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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

I'm in favor of gay marriage, pet marriage, sibling marriage, and all sorts of other kinds of marriage that people tend to feel the need to ban.

However, I think it's absurd that the state is involved in marriage. Google's move, while perhaps pragmatic in nature, reveals a very strong sentiment legitimizing the state role in marriage, which is the basis for all the backwardness.

Only when the state becomes involves in things can politicians attempt to control what others do via the power of the state. I'd rather see Google encourage people to just "marry" each other with private vows and no license or other nonsense.

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Private vows don't work so well when your bigoted inlaws decide you can't see your lover at the hospital. People have compiled lists of hundreds of privileges granted through marriage that are difficult-to-impossible to arrange any other enforceable way. We'd have to rewrite family law from scratch.

That said, I don't know that they are better at lobbying than anyone else their stockholders could give the money to, which would be the only reason they ought to involve the corporation.

What privileges are difficult-to-impossible to arrange without a legal concept of marriage? Just curious. I also believe that the root of the issue is coming from the government being involved in the marriage conversation at all and I'm curious why that would be hard to change.

Off the first hit for "marriage equality" (http://www.marriageequality.org/get-the-facts), here are some choice ones:

* Married couples are permitted to give an unlimited amount of gifts to each other without being taxed. * The law provides certain automatic rights to a person's spouse regardless of whether or not a will exists. * With marriage, a couple has the right to be treated as an economic unit and to file joint tax returns (and pay the marriage penalty), and obtain joint health, home and auto insurance policies.

OK. Thanks for the list.

I think there are two issues in this "same sex marriage" debate that are being confused by people on both sides. One is the special rights and privileges given to married couples, and the other is the actual word "marriage". What I was suggesting is that the government should drop the term "marriage" from their vocabulary and change it to something else, like "domestic partnership". I highly doubt that anyone employing rational thought would suggest we can do away with the concept of mutually exclusive partnership between two people in the legal realm. Part of what the people on the right are arguing for is to not have the actual term "marriage" redefined by the government. That word has a lot of tradition and meaning. If we turn the conversation towards removing that word from the government's laws and replacing it with something that has less specific meaning to people, then the conversation is purely about equal rights and not a fight over a word and the tradition behind it. I think that's more what people are getting at when they suggest that the government shouldn't be involved in marriage.

Oh, separate but equal?

No.

How is that separate but equal? Who is making anyone separate? I'm suggesting the government should treat everyone the same.

My understanding of "separate but equal" historically had to do with separating students based on race into separate schools. If the government were to say, "OK, call it a marriage, call it whatever you want, but 2 people can form what we call a 'domestic partnership' that creates certain legal rights by filling out this form." How is that separate but equal?

I think it sounded like you were saying that the new rule would be only for same-sex couples, and that opposite-sex couples would continue to call it "marriage".

Ahh, I should have made that more clear the first time.

Unfortunately most of the marriage protection amendments also ban establishing these "separate but equal" legal arrangements as well.

In the US, marriage makes it trivial to bring your spouse over if you are immigrating from another country. Same sex couples are split apart for very long periods of times. I have seen this happen numerous times with my LGBT friends in tech, and it frequently does bad things for their relationships (as long distance relationships often do.)

A challenge to section 3 of DOMA has made it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court may take it up and rule on it next term. Section 3 defines marriage for purposes of federal law.

Section 2 (specifying that the full faith and credit clause does not apply to same-sex marriage), which Law Prof Andrew Koppelman suggests is roughly as effective as a ban on hunting unicorns is not before the court and if Koppelman is right (and the section does nothing anyway), will never be before the court.

My prediction is that they will, and they will strike down this provision on the grounds that defining marriage has been a traditional role of state governments and that the federal government must defer to the states as to who is married and who can be married. They would then hold that there is no valid reason for the federal government to treat these differently. This decision is likely to be 7-1, 8-1, or 9-0 depending on whether Scalia dissents and whether Kagan recuses herself.

The result will be that it will fully revert to a state-by-state approach and that if you are in a state which recognizes same-sex marriage you can bring your same-sex spouse over, but if you are a resident of a state which does not, you may not.

I hope so.

Assuming I am right, I would expect a decision striking DOMA on 10th Amendment grounds to be far more welcome on the right than the left of legal academia.....

Ok, so suppose that you live in a state like Washington that:

1) Has extraordinarily strong freedom of religion protections (a city may not enact a blanket ban on churches hosting tent cities for example, according to our state supreme court) and

2) Very narrow anti-bigamy laws (IANAL, but I think the best reading of the statute is that it bans intentionally legally marrying more than one person at a time, or telling the other individual that you are going to be legally married when you are not. It could be read to ban purely religious marriages, but given #1 above, I don't think so. Note a few years ago a bigamy case was dismissed by the state Supreme Court because the jury had not been instructed that they had to find specific intent, and that the individual marrying someone else while his divorce was pending and the process was being drawn out might not have met that standard.)

Now suppose you are in a polygamous household which avoids the very narrow bigamy laws and suppose your religion endorses polygamy (it doesn't really matter whether this is polygyny, polyandry, or some combination).

Would you argue that there is an equal protection violation by only allowing one spouse of each partner access to these rights?

The purpose of marriage has always been a state issue. The state didn't become involved; it invented marriage.

This is a very important concept which many miss, so it's a shame it's being downvoted.

Marriage is not a contract between two people, as many people think. Marriage is a contract between a two people, and society. The way you can tell is exactly because two people can live together all their lives, by their choice, without being married, but they don't get any of the societal benefits of marriage. All the marriage rights, fore example, but also social acceptance of their having children.

In fact, that's mostly the point of marriage. The contract benefits society by making more stable family units that will raise children, and be permitted to do so. The contract benefits the couple by giving them many legal rights and recognitions, including monetary advantages, that they couldn't get otherwise.

In fact, it's only in the last few years (relatively speaking) that marriage was even necessarily between two people who choose to be married to each other out of love, and it's still not that way in all cultures.

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