Marriage Against the State
Jason Kuznicki on Feb 20th 2008
I’m expanding on, and clarifying, a comment I made below. The thesis: Marriage is in many ways a defense against the state. Marriage is many different things, but in a whole set of ways, it is an approach toward a more limited and more tractable form of government. Marriage — “state-sanctioned” marriage — is a defense of the home against the bureaucracy.
Marriage does a lot of things. Here are just a few of them: It helps to decide child custody and presumed parental obligations. It resolves nearly all questions about inheritance. It does the same with property and financial decisionmaking. It settles who gets to make medical decisions. It determines who may have standing to sue for wrongful death. Whether rightly or wrongly, it helps to determine — and who may not — receive retirement benefits, even if those benefits come from a private company.
In each of these cases, I think it’s preferable to have a “default” state: It’s just better to have an understanding about how, barring alternate arrangements, everything is going to play out: When one spouse dies, the other gets the house, the kids, the right to sue. No fuss, no questions asked. Not even any probate in a lot of jurisdictions, as I understand it. When one spouse is incapacitated, you look to the other one for the life-and-death medical decisions. And so forth. In a time of crisis, you do not want a bunch of lawyers trying to argue their way through your private life. You just want to get on with the business at hand.
So that’s why we have these sensible rules. Whenever we hear “let’s just get the state out of marriage,” we must remember that, without these rules, the state would be a lot more in all of our private lives: Without marriage, the state would be forced to decide each of these questions on a case-by-case basis, every single time they happened. The state would be everywhere, inspecting, documenting, interrogating, assessing, denying, arresting, and all the rest.
That, my heterosexual friends, is what life in a same-sex couple is like right now. The state is everywhere in a gay couple’s life, particularly if they happen to have kids.
The state intrudes into the lives of gay people very, very often, because we don’t have the commonsense rules that everyone else has. The state comes along and takes away our house, and awards it to the dead partner’s parents, even though the parents hated both of us. The state takes my money for Social Security (just like everyone else), but then says I can’t give it to the person I share my life with (unlike everyone else). The state decides that one man’s visa is expired, and it’s time for him to leave the country and never return. The state comes in and takes away our kids. The state declares that, no matter how much harm the partner of the deceased may suffer, if it was a same-sex union, there is no right to sue for wrongful death.
We’d like to be left alone, if it’s all the same, and NOT have this state interference. In other words: We’d like marriage instead. Let us run our own affairs. Let us take care of ourselves, without the help of all these indifferent bureaucrats and unthinking regulations.
Now, if it happens that the word “marriage” is too much to take, then fine. Call it something else. But let us have some order and regularity to our lives, and to our dealings with the state, so that we know where we stand as citizens and as family members. Give us the same right to conduct our private and family lives that you already have.
Filed in The Boudoir, The Bureau
Jason, I think you’re right about wanting to live your life, as a gay man, without government intrusion. And given how bad the situation is for you, the grass certainly looks greener for those of us in “state approved” marriages.
But the state of marriage (no pun intended) is not approaching Nirvana. It can only be said that traditional marriage is green in comparison. Divorce still involves courts and claims and few who go through a divorce that includes any contest find that they are able to “get on with their lives” because the courts are so convenient.
And on a philosophical level, the idea that the state can grant me a “license” to permit me to enter into a contract or relationship is, offensive. No one, be they gay, straight, or polygamous, should have the government telling them they can or cannot enter into a given relationship.
My desire here is multifaceted: To end the culture war; To provide equal rights; To restore social institutions and diminish the State. I have learned a lot from the dialogue we had in my previous post on the subject.
I agree entirely that it’s galling to think of marriage as permission to enter into intimate relations. I think though that for the younger generation, it simply isn’t thought of that way anymore.
And yes, divorce does involve courts, lawyers, and claims. But it beats the sorry spectacles one sometimes encounters in the gay world, with locks changed overnight or possessions strewn on front lawns.
Maybe the grass does look greener, and maybe there is a lot I could do without in the current marriage law. But these advantages aren’t to be taken lightly.
[...] I worked late tonight, but I’d like, in part, to make a note or placeholder if you will, that I want to pen a response to this essay, by Jason Kuznicki, on marriage and the state. Because I think while he touches on some of the reasons why citizens want state/marriage/family entanglements he misses others which lead to both parties, state and citizens in favor the current arraignment. In part, I plan to draw on Charles Taylor’s analysis of societal trends over the last 500 years as put down in A Secular Age. Jim Babka comments on that post that he’d like, in part, to “end the culture wars.” This particular culture war has been ongoing for 500 years and my guess is that we are all very thankful for the results, i.e., that the side which is (or was) winning did so. [...]
[...] Confusion and a Divorce By Mark O. Jason Kuznicki writes on marriage here. He notes: The thesis: Marriage is in many ways a defense against the state. Marriage is many different things, but in a whole set of ways, it is an approach toward a more limited and more tractable form of government. Marriage — “state-sanctioned” marriage — is a defense of the home against the bureaucracy. [...]
[...] Jason Kuznicki writes on marriage here. He notes: The thesis: Marriage is in many ways a defense against the state. Marriage is many different things, but in a whole set of ways, it is an approach toward a more limited and more tractable form of government. Marriage — “state-sanctioned” marriage — is a defense of the home against the bureaucracy. [...]
[...] Mark Olson has some very interesting comments on my post “Marriage Against the State.” His first point is as follows: Marriage has been, historically and socially perhaps even “humanly”, been regarded as more than a contractual matter. A sacramental, liturgical, and eternal significance has almost universally been attached to this event. The phrase, of “pledging our troth before man and God”, is common because it is …, well, common. Marriage (first marriages at least) makes sense as celebration and virtually all cultures that aspect is there in abundance. There is also universally a religious aspect. At the very least, shared liturgical praxis is a to touch the sacred. Charles Taylor in A Secular Age begins by looking at the word “secular”. “Secular” comes from the Latin, saeculum, meaning a period of time. A liturgical rite, in a primal fashion, is a denial of time. It is meant to forge a connection with all the other rites that are the same. The Eucharist for example is a forging of a connection with the first Eucharist during that passover night almost 2000 years ago and every other Eucharist performed everywhere else since then. Marriage ceremonies are the same, a denial of time. This connection between the lover’s bound in marriage and eternity is almost as universal. [...]