It ususally is self-defined, as far as the marriage itself goes. As far as laws go, it's a legal commitment. Because of it's subjective and often religious nature, I don't think the government should be involved in marriages at all. But since it is, it should not discriminate.
Yes.
Fair enough. I love it when we can all agree, if not on our positions, at least on what we are really saying.
However…
You’ve created a rather bizarre governmental institution, there. It changes your taxes, your eligibility for government benefits, some legal status, and your citizenship rights, but the only criteria for participation is self-nomination of the participants.
I think in reality the problem comes from some simple problems of biology. Since the dawn of time, things have been pretty predictable. Birth, sex, children, death. Somewhere along the line, someone noticed that steps 2 and 3 were connected, and that step 3 was a big job, which was fairly difficult if the woman with the kids was trying it alone, and so, they tried to ensure that the guy stuck around to help. Of course, if he was doing all that work, he wanted to be sure that those kids were really his. To solve both of those problems, “marriage” was created. (Of course, it didn’t really prevent men from raising other peoples’ kids, but at least he got to stone her to death if he discovered that it was a real possibility.) The new life order was, birth, marriage, children, death.
And as long as they were stoning people to death for having sex with the wrong people, they may as well also ban all the icky stuff, too.
Fast forward to 1960 or thereabouts, and along came the pill. Steps 2 and 3 were decoupled. Sex and children didn’t follow, necessarily. Now, all that baggage added over the centuries to make sure that a guy didn’t waste his time on other peoples’ kids wasn’t so necessary. The whole motivation for marriage was thrown into doubt. People wanted to have sex without kids, and some wanted to change partners every once in a while, or more often.
And it occurred to them at some point that they didn’t want their own sex life regulated, and one way to make sure that happened was to not regulate anyone’s.
Meanwhile, people wanted to share the beach house. But in the old days, you would probably have sex with someone, which means you would probably make babies, and it certainly wouldn’t make sense to share the beach house with someone other than the co-parent of your offspring, society had wrapped up all of those property sharing agreements into “marriage”.
Today, as a society, we’re struggling with how to disentangle all of those things, but that’s what we need to do. There’s no reason people need to make a lifelong commitment of sexual fidelity in order to share a beach house, so there ought to be an easy mechanism to share beach houses. There’s no reason an employer or government ought to provide health insurance to someone just because he’s sleeping with his roommate, so that should be separated as well.
On the other hand, the need for a lifelong commitment of sexual fidelity still exists, that is closely related to property sharing. I say we should keep that, and call it “marriage”, and make some other arrangement for people who want to share the beach house. We can call it a “civil union” if you like. It doesn’t matter much to me who enters into that lifelong, legally binding, commitment of sexual fidelity, but I want it to exist.
Meanwhile, government benefits and other legal and economic benefits, restrictions, or other considerations of marriage need to be reexamined and put where they make sense. There’s no reason my company ought to pay for health insurance just because I’m sleeping with my roommate, even if she’s the opposite sex and I promise not to sleep with anyone else. Now, if she happened to be working full time raising my children, that might be a different story, so let’s take the benefits of marriage, and instead couple them to where they make sense, which is child rearing.
The vision of “marriage” described by Ken, ID, Bluess, and many, many, other supporters of gay marriage threatens that view of marriage. It doesn’t threaten it because it allows gay people to participate. It threatens it because it redefines it as something other than a legally binding lifelong commitment of sexual fidelity.
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