Why I Am Against Marriage
by Joe Bartlett
No, it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm single. And no, I do not believe that marriage itself is a bad institution. Rather, I think that marriage is a meet, right and salutary estate for couples who desire it. I have no problem with the institution or marriage, per se. My problem, then, is with the institutionalization of marriage by the government. Simply put, we need no government recognition of marriages, nor do we need government limitations on marriages. Moreover, we certainly do not need government taxation of marriages. In fact, if we were to eliminate the so-called marriage penalty from our tax code, we could do away with government certification of marriages altogether. (Of course, as a libertarian, I'm in favor of eliminating the income tax altogether, but that's a topic for an altogether separate article.)
In lieu of marriages, I propose that we reduce the legal status of marriage to nothing more than contract law. (Notably, the government issued marriage certificate is, itself, little more than a contract, with needless bureaucracy and overhead attached.) I could, for example, draft a contract with any person or persons, for the purpose of establishing an exclusive domestic partnership, with all rights, responsibilities and privileges entailed by such an arrangement. While I, personally, would desire to enter into such a partnership only with a single female on a presumably permanent basis ("till death do us part"), I understand and expect that others would not want to place such a limitation on this contracted domestic partnership. Such a reduction of marriage to contract law would allow for domestic partnerships between members of the same sex, among groups of more than two persons, less than two persons (e.g., a self-imposed vow of celibacy, which would be foreseeable for a variety of reasons), on a time-limited basis, with a non-exclusivity clause, and any other permutation you may like. Or, it may allow such partnerships with any permutations you do not like, as what happens behind closed doors of another person's home is not your business anyway. (Who may and may not enter into such a binding contract is, again, a separate topic for another article. For the time being, I will limit such a contract to "consenting adults," i.e., those who are not dependent on others, such as parents. Further distinctions could almost certainly be drawn, which I will not elaborate upon here.)
Lest anyone worry that such contracts would become costly, I point to the marriage tax as an example of just how costly marriage under our current system already is. In addition, I foresee a "standard domestic partnership contract," not unlike a standard lease, which varies very little from realtor to realtor. The existent of such a standard form for such partnership contracts would assure that couples (or groups or individuals) wishing to enter into this estate would not incur exorbitant legal costs. I also foresee those who enter into such an estate reaping a financial gain from such a contract, in the form of reduced costs of health and life insurance and other services that are generally made available to married couples at a cost lower than would be available to two separate individuals.
Some may be concerned about how such domestic partnerships would influence such matters as health insurance. "I don't want to pay my premiums to an insurance provider who provides service to polygamists," someone may object. Morally, this is certainly a viable objection. There are many such domestic partnership arrangements that would certainly violate the morals of many (and, in some cases, the majority of) Americans. This, however, still does not make the existence of such partnerships the concern of such morally minded Americans. Just as today Americans have the freedom to select insurance providers who do not provide benefits for abortion services, there would certainly be no shortage of insurance providers who would cater to this large segment of the population by providing insurance to individuals and to couples in "traditional" domestic partnerships only.
This freedom of association would extend, not only to insurance providers, but to religious affiliations as well. Same-sex and multiple-partner domestic arrangements will never be accepted by many religious bodies. Under the current system, however, should such partnerships be "legalized" (i.e., granted the same legal status as opposite-sex marriages), such bodies could eventually find themselves forced into accepting such arrangements that are contrary to their doctrinal positions. For example, a church may wish to excommunicate a homosexual couple who practice against the teachings of that church, but may face certain obstacles to doing so, on the grounds of the legal status of that partnership. Agree or disagree with the legitimacy of such an excommunication, the principle of freedom of association still holds. Such a church should be free to choose who may (and who may not) be a member and have the privileges of membership in that private organization. On the contractual basis I propose, churches would have the option of recognizing, for religious purposes, certain partnership arrangements, while rejection others without concern for the potential of any future legal entanglements. (Churches could, for example, recognize as "valid" only those domestic partnerships that have been confirmed by a public religious ceremony.)
Sadly, even in our society that is so heavily biased toward these traditional domestic arrangements, many marriages do end before death do the couple part. Such endings are rarely clean and tidy, but rather almost always quite messy and painful. Replacing marriage with domestic partnership contracts ensures that, at least insofar as the division of property is concerned, such proceedings would be somewhat simplified. (In no way do I mean to imply that there is any way to make divorce entirely painless.) Just as in the case of a prenuptial agreement, couples would be free to make agreements on how such situations would be handled ahead of time, in anticipation of the occurrence of this sad but common possibility. For example, a couple may agree that they will split all assets according to respective salaries, or they may prefer an arrangement that favors the innocent party by awarding a majority (by some pre-defined ratio) of assets to that member who did not breach the domestic contract. Such breaches could, according to the terms of the agreement, consist of behaviors such as infidelity, domestic abuse, substance abuse, negligence of parental duty, etc. (In such cases, matters of child custody could also be pre-determined to favor the innocent party to the dispute.) Such matters could, then, be settled by much more easily arbitration rather than by means of the court system.
There are, then, no further grounds upon which the continuation of state-sponsored marriages may be justified. The principle of "caveat emptor" would prevail; those who voluntarily enter into such arrangements would do so with full knowledge of the consequences, not only in terms of the rights and responsibilities of the arrangement, but also in terms of the conditions of its termination. The state would have no role to play in such matters whatsoever, which is as it should be. After all, such matters really are nobody's business, and government involvement (with its associated taxation to support the bureaucrats who oversee such matters on the government's behalf) wrongly makes such private matters everybody's business.
