It is said that Marriage is the cornerstone of society, a child having both a provider father and a caregiver mother being crucial to a child’s upbringing. Now that the legal system has laws to protect the children of single mothers through the child support system, forcing fathers to pay the mother for looking after the child, has marriage become redundant? People are already living together as couples before marriage, there are no laws covering infidelity and fathers are legally made play the role of the provider regardless of marital status, or as in a few cases, regardless of not actually being the biological father.
Is this a set of somebody’s morals being forced onto other people by law?
At the end of the day, marriage has turned into a series of Tax breaks the government is willing to give you if you get a stamp of approval from the church.
Is this even constitutional?
Why should marriage still even exist?
Marriage is a ritualized recognition of the commitment that is already present in the relationship but, through ritualization, the commitment is brought to the fore and actualized. Many people talk about the transformation that occurs in the relationship after the ritual of marriage, where there is now a third entity in the relationship: the marriage itself. So, instead of being just two people having a relationship with each other, it is now two people having a relationship with each other and a relationship to their marriage (their relationship, essentially) thereby creating a grander narrative to the entire endeavor. The ceremony is what makes it real.
Now, from that we can see obvious societal benefits from stable relationships between partners (I can’t think of a single study that suggests otherwise), so it makes sense that society would promote this rite in any way it can.
As for fathers being providers – farmers provide for livestock, clearly there is more to a parent then that!
The role of the father is much more than just ‘provider’ (though, in modern times, it does not necessarily include providing), and as such there is benefit beyond money from couples staying together.
However, there are a number of financial reasons to encourage marriage. First, if one parent is to be ‘caregiver’, and the other ‘provider’, the caregiver parents job prospects suffer for it. Should the couple split, the caregiver needs more than child-support: they need self-support, and compensation because they have largely sacrificed their professional livelyhood in order to raise the child.
But, as you’ve pointed out, there are social institutions that force providers to continue providing, and they could certainly be extended. However, that isn’t efficient. If everywhere we currently have a marriage, we had to have a court decision stipulating monetary exchanges and the proper division of the child’s time and the parents responsibilities, and a government-employed case-worker to ensure that both parents live up to the ruling, the cost would be exorbitant. It is more efficient by a long shot to provide tax breaks that encourage natural human pair-bonding to last.
I suppose what it comes down to is that the society we have set up, and all its trappings, was set up with marriage in mind and in practice, so that dismantling marriage would require restructuring a whole lot more. For a proposal whose benefit is uncertain, the cost of the shift is too much to risk.
Instead of abolishing marriage, why not eliminate all the legal benefits and liabilities that accrue to it? No more tax advanatages or penalites, or default rights of inheritance for instance. Such an arrangement would decrease the economic bases for marriage. Couples who stay together or marry would be more likely to have authentic reasons or religious ones for doing so.
Xunzian wrote:
You have just told me that people get married to be part of a marriage rather than part of a couple. Why should they become married?
Xunzian continues…
Sorry, but they are not obvious to me. What societal benefits do you mean? When was the last study that actually questioned whether people should be married?
What benefits are there which are not already enforced by law?
What counts as a stable marriage and what are the it’s benefits over a stable de facto relationship?
Xunzian then goes on to say…
Is this a reference to spending quality time with your child? To teach them stories and advice? The value of ‘just talking’?
Even if the parents are not living together, there are laws enabling access to the children if the non resident parent wants to spend time with their children. Really, Marriage does not even factor in the quality of the child’s upbringing. Upbringing is dependant of the quality of the parents regardless of marital status.
Carleas wrote:
So you are saying that people are better off when they have close friends they can rely on. Why this has to be someone legally bound to you is unclear. Furthermore, I don’t know what the laws are like where you live, but my local law makers have established that whether or not a female chooses to keep or abort a foetus during pregnancy is solely up to her, regardless of the male’s opinion. The male’s required consent ends at sleeping with her. So a male who wants to keep a child can have his child legally terminated by the mother against his will, or a male that does not want a child has no choice but to become a father and pay child support for the next eighteen years, if that is the mother’s choice. Compensation is something awarded to people who have been wronged, and so logically should not extend to any case starting with the mother’s sexual consent.
Carleas goes on to say…
But aren’t these ‘provider enforcement’ laws virtually marrying people together without calling it that? Without the ceremony?
Also, Government case workers have only get applied to ‘troubled’ cases of parenting, both married and otherwise. Just because a two people do not get married or live together does not mean they don’t get along. (Some of my best friends are people I don’t live with 
)
Carleas then says…
We already have a society which is structured around single parents, a minimum of new laws would be required. The only restructuring that would be required would be an optional cleaning out of the old laws, taking out any bias it once had toward church approved couples.
People get married because the ritualization affirms the couple and through that produces another entity that serves to deepen the relationship, is what I said.
As for social benefits, check out just about any sociological study and you’ll find that children from a stable household (see point 1) fair far better than those from an unstable household. I haven’t seen a single paper that has ever suggested otherwise.
As for parents not living together and its attendant problems, see point 2.
Now, what manner of ritual is used to create that other entity is, of course, up in the air. However, the ritual is what allows the participants to become fully human and recognize the role.
felix dakat wrote:
That is a very good point. I can see the sense in the existance of the legal benefits and liabilities, and why we need them, but they should be completely scrapped and reinstated directly onto being a parent rather than being married. Why should a married couple with no children benifit where a de facto couple with children would not?
Xunzian wrote:
If a law was passed and absolved everyone of their marriages, would the world fall into chaos? Would people run around yelling ‘I’m free! I’m free!’ and start humping the nearest stranger? No, no they would not. People would shrug their shoulders and go about their lives as normal, perhaps ringing their accountants to check how it affected their taxes. There would be no tearing of deep emotional and spiritual ties between loved ones anywhere. And the deepest levels of a relationship do not require a thorough application of marriage, they are based on love, trust and all sorts of stuff that comes to any relationship given work and time.
Xunzian wrote:
Stability and Marriage are two seperate things. A child who has only one parent or who has parents in two seperate houses or who just has parents who are de facto can still come from a stable household.
Xunzian wrote:
Fully human? Sounds like a personal angle. (steps back 40 feet to behind the safety of bullet resistant glass) As far as ‘recognising the role’ goes, that happens to everyone reqardless of marriage. Every father upon first holding the unfathomable beauty that is his newborn child, gazes in amazement and thinks to himself ‘my freedom is over’. Happens every day.
I think you have a point with the separation of child rearing from couple-dom. People should be awarded for raising children, and they are. However, (1) I still think there is sound practical reason to encourage parents to stay in a marriage, and (2) I think that the legal institution of marriage does that pretty well.
- Children reared in two parent homes have distinct advantages over children raised in single parent homes, or in two separate homes. I haven’t done an exhaustive search for sources, but I didn’t find any sources saying that the effect was benign. Here’s a statistics that typifies what I found:
One could certainly argue that the people who divorce most are predominantly from XYZ background, that the legal troubles of divorce are actually the root of the problem, etc., but I don’t think there’s much of a case for that. Children are troubled when their parents separate, I think that’s pretty clear.
Further more, you did not address the point I made about the sacrifice of the ‘car-giver’ parent in terms of being self-sufficient. Raising a child requires a lot of work, but it does not boost ones resume. If one parent is out getting paid, getting promotions, getting experience, and has made a deal with the other parent that s/he will care for the child, then the ‘provider’ has a responsibility to the other parent, and not just the child. Marriage provides a convenient way to ensure that a ‘care-giver’ can lay claim to the assets of a ‘provider’ if the provider chooses to leave.
2) Marriage being a legal institution that provides benefits is a great way to encourage couples to remain together. It ties them together legally, making leaving sufficiently hard to allow a relationship to weather many issues that a less committed relationship might fall to.
It also provided an umbrella policy under which a number of legal issues can be dealt with, such as inheritance and health insurance. If a 'provider were to die suddenly, the ‘care-giver’ would need their assets to support her- or himself and their child. It would be possible to set up all these things individually, but it would be a pain.
I am interested in the point you make about marriage versus children, and I wonder if maybe the legal benefits of marriage, or many of them, shouldn’t come into being until after the couple has a child. That is, married couples who have children should get extra benefits over people with children or childless married couples. There is something to be said about marriage encouraging procreation, and that could be an argument for or against marriage credits, depending how you see global population issues.
Marriage the ritualization is completely independent of marriage the legal status. Apples and oranges, as they say. The legal status merely exists to confer material benefits (and, by extension, encourage the ritual itself – though I think we all know that the ritual is often hollowly performed).
As for ‘Fully Human’, Tu Weiming has written a good deal on it. I’ll provide the larger part of the speech for context, while bolding the part important for the present discussion:
Abolish marriage. Ok permit me a bit of a laugh over the chaos that would begin worldwide. ROFL.
That one act would start countless skirmishes and possible wars, deaths, and mayhem. Poor divorce lawyers would be jumping out of windows( Oh wait that is the good thing)
Inheiritence, alliances. and progeny support etc… ROFL You would with one tiny law wipe out peace. ROFL. Social Chaos would ensue on so many levels it would not be funny but, it would. Oh my it would be interesting.
Kris, do you think it would be in principle impossible to have society without marriage, or just that it would be impossible in practice to abolish marriage right now?
The latter, It would be impossible to do so now. Unless it was done over a gradual slow span of time. Worldwide all cultures or most cultures have marriage too intertwined in too many aspects of living.
It would be different if humanity did not have such a possesive selfish nature. Look at marriages as a territory. You have alliances, inheiritence, progeny, rights, properties. Gads there are countless businesses world wide tied up the the business of marriage. Countries soveriegns and families, lets not fail to mention just the average person, all still make matrimonial alliances.
Resolve to dissolve marriage and what is going to happen with children?
Wow talk about single parent families. What happens if one parent says hey, I don’t have to stay, and by golly the other parent decides the same thing, both thinking the other parent will be there for the kids. You know this will happen. Maybe not too many parents will do this but, I do now that there will be a fair number.
We are selfish and possesive in too many ways. That is why we have laws forcing us to be responsible to each other and for each other.
I could go on about all the ramifications of such a thing happening and why they would happen. Its sad that I could.
Peace would be gone .
Your post begins with the bad premises that marriage is simply a matter of cold, calculating procreation, and that the state is somehow more natural than marriage. Marriage is about commitment, though you’d be hard pressed to see it proven today, and about building a family on the foundation of that commitment. A good analogy is found in the state, which is based upon mutual interest and a system of governance built upon that mutual interest. To insinuate that marriage is simply about children is the equivalent of insinuating that statehood is simply about taxes.
Though there are no laws covering infidelity, there should be, as such actions violate the terms of what amounts to a contract. If I cheat the government out of my share of the tax burden or aid an enemy of the state, I’m considered a criminal; why should marriage be any different?
Moreover, it’s the security of self-perpetuation and/or continuity that marriage provides that keeps the state and it’s government going. There is no shortage of scientific studies showing how inferior “unconventional” families (e.g. single parent homes) are two “traditional” two-parent homes (excepting, of course, where some form of abuse is present); healthy homes produce healthy people.
Lastly, the state and the government find their roots in family, which in turn finds its root in marriage, so if one were to make a choice on whether marriage or the state have a more natural right to exist, marriage would hold a firm advantage.
JVS
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If you “abolish” marriage - a very dictatorial proposition - you “abolish” family.
If anything, due to social and cultural realities, marriage is declining and family is becoming obsolete, with unforeseeable consequences.
Marriage was the harnessing of female sexual power to the group, so as to enable the more harmonious coexistence of males and the assimilation of greater numbers of individuals.
Technology is making sex insignificant and trivial, resulting in no need for such social mechanisms.
And so females are liberated and returned to their more primitive, and natural, sexual behaviors, creating alienation and growing social fragmentation.
I am sure my husband and many other husbands wish we women would
return to our more primitive, and natural, sexual behaviors. I have no clue what they are but, you tell me and I might try it. 
Its a celebration of love, people want it to exist, why take it away?
Married people have tax-deductions as they live together as a family.
I think marriage should be allowed between more than one person, and you should also be able to marry cats, dogs, horses, etc. And no sex or rings or wedding should be necissary for the marriage.
Eventually, everyone gets married and has to pay less taxes to the federal goverment. 
The more natural, more primitive sexuality of a woman is moreso fearless, less repressed, etc. That is all. It is sexuality before shame, guilt or domestication. =3
Oh is that all? I thought that was normal. Sheeez and here I thought I could bring something new home.