TheProgressivePatriot
Platinum Member
They can as long as they are not sisters. And if they are sisters they are free to peruse the right to marry through the the courts and legislative process the same way that same sex couples did. And the government does not require sex as a condition of marriage. Dhaaa!!If Aunt Suzy and Aunt Becky want to get together to make ends meet and they are friends, why should they have to get married to have the rights they wish to have? Why should they have to have sex?
Marriage implies sexual union. That is why it should not be used.
If you want people to share certain aspects of your life with legal authority, all one needs to do is see to it that the law lets you do that.
Again, marriage is not needed.
Sure destroy marriage for absolutely no good reason other than because a few bigots and anti government fanatics don’t like it . Here is an interesting piece that will shed some light on the subject.
Can Government Get out of the Marriage Business?
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/can-government-get-out-of-the-marriage-business/
Selected excerpts with notations where needed:
In the debate last night, Ron Paul noted his position on marriage as follows:
get the government out of it. Why doesn’t it go to the church? And why doesn’t it to go to the individuals? I don’t think government should give us a license to get married. It should be in the church.
The Church? Really? Where does that leave people who are not religious or who just do not want to get married in a church? Will we then be discriminating against those people on the basis of religion? What are the implications for government benefits and the government’s role in mediating divorces? . Shall that be left too Jewish, Sharia or Cannon law? Not very well thought out.
Here’s the deal: much of the significance of marriage is very much linked to civil-legal matters in a way that makes it impossible for government to extricate itself from its definition. Marriage is many things that have nothing to do with government such as romance, love, friendship, lifelong companionship, and even sacred bonds. There is little doubt that those things can all be achieved without the government being involved (as is the case with friendship, for example). However, marriage is also about certain mutual legal obligations regarding property, finances, children and whatnot, about which governmental intervention is sometimes necessary to resolve disputes (as is the case with any contractual relationship). Further, marriage diminishes legal complexity in a variety issues (children, death [i.e., funeral arrangements], hospital visitations, medical decisions, etc.). Now, we could utterly remove marriage as a legal institution, but then we would have to replace it with something else, and that something else would almost certainly be more cumbersome in terms of government entanglements that the current system.
To put it as simply as possible: for government to truly get out of the marriage business it would have to stop recognizing the spousal relationship as having special legal standing. This is because to recognize that relationship as having specific legal significances it would need a definition of “marriage” that could be held up to legal scrutiny (to, for example, stop people from arbitrarily claiming whatever privileges might exist for married couples). Such a stand would have to exist whether the government issued the licenses or not. Once the law has to define “marriage” then government is, by definition, in the “marriage business.”
To summarize the summary: the only way to truly get government out of the marriage business would be to reduce marriage to the same status of friendship, i.e., a social relationship utterly defined by private interactions and that lacks legal significance.