lurking 15: the argument against marriage
I’m reliably informed that from the age of 4, I wanted to get married to a succession of cute boys and have around 99 children. I considered each one in turn to be my one and only, with whom I would breed till my heart’s content, until the next one came along. Odd that as an adult both marriage and breeding became something I thought better of, and indeed had no interest in. I don’t really understand why people want to get married – if you’re in a relationship it seems enough that you both want to be together. But marriage seems to be a big deal in most cultures and perhaps there’s something to be said for the excuse for a celebration.
But my rambling opinion on marriage either as a child or an adult is of no interest next to the gem I came across today. This could possibly be my favourite comment of the month. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you higharka‘s tax-based argument against marriage. Enjoy!?
Now, you probably don’t care to force churches to have their clergy perform marriages for anything they don’t want to–that’s just their thing, right? But when it comes to the state sanctioning marriages, the situation changes a lot. It costs billions of frickin’ dollars every year to record, monitor, tax-incentivize, dissolve, and enforce the monstrous system of state-licensed marriage. As soon as gay people start getting married everywhere, too, even more food leaves my children’s mouths and goes away to family court judges. If I don’t want to pay for their family court judges to supervise marriage and divorce proceedings, and for armies of tens of thousands of clerks to file and process paperwork, then police come to my home and shoot me dead.
So “state marriage” is a serious deal. Of course it should be done away with, all of it. it is absurd that we take so much money from people at gunpoint, then waste so much of it on validating someone else’s emotional commitment. Government agents have no more place “authorizing” preachers to marry a couple than they do putting cameras in the couple’s bedroom to see how often the marriage is consummated, and in what ways.
And of course it’s wrong for the religious to want to use government policemen to force the collection of taxes for heterosexual marriage. That stuff should be left to churches. Giving the government a hand in Christian marriage has not only been tremendously expensive for Christians, it has perverted and destroyed their idea of the thing anyway.
Why don’t we all just agree to leave marriage where it belongs–with people who want to get married? I shouldn’t have to pay $37.15 in state taxes every month so that Britney Spears can get married to everyone in her Rolodex for five minutes.
Great one
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Thanks!
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The disconnect and paradox to be found in those who poo poo the whole idea of marriage as not having any significance, and yet shriek hysterically about gays being deprived of this oh so important Divine right, is kind of astounding.
So which is it? Is marriage the holy grail of human rights and human dignity or is it nothing more than an insignificant excuse for a celebration?
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I’m not personally interested in marriage, but I acknowledged that for whatever reasons it is important for most people in most cultures. I’m not trying to remove that right from anyone.
The disconnect and paradox to be found in those who insist couples must marry before embarking on a serious relationship, and then shriek hysterically that it can only be the consenting adults they think ‘deserve’ to undergo the ritual, is kind of astounding.
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I think it is Christians who make a poo poo of all the issues surrounding marriage.
The rest of us just get on with it.
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I think when the state sanctions marriage it no longer has divine significance. For many(especially in the US, I’m not sure about elsewhere) being married is about rights. A spouse has the right to property, a spouse has the right to visit their sick husband/wife in the hospital, a spouse has the right to make decisions regarding burial, a spouse has the right to group health insurance, etc. The list goes on and on.
When marriage is state sanctioned religion doesn’t come into it. There are atheists who marry, agnostics who marry, Muslims who marry, Christians who marry, and for that matter Satanists who marry. It’s funny to me that Christians don’t care about any of that, only what plumbing the couple has. Please do make sure one is an innie and one is an outie. The rest doesn’t matter.
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Well clearly it’s such a drain on the economy that we should be abandoning it as a practice altogether!
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Me,personally, I think that the government should get out of the marriage business altogether. Marriage shouldn’t be government sanctioned. It should be a private matter – and if a couple wants to dedicate their lives to each other publicly then the service of their choosing and then call it whatever they like.
Where the government is concerned there should only be civil unions. If there were no legal ramifications involved in unions I would even say the government should have no stake in it at all.
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Oh no, you’re taking it so seriously, and I just wanted to laugh about Britney Spears stealing tax dollars! I’ve never really thought about it beyond I don’t get why people want to do it. There are so many historical, legal and child protection issues. I think in the days before birth control especially it was important for women. I don’t like the way relationships in generally are overly romanticised these days, and the focus on being ‘successful’ somehow if you’re married – like it’s the goal of adulthood. Although it so much more complicated than that because most of us do yearn for a partner … anyway, Britney’s stealing your tax dollars!
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Oops! She did it again! Bad, bad, Britney.
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😀
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Ruth mentions plumbing and you follow up with drain ( on the economy). Tell me that was done on purpose!
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Boom boom.
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His argument against marriage is against any public services whatsoever. I wonder what he thinks about having an army.
Hey, Violet! Leave the Christians alone: the anarcho-capitalists are far nuttier, and funnier.
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Ah, but I think you’re missing a trick. Is this not a Christian anarcho-capitalist? To be honest it’s difficult to tell. They’re an intriguing lot. I’d love them all to have an exchange trip with some Scandinavians to see what kind of society a tax heavy, socialist country can achieve. It’s sad because they’re terrified of living because they have to scrape to get enough, healthcare is a trauma, and all their neighbours have guns – yet they’re pre-programmed to believe that anything other than this would be terrifying loss of some blurry rights that made sense 300 years ago. I’m fascinated!
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I’m totally with you on thinking marriage is a rather ridiculous idea in this day and age, but if marriage is gone, you still have common-law partnerships to deal with to an extent that will cover most of what were previously marriages – only except for the short term ones that don’t reach common-law guidelines.
Would that even make much of a difference?
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It’s difficult to know where relationship rituals will go. People are so sold on the romance of marriage that it will sell for a long time, even among those who don’t do it for religious reasons. But thinking about it a bit more I suppose they do give a helpful structure, in terms of law, to relationships that can get messy and complicated as they change. The least of my problems with marriage is that they are a tax burden for the population, I think the regulation aspect is actually the most helpful. I was amused to see it could be yet another moan for the American far right …
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From my understanding, marriage (and all the fluff that goes with it) really doesn’t have much to do with legal aspects of the underlying personal partnerships.
Although, not having people blow their life savings on a mostly pretentious ceremony and jewelery would certainly reduce some financial strains that lead to the crumbling of some such partnerships.
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Oh I don’t know. Although it would be my idea of hell to get trussed up in a fancy dress, spending a fortune on a party that I probably wouldn’t enjoy, to publicly declare things about a relationship that I feel would make no sense given the nature of relationships, I can understand why it would be a different experience for other people. They just want their own special big day to celebrate with all their nearest and dearest and they genuinely want to declare and celebrate their relationships. And they feel this is worth investing a significant chunk of cash in. Each to their own.
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I sympathize with these arguments. I lean libertarian on marriage: why should the State care? On the other hand from studying history I understand why the State would be interested in incentivizing marriage, because this maintains the population and the stability of the State. Have you read about the fall of the Roman Empire? Men did not want to marry and certainly did not want to raise children probably because both are difficult. If men were married, they could order their wives to get an abortion which was horribly dangerous in those days. They also practiced infanticide and this was encouraged by paganism and Greek philosophy and was lawful. Males with defects and any female could be left out for exposure.
That was a bit of an aside to the real point that the institution of marriage is actually beneficial to the State. That’s why Rome made it law that women had to be married at a certain age and had to have at least 3 children. Women were a commodity because of female-skewed infanticide and death from abortion practices. Even this was not enough to stave off the social trends and this contributed to the fall of Rome.
This is probably a major sociological reason for why Christianity overtook Rome: because they placed high value on marriage and the dignity of all human life including infants of course.
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…because they placed high value on marriage and the dignity of all human life including infants of course.
So much so that in their efforts to ensure everyone got to heaven the church often gave a great many people hell first. Oh, all the name of their loving god, of course. Barf.
When you mention the fall of the Roman Empire which historian are you referring to; Gibbon?
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The historian is Arthur Boak and the work is Manpower Shortage and the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West. This is referenced in Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity which seeks to explain what happened using modern sociology.
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I think you make a good point about the stabilising influence of formalising relationships. Certainly before the advent of birth control, the expectation of lifetime marriage must have made the lives of women and children easier in many respects. It doesn’t seem very relevant to our changed society today though, and I think our understanding of relationships in the light of the choices available to us has obviously changed immensely. However, I still don’t get this problem that so many Americas have with ‘the state’ meddling in their lives, and their overwhelming concern with taxation. Personally, I live in a co-operative society, and I’m happy there’s a structure (albeit in constant need of refinement and improvement) underpinning, supporting and providing structure. We obviously need to change the structure frequently but that doesn’t mean we all have to live in our bubbles hoarding guns and twitching in a paranoid fashion.
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Well even if it’s irrelevant the bigger problem is that the State’s incentivization is probably powerless given our wealth in the West, unless we experience population decline like Japan has but on a larger scale. It could happen, but I’m not wagering any bets on it ATM.
In other news, ‘Murica!!!!!!!!!! 🙂
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A few nights ago, I was listening on the local PBS radio network, to symphonic music (my preference), when a particularly tedious piece came on) don’t recall the composer or the composition). The piece seemed to wind down to an inevitable conclusion, when suddenly, it caught a second wind, and went on for another minute or so, then again, appeared to wind down – then revived once more and continued again – the piece pulled it’s Lazurus act two or three more times before mercifully terminating.
The announcer, apparently suffering as much on his side of the microphone, on this normally quite refined and high-brow station, as I was on mine, said something so original, so out of character and totally unexpected, that it cracked me up – with exasperation evident in his voice, he said, “That piece was longer than a Britney Spears marriage!”
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Does that make sense? Would it not be “that piece was shorter than a Britney Spear’s marriage” for a short piece??
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The piece went on interminably, it refused to end – by what definition of the word, would that be considered short?
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No, I mean if you were going to use a Britney Spear’s marriage reference point, it would be for something short.
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“No, I mean if you were going to use a Britney Spear’s marriage reference point, it would be for something short.</em" – unless you were aiming for irony, a marriage should last at least a bit longer than a composition's finale.
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Apart from inheritance issues, why should the state care about who marries who and where?
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I need to add, especially when they are consenting adults
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