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sc94597 on 30 June 2015
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Wonktonodi said:
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. 

Yes the communicative and testimonial priveleges should be abolished. Such laws already vary among states. Notice that in most cases that the first only protects private conversations after they were married. What is so special about marriage that gives them this privelege? Why couldn't they be afforded this privelege when they were dating? Alimony agreements can be made through written (or as in the case of marriage) verbal contracts which are rewarded among the judge's reasoning. Again, if forming contracts is too much of a bother, you can use the money you would have paid for a marriage license to purchase a pre-formatted contract bundle which your lawyer would summarize for you and your partner(s). If you are that lazy that is and you don't want to put in the work for a fool-proof legal contract that you both agree with. 

The statutory law =/= common law. All a person needs to do is tell a judge he/she is married and the judge is obliged to accept it, as long as there is evidence to substantiate this (a signed contract or some other record that shows they are cohabiting and both agree.) Common law is the law created by precedent cases of judges, and it works very differently from statutes.

The state will enforce contracts in any system in which the state has a monopoly on the issuance of law. It will not oblige state mandated licensing (what it does now), it will not impose its own stipulations to these contracts (as it does now) , nor will it give special priveleges to certain contracts over others (as it does now.) The argument is not to get the state to stop enforcing contracts (that is a different argument to be made.) The argument is for them to enforce them equally and fairly and for it to not alter said contracts with its own statutes.

If you are interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage