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Wonktonodi on 30 June 2015
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sc94597 said:
Wonktonodi said:
 

There are so many legal rights and benefits that come from marriage so if you take that institution away what would you replace them with? Would you require people to set them all up individually? If you want to do away with them then you would be taking away peoples rights to make the decisions to make that form of commitment to one another

The question is why should the majority of these priveleges exist at all? What makes a "married" couple more special than a non-married one? What makes a couple more special than singe persons? Why should married persons get tax breaks that unmarried couples and single persons do not? The next of kin issue can easily be resolved through contract law or common law judgements like it had for the hundreds of years prior to government involvement with spousal and familial relationships. A state license is not necessary for this.

a single person, doesn't have to testify against themself in court. A someone married doesn't have to testify against their spose, how are you going to set that up as contracts?  Getting married in a sense buddles a whole lot of contracts together. Some of those are not just rights thoguht but resposiblitties, comitments, it's not all tax breaks and butterflies, but alimony, and shared debt.

if the state doesn't recognise same sex relationship with common law, then those benefits aren't there.

The simple thing that it comes down to, if you were to get rid or marrage and say it all had to be individual contracts, who would be the one enforcing the contracts? who would you go to if someone wasn't living up to there end of it? the government. So to try and say they are out of "that business" is foolish.