This kind of nanny state ideology, paternalism, and social engineering is what I find the most objectionable about the Left.  Who are you to tell billions of people that they shouldn't accept the standard definition of marriage?  I'm perfectly satisfied with the terms of my marriage, and don't need anyone coming in and telling me that we need to negotiate some unique arrangement.

You and your significant other(s) are free to enter into any prenuptial agreements, mutual power of attorney arrangements, wills, living wills, common bank accounts, or any other contracts allowed by law.  You are also free not to do so.   I wish you well in whatever you choose.  But leave my marriage alone.

Frank, you are completely unclear.  I honestly have no idea what you are advocating.  You are much better at explaining what you don't believe than what you do believe.  Sometimes you appear to advocate a complex array of contracts, enforced by the government, then you indicate you think you are advocating reducing government involvement.  Other times you appear to be advocating returning to the understanding of marriage from primitive, pre-literate villages.  Of course those villages didn't have complex contract law.

I wish you'd just explain what you are advocating.  How would that differ from what we already have?

Is this just about licenses?  Is that what all the fuss is about?  The one page piece of paper some states have you sign before the wedding? 

When you say "get the government out of marriage" do you just mean "go back to common law marriages"?  This would mean keeping all the law on how to divide assets and income in a divorce, all the law on child custody, all the law on next-of-kin, all the different tax treatments for married couples.  The only difference is how one would enter the marriage, or rather how the state would come to recognize it.

But to answer your question: The positive feature of licensing is that all the parties involved are clearly aware of who is married.  States with common law marriage occasionally have the problem where one member of a couple claims to be married and the other denies it.  If one signs a marriage license, one knows one is getting married.

I guess my problem is I just have no clue what people mean by "getting government out of marriage."  When asked, advocates such as Frank above, say they want people to be "forced" to enter into government enforceable contracts.  In what sense is that getting the government out?  Governments enforce marriages now, governments would enforce the contracts.  There is no difference in terms of government involvement. 

Under the status quo a couple to be married usually signs a single piece of paper called a marriage license (not needed in states with common law marriage).  If we "get government out of marriage" the couple will sign a myriad of forms (such a contract seems at least as complex as buying a house.  I think I signed my name 50 times to buy my house).

Moreover, don't we already have contract law? If a couple wants to forgo marriage and just get a set agreements such as of power-of-attorneys, wills, living wills, trusts, and partnerships, what's to stop them?  What change is actually being proposed?  Just eliminating one of the options couples have?   How does that increase anyone's liberty of make anyone better off?

Wait.  I'm confused.  I thought you were advocating replacing civil marriage with private and purely contractual arrangements to be negotiated solely by the parties to the relationship.  Did this system exist in tiny villages in olden times?  If so, please enlighten me.  I've never heard this before.  Which tiny village?  When did this take place?  A quick google search will reveal plenty of marriage agreements, but these were public agreements, called marriages, and enforced by government and so don't count as "getting government out of marriage."  Also I don't think the parties to the agreement were free to define the arrangement just anyway they liked.  I think they were constrained by the laws and the culture of the time.

I concede I am ignorant of this, but I assure you I am not willfully so.

... continued from comment #38.

Herbert, in comment #22, agrees with Frank.  "[P]eople would be in fact forced to have prenupts tied to their marriage agreement. This would clarify expectations up front, a good thing." 

Civil marriage has centuries of case law to provide precedents.  That body of law clarifies the expectations in civil marriage.  How would eliminating it improve clarity?

I've re-read the comment thread twice and that's the only positive argument that's been presented for abolishing civil marriage. 

Now in comment #28 Frank challenges defenders of civil marriage to show what harm would come from abolishing it.  Well, how would I know?  Or anyone?  It's never been tried.  The point of the original post, as I read it, was a request to advocates for the abolition of civil marriage to explain how that would work and why it would be better.  The only responses have been, paraphrasing, "Government is bad." and "People should be forced to re-invent the wheel" (I joke, of course, civil marriage pre-dates the wheel, so it's an imperfect analogy)

This is a great thread Daniel, thanks for posting it.

My observation thus far is that a pattern has developed in which Daniel or another defender of civil marriage asserts some good that the institution is doing, and then the libertarians deny that the good is really coming from state involvement.  What I haven't read is any kind of positive case for abolishing civil marriage. 

In comment 11 Frank argues "In all other areas, conservatives argue that government makes problems worse when it gets involved.  Government efforts to reduce poverty tend to exacerbate the problem."  So the logic here is that because welfare exacerbates poverty, therefore government is bad, therefore the institution of civil marriage should be abandoned. That's, um, an astonishingly weak argument.  Is that the best case there is for turning our backs on 10,000 years of tradition?

Or perhapse it's this from comment #15 "Without the default terms of marriage, people would be forced to come up with their own marriage agreements."  So the libertarian case for abolishing civil marriage is that people need to be "forced" to redefine an ancient institution?

Continued...

Prager weighs in: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/343308/if-your-child-gay-dennis-prager

These are great points.  I voted for option 3 on DocJay's thread, but let me clarify that my support of civil unions has two pre-conditions:

1. Private parties must be allowed to distinguish between marriages and civil unions without legal penalty.
2. Civil unions must be open to any two unmarried people: elderly siblings (same sex or opposite sex) whose spouses have passed, heterosexual, non-romantic roommates, romantic heterosexual couples who don't want the cultural incidents of marriage, an elderly father and his care-giving daughter to whom he wishes to grant various legal authorizations., etc.

You misunderstand me.  The issue on which you don't appear to be willing to take a stand is anti-religious (or even just anti-traditionalist) prejudice.  The position of a child who would reject his parents' love because of their position on SSM is a hateful one.  To say that everyone who opposes SSM is a bigot is to say that the Catholic Church and all the more religiously conservative Protestant churches are hate groups.  

This position is both false and a threat to tolerance and liberty.  I've had discussions on Facebook with someone who took the view that the Catholic Church's freedom to exercise free speech from the pulpit is unimportant because of the churches views on SSM.  Public officials have attempted to deny Chick-fil-A their right to do business due to the religious views of the CEO.

Anti-religious prejudice is worth fighting.

Taliesin, If I understand your position correctly, you are saying that you don't care what the underlying truth of the matter is, the prejudice against defenders of traditional marriage is too strong to be worth fighting.  You may be right.  I don't know.  I'm not nearly clever enough to know how the politics will play out in the end.  I suspect you aren't clever enough either, but again, I could be wrong.

My more simple approach is just to defend positions I believe to be true.  Not all positions are equally important, of course, but when an entire group of people is falsely vilified and subjected to prejudicial attacks, my intuition is that that argument is likely to be worth having.

The churches that about a third to a half of the American people attend do not support SSM.  To allow all those people to be cast beyond the pale will have consequences.  If SoCons come to believe that other elements of the GOP coalition don't merely disagree with them on marriage, but actually despise them, the result could be a schism.

But ultimately I just think the innocent should be defended from calumny.

My apologies for quoting you four times, but you've packed so much error into so few words.

The belief that all opposition to SSM stems from hatred is, of course, prejudice.  There's no denying that many people do hate homosexuals, but automatically ascribing this sin to anyone who holds any given position is invidious discrimination.  Fighting prejudice is a constant battle  New people are constantly being born and growing up, and forming opinions.  New minds are always in play.  The struggle is never fait accompli.

The fact that some people are unconvincable should not be taken as evidence that noone is.  After all, some people are "invincibly ignorant" and others are, frankly, anti-religious bigots (noone on Ricochet, of course).  We must continue to proclaim truth.

You seem to think that only one side of this debate relies on abstract principles.  This is not the case.  The notion that a person's sex is irrelevant to all a person's relationships (except insofar as purely idiosyncratic tastes are involved) and that any view to the contrary is so irrational as to constitute prima facie vidence of hatred is an abstract and highly ideological principle.

I recommend The Tyranny of Cliches by Jonah Goldberg for an excellent discussion of how treating only one side of a debate as being ideological allows one to "steal bases" in an argument.

Emphasis mine.

I take it from your use of the terms "us" and "we" that you oppose SSM.  I am curious to know on what basis you oppose it.

You mentioned this burden before in an earlier post, and I meant to ask about it.  Where does this burden come from?  I'm certainly not aware of it. 

It seems to me that every person has an obligation to seek the truth to the extent practicable on every given topic.  If a person believes that all opposition to SSM comes from hatred, then that person has the burden of justifying that belief.  This is not an obligation to some external authority, but to one's self.  One ought to believe the truth.

Now, it's true that in some specific contexts, such as a criminal trial, we recognize asymmetrical burdens of proof.  But if we are to make such an analogy in this case surely it is the party making the accusation of hatred that carries the burden of proof, not the party in the dock.

The flaw in this analysis is that you hold one side's position fixed and then ask the other side to react.  In reality neither side's position is fixed.  The child can choose to accept his parent's love, disagreement over the definition of marriage notwithstanding, just as the parent can choose to abandon his beliefs as a payoff to emotional blackmail.  The difference is that the child doesn't have to sacrifice his integrity to maintain the relationship.

If you believe that opposition to SSM is compatible with loving a gay child, you should be advocating that the child believe the truth, not that the parent lie.