This presents its own problems.
To start off with, marriage is a religious sacrament, which the government has long tried to take over, offering incentives to married couples, then mandating that only the government can make a couple “legally” married.
For the conservative and Orthodox churches, a far better solution would be to try and take back their sacrament with an ecumenical agreement. The most important part of which is to *not* recognize secular marriage made outside of this pact.
This would make marriage either religious or secular again.
As before, purely religious marriages would have to shun any government benefits bestowed on married couples; which would mean that government would at first *only* give benefits to secular married people.
But then, there would be pressure for government to discontinue benefits solely because a couple were married.
It took a very long time for us to get to this point, so a fix won’t come overnight. But if you want it done right, it is better to be slow and methodical about things.
I have thought often about one of the proposed Libertarian perennial proposals, just to eliminate marriage as a secular concept at all.
It has a surface appeal, but on deeper thinking on that I decided it was not a great idea. It is another step is breaking the family, it aligns with the libertarian ideal of hyper-individuality, so I can see why they like it. Each person would have an individual 1 on 1 relationship with the government, the family would be legislated out of existence.
A stay at home Mom would have to file her own tax return. A lot of divorce judges would be out of business, I guess.
Anyway that's not going to happen, so it's mere speculation, I guess.