Not true - it is in the government's best interest to promote the institution of marriage. The heterosexual family is the foundational unit of society. Stable families produce productive citizens which benefits everyone. Of course the government should support and encourage this!
Shared property, child custody, power of attorney, and the like can be handled through other legally binding agreements between individuals.
Now you're just talking about more money for lawyers. Who else would want to generate more legal documents and contracts? Not me!
The FMA will never happen.
If your're talking about a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a heterosexual institution, you are wrong. It will pass with ease, and it destroys all your above arguments.
But the government is incapable of promoting the institution of marriage. It is only capable of destroying it. Since the government will inevitably expand the definition of marriage to the point of destruction, shouldn't it get out of the business of defining marriage altogether?
The heterosexual family is the foundational unit of society. Stable families produce productive citizens which benefits everyone. Of course the government should support and encourage this!
Of course the government should, but of course the government can't. If there is a benefit, it will be given to any who want it.
Now you're just talking about more money for lawyers (by having legal relationships rather than marital relationships). Who else would want to generate more legal documents and contracts? Not me!
The lawyers who are making money now on matrimonial law would be the same ones making money on contractual law. Breaking up any legal relationship is messy, and lawyers always seem to get their cut...
It (FMA) will pass with ease, and it destroys all your above arguments.
Do you think 70% of the population can be mustered to support the FMA? Because at the end of the day, that's what it will take. Absent the FMA, the government will destroy marriage through a slow erosion of the institution. But trying to keep the government promotion machine running hoping that the FMA will bail the whole mess out is a false dream. It will not happen. Keeping the government involved hoping for the FMA will guarantee the destruction of the very institution you seek to promote.
OK, maybe you'd favor a law that just de-legalized MY marriage. I have a vasectomy, and my wife has had a hysterectomy, we just got hitched six months ago, and maybe we shouldn't have done so, since we can't "be fruitful and multiply."
The laws of the various religions functioned to protect the societies that had them. The coupling of government with religious law worked fine for the first 4900 years of human history, but in the last 100 years, we've figured out how to get most people born in a civilized society to reach reproductive age. Therefore, we no longer need government sanction for purely religious rules that favor procreation.