And that's before we get to the point that corporations, as a practical matter, are formed under state laws, so why is the federal government giving them rights?
(and that's before the other issues with Citizen's United as a case, regardless of the decision as people usually remember it, but I'm starting to go off a bit..)
That's an interesting point. Marriages are formed under state law as well, and it doesn't seem controversial to me that the federal government grants that relationship special privileges.
I think the only reason this isn't controversial is because people don't think about it. The fact that people are conditioned to get married, not to mention the tax benefits, is pretty fucking weird if you stop and think about it. Supposedly our country was meant to separate church and state, but it's obvious it was such a new concept that many of the ideas were stolen from the mores of the conventional religions of the time.
I mean, why is marriage a legal thing at all? Why is the government involved? It made sense when there was a dowry involved, but today? Nobody cares until they realize what a fucking nightmare getting divorced is, and the number of conditions and loopholes is asinine. It's almost like the lawyers invented it, because divorce lawyers make an insane amount of money on the suffering of others (they are heavily incentivized to push for people to be combative, because they make more money that way - and it's easy to rile people up when custody of children is involved).
This is obviously a bit of a rant that went in a weird direction but whatever.
You might be interested in the concept of the relationship escalator, then.
https://solopoly.net/2012/11/29/riding-the-relationship-esca...
(Disclaimer: I'm not poly, but I really like how poly folk interrogate relationship norms. Don't be scared off by the poly blog!)
This doesn't make any sense. Every person in the group retains their free speech rights and can exercise them however they want, it's only the non-human "person" entity in the form of the corporation that would be limited.