Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
(6) Why is the government involved at all? A fine question. You and the five other people who believe that there is any chance that the government will get out of the business of legislating morality should get together in the lobby of the Radisson at the next libertarian (tm) convention and discuss this. Perhaps the six of you should pick a state to move to where you can vote to change the laws so you can all marry each other.
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There are legitimate non-morality reasons for the G to be involved, though I think we all know they aren't the primary ones.
First, there is the idea that marriage promotes household stability - and I mean in an economic sense, not a moral or "think of the children!" sense. In a two (yes, or more) parent household, if one parent gets fired, is disabled, or works too many hours to make it to the school play, the other adult head-of-household can pick up the slack. (Actually, this argument also tends to mitigate against having two-earner households, because if both parents work full time already there is no one with the ability to enter the workforce to pick up the economic slack if something goes wrong, given that many or most two-earner households tend to budget around and spend both incomes, not one.)
On this note, I'd bring to your attention the current admin's weird policy of promoting marriage among the poor. The idea is that, if two poor people get hitched and run their households together, they can support each other through the trials of being poor and all get through it with more stability and success than they would on their own, in that the various bumps in the road that would derail them entirely and send them spiraling into [insert random hole in the social safety net here] may be mitigated by having another person around to share the burden. While that is a more interesting idea than it superficially appears (in that it is an economic idea disguised as a moralistic bible-banger idea), it doesn't appear to have had any effect in practice. Which calls into question, frankly, the assumption that marriage increases economic stability, or if stability leads to marriage, or if they are both side effects of something else.
Second, there are some real household benefit issues that are of interest to the G. In a multi-parent household, if one parent is the primary earner and the other primarily does unpaid work to make the family function (the "traditional" arrangement, if by traditional you mean "middle-class after about 1800"), if something happens to the earner there are serious harms suffered by the other household members far beyond the loss of income - primarily the lost benefits (SS, pension, healthcare, etc.). It is the old "widows and orphans" problem. It makes sense for the gov't to say that, if people arrange their lives in this manner of divided labor, as many/most do, then it makes sense for the gov't to ensure that all those benefits won't be lost to the household as a whole because of the unfortunately demise of one member, and so to pay some benefits over to the surviving adult head of household - let's call them "spouse." And, if so, it makes sense for the gov't to have some interest in who qualifies as a spouse, if simply to figure out who needs to get paid and/or to avoid fraud.
It also means that polygamy potentially raises different issues than single sex marriage - how many households/dependents can make a claim on one person's benefits, etc.
