If a US citizen wants to live with and have children with a foreign national, I don’t think a private contract would cut it for purposes of sponsoring for citizenship.
More then that, if we are taking about real people, instead of hypothetical libertarian homo economicuses (economi?), i don’t think a private contract is going to do it for much anyone.
People? We ain’t people!!
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RN
Explain. What sort of contract will give a person a get out of jail card free? Or survivor disability benefits from SS?
Look, if you want to let two folks live together and raise a family without government involvement in their relationship…guess what, you can do that today. Just move in. No need to be married.if you think the whole thing would be better if a friend of yours sprinkled fairy dust around you two and said something in ancient Aramaic…go for it.
Point is: if you don’t want the State to have any say in marriage, then you can get that now. As you say, write up a few contracts, like a will, and then just live together. No need to affect anyone else’s marriage.
Wouldn’t that become a common law marriage after a certain number of years, though? I think it would.
I don’t know about same sex couples, since i wouldn’t think there is the same case law tradition on that.
I think this functions to protect both spouses, particularly the woman.
Depends on where you live. Marriage law is state based, and the only thing the Federal gov says is other states must recognize a marriage from another state. I am 95% certain Texas requires a declaration of marriage, even if you have cohabited and raised kids for 40 years.
Here we go
If we say we aren’t married, length of time we cohabitate is irrelevant.
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I’ll defer to nick on whether that satisfies his objective.
Some states should learn not to fuck around a second time, or they’ll really find out.
I thought it was Washington state where you could live in the same residence for 6+ months with someone who had a child but you’re not the other biological parent, and if you then left the residence the state could go after you for child support.
Could be confusing that with something else, but I swear I remember more than one case like this.
I would say instead that marriage is a thing people do that has been co-opted by religion. I mean, most birds and some mammals routinely “pair bond”. What is marriage but the social recognition of human pair-bonding?
And marriage does a bunch of things that can’t be done by a contract between two people. When my husband rents a car, the rental company lets me drive it, too, without my having to be there to sign the document with him. They do that because society recognizes marriage. I can’t, de novo, create a contract that other institutions will have heard of or recognize.
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No record of your marriage need exist anywhere for the rental car company to give you that deal. You are all free parties. The only reason the government needs to register marriages is for you to get tax benefits. That has more to do with your insurance and not your marriage anyway.
Like I said the government need not define or license marriage for them to serve their purpose. Also outside of government involvement anyone could have gottenarried to anyone long ago in private instead of needing the Supreme Court to rule on the matter.
Gay people would have been able to marry for all of US history if the government didn’t decide who could get married. People who want to define marriage more narrowly were able to use the governments involvement to suppress a type of marriage they did not believe in before the Supreme Court ruled. Because the government changed the law you all say the government is good when the government’s very involvement was the reason no gay folks could marry in the first place.
I would go farther, and claim that you cannot have human pair bonding without the social dimension, because that is part of humans as animals, and also as having unique faculties not possessed by other animals. “Human” pair bonding is the kind of pair bonding that belongs to humans in part because it is social.
I’ve read that ritual is a fundamental kind of religious experience, with the four most important rituals concerning birth, puberty, marriage, death. So in this sense marriage may be seen as one of the foundations of religion, or as being created at the same time as religion.
I was gonna ask, if a woman spends several of her child-bearing years living with a man, hoping he’ll become the man she wants him to be, and he doesn’t, so she leaves him, are there any US jurisdictions in which she’s entitled to his assets?
If women get to decide when sex occurs, then men should get to decide when marriage occurs.
My hypothetical assumes no children and no declaration or representation of marriage, btw.
The problem in my mind is that you are not talking about real people anymore. Real people need marriage, not some private contract. Or most of them.
Marriage has always been a fundamental part of people.
Gay marriage was illegal because most of society refused to see gay people’s full humanity. That was the problem, not government involvement.
One problem with shrinking the government is that inevitably the politicians shrink the best parts of the government and keep the abuse, corruption, and unnecessary rules.
Thus the South, for whatever mysterious reason, is not a paradise of legalized drugs, nude beaches, small public pensions, and stylists shampooing without a license.
Instead they wisely use their anti-government to randomly tell schools to not teach kids about gay people.
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No idea on your questions. Then again, I’d point out that there are a number of times where women don’t get to decide when sex occurs, and I wouldn’t offset that with “so women should get to decide when marriage occurs.”
Nothing prevents state legislatures from creating some form of “civil union” where two consenting adults voluntarily agree to grant various rights to the other as occurs in the traditional marriage. Well, except for the group of Bible-thumping, marriage is only between a man and a woman, everything else is a sin against God, the next thing you know we’ll have people wanting to marry dogs and trees and unicycles group of politicians that whistle right back the “two consenting adults” thing.
If you then want to have a “marriage” fine, go find a church of your favorite religion and get one.
I suspect you read a few things into my post that weren’t there. Screw those Republicans in the bolded. IMO, both sex and marriage should have mutual consent. Living together for _____ months does not constitute “consent”.
I actually only had one question (not “questions”).