Yesterday, I attended a debate (an actual CX-style debate) on gay marriage. Or 'marriage'--and I use the quotes as a linguistic point, not a political one. Anyhow, the affirmative side resolved that the state should get out of the marriage business all together and grant civil unions to any two consenting adults. Now, I've often advocated such a proposal, so the following argument is, as much as anything, playing the devil's advocate with myself.
Now, the proponents were making a rights-based argument from equality: it violates the 14th amendment if straight couples can form a union but gay couples cannot. There's an easy answer to this as the law currently stands: anyone is free to marry--that is, form a union with someone of the opposite sex, regardless of one's own sexual preference. However, substitute 'same race' for 'opposite sex,' and you have the argument for anti-miscegenation laws. So, if race was once thought to be a barrier to union but no longer is (after Loving v. Virginia), perhaps the same is true of gender.
With the stage set as such, I ask the following question: what about platonic unions? Now, I know I don't have a right to a tax break for my roommate, or a right to demand that my employer provide my best friend with health insurance. Thus, I contend that the right to form a union--with the benefit that right currently construed--does not extend to ANY two people. We could change how the right is construed and abolish marital benefits altogether (or, at least to the very narrow scope of Power of Attorney and the like). This move would be logically consistent but unfeasible as a matter of public policy.
So, there must be some other baseline for the benefits currently bestowed by marriage than 'any two people.' Two people who love each other? Any subjective line drawing and you defeat the purpose of getting the state out of the marriage business. It becomes a debate about the merits of a narrower or broader class of beneficiaries, a subjective debate the resolution was intended to avoid but I think we must have.
Now, one could argue that two platonic friends of the opposite sex could get a 'marriage' under current statutes. Indeed, they could, so how would it be any different if two platonic friends of the same sex could get a union? Because, to do so under the law as I know understand it, they would have be disingenuous because they are getting a 'marriage' not a 'union,' and, the former has within its definition a certain bond not implied by the latter.
And, as a practical matter, more straight platonic couples would get unions if they were extended to any two persons than they do now, even though they are free to do so. Why? Because there's social sanction on marrying someone who's, say, just a good friend, one which would disappear if the benefits of unions were extended to homosexuals--because, for better or worse, many people would view these relationships as devalued, and the institution of 'union' would lose a key component of its meaning for everyone.
I do not know whether this argument is innovative or rife with illogic (or both), but I would appreciate feedback. Do keep in mind the narrow scope of the post--arguing against the resolution that marriage should be replaced by civil unions between 'any two persons.'
2 Comments:
You may be setting up a straw man here, but allow me to go off on a slight tangent. i agree there are public policy reasons to exclude "any two persons". i prefer to extend benefits to something closer to Stanford's definition of a "domestic partnership". "At Stanford, a domestic partnership is defined as an established, long-term partnership between two people with an exclusive mutual commitment in which the partners share the necessities of life and ongoing responsibility for their common welfare." http://www.stanford.edu/dept/hds/has/applying/grad/gradapply/eligibility.html
i assume that their use of "exclusive mutual commitment" essentially serves the purpose of identifying the couple as an economic unit disjoint from other economic units. This entails much more of a commitment than "any two persons", and makes sense from an institutional standpoint. If the university (or the government) is going to throw its weight behind sanctioning such economic units, it is going to want to ensure that such unions are well-defined and not entered into lightly. As such, the "long-term" requirement makes sense as well for public policy reasons, but why must such a partnership be the exclusive domain of two people only?
Looking back on my previous comment, i realize that my theory of marriage as establishment of an economic unit necessarily has implications that go far beyond the economic partnerships that exist in marriage as we know it today. It seems to me that formation of an economic unit should be essentially tantamount to the merger of two corporations, with all the advantages and disadvantages that conveys..
Allow me to propose an ultra-libertarian theory here without committing myself to it ideologically. Perhaps we could envision assigning to each person an economic identity in the form of a corporation. A single adult is considered 100% shareholder of his or her respective corporation. Marriage could then be defined economically as a merger of the corporations of two individuals into a single unit, wherein each partner has a 50% share. More generally, a partnership of n people could be formed wherein each person held a (100/n)% share in the corporation. In some sense, family membership could be defined similarly, where a family could spin off corporations as children reach the age of adulthood. There would probably be interesting implications for wills and estates as well..
Perhaps this is unreasonable or unworkable, and perhaps what i discuss above would be better described as something other than marriage, but it seems the economic implications of marriage could use reform of some type. The problem of course is the disparity between risks and benefits of marriage. For a very simplistic example, what if my wife and i each take out a loan and place a $1M bet on opposite colors of a roulette wheel, and then the loser declares bankruptcy while the winner makes a $1M profit. Of course, as an economic unit we have profited by $1M at the cost of only a ruined credit history for one of us. The roulette winner is not held liable for the debt, but both of us get to enjoy the profits. Under a true economic unit paradigm, both parties would be responsible for each other's debts, and this scenario (neglecting the roulette's 0 and 00 for the moment) would have been a wash once the winner paid the loser's debt..
For a more realistic example, consider a car accident. i get into an accident where i am negligent and my wife is injured, she sues me and my insurance company pays out a huge damages award which i then get some of the benefit of. Of course a jurisdiction that has laws about imputed negligence and such could overcome this problem, but it seems an economic unit theory would deal with this quite efficiently..
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