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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

That is a whole lot of energy being used on an underlying issue of nation states conveying benefits to people that support each other and tying that to a religious concept of the same name called marriage.

Decoupling those concepts removes the whole debate.

The reasons for the state incentivizing men and women getting married are gone or at least no longer prerequisites. So since we like the financial benefits, even though the reasons are gone, just expand the state-sponsored concept to any combination of humans that want them. Any opposition is clearly religious people viewing their government as an extension of their religion, or just completely conflating the concepts that coincidentally have the same name, and they out themselves making it easy to ignore.

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> and tying that to a religious concept of the same name called marriage.

Marriage was originally a financial/economic arrangement; it was originally of both religious and civic character because while it was a legal/financial arrangement, the idea of the religious space being separate from the civic was literally thousands of years in the future.

As religious and civic spheres much later did split, both of them continued to concern themselves with marriage, for different reasons.

> Any opposition is clearly religious people viewing their government as an extension of their religion

People can legitimately have different views about whether and what the civil purpose of marriage is and consequently whether and with what parameters it should be offered, without either side viewing the government as an extension of their religion.

Now, certainly, there are positions in civil marriage that are frequently taken for that reason, but that's not the same thing as what you are suggesting.

While I agree with you in principle, especially as regards decoupling the legal benefits of marriage from the religious union, it doesn't remove the whole debate on the part of gay couples who feel that "civil unions only" still relegates them to second class status, and they would rather religious people get past their bigotry instead.

At least the state wouldn't be putting them in a different class than heterosexuals, then. Of course it wouldn't solve bigotry, but what legislation could?

Legislation can't solve bigotry, and it shouldn't be expected to. What it can do is delegitimize it and deny bigots the power of the state.

Then the state should call their civil union a marriage or make them have the exact same benefits of marriage, and not just similar

Assuming the state also refuses to confer any legal validity to any religious ceremony, and to legally define marriage as a heterosexual union, then fine. Otherwise it still winds up being "separate but equal" but for sexual orientation instead of race.

Benefits and legal status are important, but social and cultural equality is important as well.

Why punish people who prefer to remain single then? Why can't everyone have these extra financial benefits?

In general, the two biggest financial benefits have to do with reduced health (and other) insurance rates, and not paying taxes on all or some of gifts, inheritance, or other wealth transfers between spouses (similar to those between parents and children).

The largest financial penalty in many countries is that spouses will pay more income-related taxes in dual-income families vs. if they were single, due to how progressive taxation bands are set up.

The benefits of government recognition for most people who marry aren’t financial - they’re to do with parental, health, estate, citizenship/immigration-related, and other rights that largely can’t fully be reliably created by contracts.

In the US, marriage is tax neutral or decrease except for when two $200K+/yr earners are married.

A lot of them don't apply to single people, like the laws about inheritance or social security or medical decision making. The laws specifically refer to a spouse who just doesn't exist for single people (but which could apply equally well to a male or female spouse).

In some cases, a single person could specify somebody in particular, but it's more flexible. This is a common default case that applies widely, and those who choose not to get married can apply the same overrides that others can.

In the case of social security survivor benefits, there's a definite asymmetry where married people get a benefit that single people don't. It covers a common case for two people who have their finances so tightly linked that the salary really is joint between the two of them, such that the social security payment really is intended to cover both.

There should perhaps be a similar rule for people who have a similar arrangement without the benefit of legal marriage, but it wouldn't be easy to recreate the entire legal apparatus that joins the two, which is what makes that survivorship benefit reasonable. Effectively you'd need to create a state of civil union, and now you're just playing semantics with the difference between civil union and marriage.

It's strange that a comment that paraphrased the words of the subject of the OP article is being downvoted.

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