In support of same-sex marriage

by philg

Due to the recent Supreme Court argument friends have been asking me for an opinion regarding same-sex marriage. So here it is…

The word “marriage” has some different meanings. If the idea is “lifelong commitment” or at least “commitment to stay together until children are reared through age 18,” this is purely a personal/religious matter. The government cannot prevent two people from staying together if they have committed to (a) each other, and (b) the institution of two-parent child-rearing. At the same time in our age of no-fault divorce the government has no role in keeping two people together. In fact, as outlined in Real World Divorce, the government provides substantial cash incentives for one partner to initiate a divorce, or just get pregnant after a one-night encounter, based on the simple principle that one can be wealthier by tapping into the incomes of multiple co-parents rather than just one.

Having a federal court decide an issue of marriage is a little problematic because the definition of civil marriage is different in every state. Given that nearly all of the states have settled into a “no-fault” system, however, in reality the Supreme Court is rendering a decision regarding which Americans can avail themselves of the financial opportunities presented by civil marriage.

The supposed financial advantages of getting and staying married presented by same-sex marriage proponents are, at best, slight. For most Americans the potential estate tax savings are irrelevant (people with less than $5 million in assets don’t pay estate tax; people with substantially more than $5 million in assets typically come up with a workaround). For American couples with a modern lifestyle, in which both partners have an income, the tax “savings” from a marriage are actually in a negative direction, particularly with the new Obamacare taxes (i.e., there is a marriage tax penalty). There are no significant financial advantages for two working Americans who stay together. Compared to the informal partnership alternative, civil marriage offers one partner enormous financial advantages only if one partner decides to cash the partnership in.

The principal financial advantage of civil marriage is that, properly structured and planned, an American adult can become a dependent on another American adult without that person’s continuing consent. Here’s an except from the Introduction:

“When young people ask me about the law as a career,” said one litigator, “I tell them that in this country whom they choose to have sex with and where they have sex will have a bigger effect on their income than whether they attend college and what they choose as a career.”

Consider Jennifer, an Indiana or Wisconsin resident with $2 million in premarital savings. “Pat” can marry Jennifer on a Sunday morning, sue her for divorce on a Monday morning, and be presumptively entitled to $1 million. “Pat” can repeat this every time that cash runs short and the profits are limited only by the wealth of the targets of these short-term marriages.

Consider Fiona, a Florida resident with a $400,000 per year income. “Chris” can marry Fiona for a short time, get a psychologist to certify that “Chris” is disabled, and then collect “permanent alimony,” remaining Fiona’s dependent for the rest of their respective lives. “Chris” can subsequently get together with a love interest and possibly benefit from that person’s income as well (and/or use Fiona’s wages to support the new lover).

Short-term marriages to Jennifer and Fiona are financial opportunities much better than what is available in the U.S. labor market. How can it be fair that whether or Pat and Chris have access to these financial opportunities depends on their sex? What would it mean for our society to present “equal opportunity” if not equal financial opportunity?

A separate reason for my support of same-sex civil marriage is that medical technology has advanced to the point that it is practical for a mixed-sex married couple to become, post-marriage, a same-sex married couple. If state law does not provide that such a couple is automatically divorced once a gender reassignment surgery is complete then how is it reasonable to deny granted civil marriage status to people who start out in the same sex? An activity shouldn’t be allowed or disallowed depending on when a medical procedure is accomplished.

What about religious objections? Religious groups that object to same-sex partnerships can simply recognize that civil marriage as offered by U.S. states is (1) not the same thing as religious or traditional marriage, and (2) not intended to be permanent or binding beyond the point where one participant can advantage him or herself by unilaterally dissolving the legal union. Thus religious groups opposed to same-sex marriage and/or opposed to mercenary marriages would withdraw from their role in creating legally recognized marriages and tell adherents “If you want to make a lifelong commitment in our religion, you can do that in our church; if you want to participate in the financial opportunities presented by civil marriage, you can go to City Hall and go through a separate and parallel procedure.” If the temporary-by-current-design civil/legal situation of marriage is not something that religious groups endorse then it shouldn’t be upsetting to them who is entering into or departing from this situation.

“Marriage and divorce is primarily a way to get paid without working,” is how one divorce litigator put it. How can a state say that some Americans are more entitled to get paid than others?

15 thoughts on “In support of same-sex marriage”

  1. Summary: Legal changes have destroyed traditional marriage anyway, so it matters little if marriage is expanded for same-sex couples.

  2. Historically, marriage developed as a way to control female sexuality and to (attempt to) ensure that fathers were spending their resources only on their own offspring and not someone else’s. Males pretty much always were allowed to screw around, but a respectable female could only enjoy sex inside the confines of marriage. Likewise, only children produced from a marriage were entitled to membership in respectable society and to inherit the property of their father.

    That train seems to have left the station some time ago and we are now in “anything goes” territory. The invention of birth control and the welfare state have made all the old rules obsolete and we have to make up new rules as we go along. Men marrying men? Sure, why not. But as long as we can make up our own rules and are no longer worried about female sexuality or paternity, no longer bound by those which applied in every human society for the last 10,000 years, why limit it to two or just humans? Could not marriage be between two men and one (or two or six) women or between three men? Between a man and his dog? Maybe old fashioned notions such as age of consent should also be discarded – we know that in fact teens are sexually active, so why the hypocrisy?

    I have a feeling that all of this is going to end in tears and our civilization is going to be replaced by something with much more conservative rules, the way that the Romans were replaced by the Christians.

  3. Should I be able to marry my children, so they can inherit my billions tax free?
    If not, why not?

  6. The topic in general angers me because we’re talking about maybe a large stadium full of people (maybe two large stadiums) who are affected, yet there’s this huge distracting hubbub. There really aren’t that many gays and only a fraction of them will realistically “marry.” It just doesn’t much matter no matter what your take.

    As a nation we clearly can’t develop a national dialog that’s prioritized on a basis with reality. Gay marriage belongs way down on the list, pro or con.

  7. @Izzie is spot on, and I agree with @sammysamsam.

    The whole idea of marriage became what we know of it today is because of religion, period. And religion was formed by humanity to save itself from self destruction, period.

    If religion didn’t exists, we could still be treating women (and men) as property to do with as the owner sees to it.

  8. There is really no reason for the state to be involved in marriage. As a result of state involvement in marriage, I will never get remarried. Because of state involvement, my first and only marriage was a financial disaster. If marriage was a compact between two people, or even between two people and a religious institution, I would probably try it again.

    Laws and regulations may incentivize marriage, but they also disincentivized marriage,.

  9. The problem with Izzies line of thinking is that it assumes that since some rules are no longer helpful, then all rules are no longer helpful and anything goes. He then gives some examples, some of which are probably bad ideas. Well, if they are bad ideas, lets not do them. And if on closer examination they are not bad ideas, then why not.

    This whole gay marriage thing can be seen as a case of closer examination. Gays are horrible people and lets do everything possible against them. No wait, on closer examination I see that gays are my co worker, my friend, my brother, my son, maybe even me. All of whom I know to be great people, and what they do doesn’t really affect me one way or another. So maybe instead of making their lives harder, I should try to make their lives easier.

  10. I completely agree with Sammy that this Gay topic is occupying a disproportionate amount of the national dialog and looks to become a central issue of the 2016 election.

    This is crazy.

    I would rather see more discussions of the level of national R&D funding, reviving core manufacturing, rebuild infrastructure, or new ways to reduce education cost in the age of connectivity…

    Ever since the cancellation of the SSC, the US has completely gone off the deep end

  11. Even beyond this is the amount of coverage given to transexuals. This is an extremely rare disorder (or whatever you are allowed to call it now – glorious way of being, or whatever), afflicting perhaps 1 out of thousands, but suddenly they are one of the most important issues facing our society.

  12. Izzie, Marvin: I agree with you that gay/transgender is a small percentage of the population. And it does seem that the NYT and other news outlets love to write about this. (What better way to feel better about yourself than to posit the existence of intolerant people and then contrast one’s own tolerance?) But small percentage alone doesn’t make the issue irrelevant. What if there were organized anti-gay or anti-transgender hate groups marching through towns, vandalizing or boycotting gay-owned shops, etc.? I think that may be what is going on here. The existence of widespread full-time haters is posited. Then they must be fought aggressively by heroes such as the NYT Editorial Board or the Apple senior executives. So really the argument is whether or not there are a lot of Americans who occupy themselves with hating gay/transgender neighbors.

  13. >What if there were organized anti-gay or anti-transgender hate groups marching through towns, vandalizing or boycotting gay-owned shops, etc.?

    Then you would be living in some alternative universe, because nothing like that is going on. In fact, quite the opposite is going on – a not very sophisticated local pizza shop owner got baited by a reporter into saying that she would not cater a hypothetical gay wedding (since when do gays have their weddings catered by pizza shops?) and she became a national hate object and the hatred was driven by people much more powerful than she ever was or will be.

    I think that “look how tolerant I am” movement has shifted its attention to gays because they are much easier to love than say Baltimore rioters.

  14. Are the gays as whorish as American women have turned out to be in family court?
    No matter, let their snouts be allowed in the trough as well.

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