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Comment by notadoc | Hacker News Reader

Why not for everyone? What's yours is yours, what's shared is shared. Seems simple enough?

The legal entanglement is perhaps the strangest part of marriage, and divorce.

The issue is that marriage often produces children. In many cases, one partner will take a more active role with the children while the other takes a more active role in their career. If they stay married it works out. However, if they split, the partner who took a more active role with the children will be shortchanged. The law tries to address this issue.

plenty of people have children without being married and plenty of married couples don't have children. assuming both parties actually wanted to have a child at the time, the child should be entitled to support from both parents and the primary caregiver should probably get something from the other parent. whether the parents are married seems like it should be pretty much orthogonal.

Unfortunately there are a lot of men who will get a woman pregnant, have her take care of the kids, not marry her. He will pay for everything then later after the kids are out leave her but she gets nothing because they are not married and everything is in his name. Now she has to start from scratch and is middle aged so she doesn't have a lot of time to build a career, pay into social security, has no savings, etc. Why do men do this? Women fall in love with bad men unfortunately. Once she is already pregnant then he has all of the leverage.

Yes this, this is why community property, common law marriages, and alimony exists. To help correct the imbalance of power, and the justice of the situation.

The bottom line is raising kids as a stay at home parent is a huge burden. It's entirely unpaid (in money and career). The beneficiaries are both parents. To allow a man (or rich woman, the laws in California are fairly gender neutral here) to accrue the benefits, and disallow the woman any benefits from her sacrifice, well most people consider that to be unfair. And so do the courts.

> Once she is already pregnant then he has all of the leverage.

Surely you mean no leverage? She can abort or put up for adoption, he can do neither, nor "financially" abort (nor prevent abortion if she wants it).

I think you misunderstand my point. if all this stuff is important for a woman who's going to be the primary caregiver to the children, it should be codified regardless of whether the parents are actually married.

That's how child support works: completely independently of marital status.

This is fairly remedial cultural anthropology of the society we work in, but it should be entirely obvious as to why being married is helpful if you have children, including the same last name (or at least an hyphenated add-on) A lot of people in society use these short cuts to make fast decisions in critical moments. For example, your child and partner was in a car crash, you arrive at the ER, and you want to see them. Can you? The real answer is "it depends on if the nurse/doctor/receptionist lets you", not what the law says. All you have on you is your ID, last name "Crew" and your partner has last name "Smith". Ah, who are you says the receptionist, I'm going to have to call security if you don't leave.

Or consider immigration, border guards, or any other number of more fluid situations. People, generally speaking, respect a married relationship and hold it up at a more privileged level. This is what the marriage equality fight was about, since people usually don't respond well to the clarion call of "but we have a legally binding registered civil relationship in the state of California!". That doesn't roll off the tongue as your partner is literally dying in the ER and you can't see them.

Child support is a separate issue; if one parent ends up with a larger share of the custody, they will usually end up with some form of child support payments even if there is no income disparity.

Here we're talking about alimony and how community property works.

A lot of choices made during marriage are dependent on both people. One spouse will take a job that involves travel means the other cannot if they have a child. Or one spouse could be stay-at-home, while the other works (once again, generally for children). When choices are made for the benefit of the couple, then both members should face the results of those choices.

I don't understand why marriage is a legal thing. Why is the government involved?

Taxes. Church and state get involved with the individual for extraction of assets, control resource distribution, control population growth by incentivizing higher birth rate(= work force = more taxes), ‘tithing’ of various forms and basically surveillance. From birth to death, they keep tabs.

Because governments regulate the pivotal aspects of society.

Marriage has been a long-standing form of union between people, which is supposed to be the foundation of procreation, which in turn is the foundation of a lasting society.

Whether the regulations are outdated, it's definitely a very valid point of discussion, but the fact that there is regulation is significant.

If you want to take all the romance out of it, you can look at marriage as a well-understood standard contract for forming a legal partnership with oodles of case law and precedent.

It's like how nearly everything is a Delaware corporation, or how nearly every lease you sign is one of three or four templates downloaded off the internet with the names and addresses filled in.

Well first things first kids need legal protection and a system needs something in place to account for them.

Isn't it possible to have kids outside of wedlock?

How does marriage protect the children?

Not marriage per se but mutual union of people ordained by the court system protects children. Truly single parents have the hardest time. Help a woman have a pregnancy with no father on the birth cerficate you'll understand what I mean.

Because property rights are involved.

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