Supreme Court rules in favor of gay marriage

You can still give people tax benefits for joint filing and for having children. There really is little logical explanation for state involvement in the marriage business beyond ensuring that brothers and sisters don't marry each other.

 

Make it a business arrangement or contractual setup if people want to go into a legal partnership.
Oh, and get rid of the mortgage deduction, too.

 

Hey, leave West Virginia out of this!

 

Joos! Whoo boy... Nazi comparisons. Getting real. As in, real goofed up and silly.

 

There are plenty of logical explanations of why the state should be involved with marriage, and this goes beyond explanations rooted in religious doctrine.

 

Like, for example, the fact that marriage as an institution predates the state? Indeed, the fact that people created the state to protect and preserve, among other things, things like their marriages?

 

Marriage as an institution is a religious construct to which the state has given its imprimatur. Yes, it predates the state because most religious institutions predate our modern states. But its fundamental nature as a contract entered into in front of God, by proxy of the priest and congregation, has not changed. Oddly enough, I can find no mention of marriage in either the U.S. Constitution or any iteration of my own state's constitution until 2014. Actually that's not odd because marriage isn't fundamental to running a democratic republic.

During times when only white men could own property, it served the state's purpose to manage the distribution of property upon death to other white men. But we live in a modern society where men and women, regardless of color, have equal rights. The benefits it confers today - such as tax breaks, insurance coverage, social security and pension rights, and estate distribution - could all be equally achieved through civil unions or domestic partnership contracts if the government could fully ween itself off the church's teat.

 

Pop some popcorn! It's time for a "Who's More Christian" steel-cage death match!

#GodHatesAdultery: Westboro Baptist church turns on Kim Davis for causing ‘F*g marriage’

 

As you know from three years of formal legal training, the law encompasses more than what is written on some piece of paper. As you also know, the concept of marriage, or at the very least, the concept of some sort of obligation to one's sexual partner, predates religious institutions.