because we re the result of heterosexual evolution, that societies remain pro-heterosexual still for a long time.

I would not go to futuristic scenarios at the moment as that is quite sterile thinking — Raul

Think about the future or risk being defined completely by the past. Sterile thinking is NOT thinking about the future.

I mean futuristic scenarios that is to say pure sterile speculation.
I didn't say anything about thinking about the future.
Actually you can see, as per my pot, that I'm thinking about the future.

I think science and technology play a role here.
Now that we know better how genetics work, don't you think heterosexuality should have a kind of social advantage because of the fact that they re the ones transferring their ADN to their children? Or you think this does not make any difference? — Raul

Not sure what you have in mind. What "social advantage[ s ]" do you believe should be given to heterosexuality?

I appreciate both of your perspectives, thanks.

I understand why the government has a desire to be involved in marriage because married couples tend to not be stable, law abiding citizens and often have children which they would also want to promote for financial reasons. I also understand why they would want to discourage transactional marriages like green card marriages for a fee (where someone abroad pays someone at home to marry them so they get citizenship).

I actually think homosexual marriages may be more stable or have a higher “success” (i.e. less diverse) rate than heterosexual marriages, I’ll try to see if I can find data on it. My guess is because people have to go through more hoops and social barriers for a homosexual marriage, they may be more serious about it than the average heterosexual couple (pure speculation).

I tend to take a very Christian view of marriage, in the sense that I see it as a lifelong commitment to another person, not just “we’ll keep going until we don’t feel this way anymore, and then we’ll divorce”.


Homosexual marriage, child marriage, polygamy, are all extending or changing the "traditional" view of marriage, which in Western culture (and it seems many other cultures around the world too too) was between a man and one woman (and not incestuous). Polygamy may even be more traditional than monogamy in early societies, but Christianity did away with polygamy in the west.

I don't think marriage was ever historically about two people "loving each other". I see marriage as an evolutionary adaptation to protect women and children (forcing men to take care of women). Men can easily have sex with many females, whereas the cost of being pregnant for women is much higher. Hence why I think many cultures find sex outside of marriage taboo-a man can get a woman pregnant and then leave very easily, whereas a woman cannot. Forcing promiscuous men to "settle down" and make a commitment with one person seems like it would be advantageous to many societies.

Now, with birth control (and the fact that women can now work and hold property), we don't really "need" marriage the way societies used to. Hence we see marriage redefined in a romantic way in terms of personal choice and "love", perhaps a result of the individualism from the enlightenment. If a brother and sister want to have sex now, they can use birth control without having to worry about inbred offspring. Will incestuous marriage be decriminalized in the future? Who knows


I wonder about this too; I think the definition of marriage has changed a lot over even the past century.

I mean futuristic scenarios that is to say pure sterile speculation. — Raul

Your use of the word sterile is just your baseless (imo) opinion. If you go back 50 years ago in the UK or even most of the USA and someone suggested a 'futuristic scenario,' in which same sex marriage is legalised. Would you have called such a prediction 'sterile speculation?' If so, you would now have been proven dead wrong.

I think, because I can and I do, that your comment is intellectually sterile, but I'm convinced it has been emotionally rewarding for you as this one is for me. :smile:

I think, because I can and I do, that your comment is intellectually sterile, but I'm convinced it has been emotionally rewarding for you as this one is for me. — Raul

How you get your jollies is a matter for you. Don't imagine that I receive emotional rewards in the same ways you do. You again demonstrate your sterile thinking.

How you get your jollies is a matter for you. I do imagine that You do receive emotional rewards in the same ways I do. You again demonstrate your sterile thinking.

Better if you try to learn than merely echo.

gay people say they wanted the same legal protections — Paulm12

& the same legal restrictions. Fools!

:snicker:

:kiss:

:vomit:

Not really. Child marriage was pretty much ‘traditional’ and this has been pretty much removed due to laws for ‘consenting adults’. If anything I can sooner imagine the required age for marriage being moved up rather than down. Either way it is just a number and I’m sure many marry when they are still emotionally immature and irresponsible. Polygamy is common enough already (albeit mostly beyond western cultures).