You guus really want to “defend” marriage? Get the government out of it. The feds have no constitutional authority in it anyway. It amazes me that a so many people are so eager to have big brother endorse, sanction and subsidize their marriages, children, schools and communities but get all upset when big brother attaches his strings to all those favors he does for them.
Inheritance and tax deductions ~ simply eliminate the federal death tax as well as the income tax and that’s most of your problem right there.
If you go back to the history books....it’s an odd way that the US gov’t got into marriage.
The whole ideal of a marriage license was foreign until the topic came up in Penn....where a husband would die, and there would be a debate over joint property. The husband’s relatives would inject that they now owned a farm....instead of the wife. So they developed a license as the state method of tracking marriages and then proving the case quickly in a court setting. No license....then you got into a long-winded ownership debate.
The second episode occurred down in North and South Carolina, where some guys married, then jumped up and ran off to another county to marry again (no divorce). So they felt that a license would bond the situation and make legal recourse in a courtroom easier. The license became the solution.
So we come to the early 1900s....where income taxes walked into our lives, and again...we’ve built various devices to help the married folks....over single folks.
I pretty much agree...marriage is nothing that the gov’t should get into. If you want a civil union...it should be a two-page form at your county office and you just fill it out....swear in front of a judge, and you are a civil union. As for marriage? It ought be only a church service, and have no legal standing beyond that. If a gay couple can find a church to do a sanctioned church ceremony....fine, otherwise, it’s not the public’s problem.
I think we are pretty much wasting a fair amount of time on this topic.
I agree. Having handed over marriage for the states to administer, having invited the Feds in to give tax breaks and benefits, are we now surprised when the state thinks it has the power to define its institution any way it wants?
After that, divorce began to be such an issue with more than one out of every two marriages ending in divorce or so statistics began claiming (not 50% of all marriages but only newer marriages), then younger adults of the marrying age said, "Why bother to get married if I'm only going to get divorced in a few years anyway?" Actually, that was mostly the men saying that as most women still prefer marriage over shacking up.
Various churches began overlooking "couples and families" within their congregations who actually weren't legally married but preferred not to notice nor to require couples to be legally wed and others performed "marriages" to couples who had lived together and even produced children, so marriage has been basically devalued as an institution by those of us who claim it should be only between a man and a woman (used to say, for a lifetime, but no longer.)
The first day we, as a society devalued marriage as an institution we claimed to revere, this was what the result would someday become.
That "someday" is now here.
You can't shake your fist at God and not have Him notice. He will give you over to your desires so that you can live what you have demanded of Him!