The government should not be in the marriage business. Marriage is a religious institution which has no place in the law. If everyone is supposed to be treated equally under the law, there should be no special privileges or taxes for married people. I feel the same way about domestic partnerships.
Today's ruling should be a moot point. Anyone who wants to get married ought to be able to do so according to the rituals of whatever religion they belong to. Atheists can make up their own ceremony - the usually do anyway. Marriage is between two (or three or four or...) people, and the State ought to have nothing to do with who can and can't.
There are many places where marriage bleeds over into law, but it shouldn't, and there are work-arounds:
Inheritance: Write an effing will. Name your partner as beneficiary if you want. Existing laws cover this already.
Visitation rights: If there isn't a law in place which allows you do pre-designate people who are allowed to visit you when you are ill, let's get one passed.
Health care: If there isn't a law allowing you to add anyone you want to your health care package (with the appropriate fees charged for the extra body) let's get one passed.
Thanks to the high failure rate of marriages, there are already laws in place to protect the children.
There are already laws in place allowing co-ownership of property by people who are not related.
Anything else?
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howeird- Mister Eclectic
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--SSI benefits (if you marry a woman, she receives some portion of your SSI benefits if you die before she does; if you marry a man, nada)
--health benefits (some companies allow their employees to cover their same-sex partners on their health insurance; many don't and some states actually forbid it)
--various other health- and death-related benefits, such as bereavement leave, leave to care for a critically ill partner, etc.
--all the issues that can come up around child custody when the parents aren't allowed to marry and the biological parent dies
--don't even get me started on the military's idiotic "don't ask don't tell" policy
Different meanings for 'marriage' I have discovered so far:
1) A pledge of commitment and support between two people, made privately between the two of them, but announced publicly to the community as a whole.
2) A legal contract granting each marriage partner rights, privileges, responsibilties, and proprietary interests in the union formed thereby.
3) A religious ceremony or sacrament whereby the marrying parties can affirm and embrace a particular aspect of their beliefs with the other members of their religious community -- possibly changing the status of one or more of the marrying parties within said religious community thereby.
4) A mystic ritual which establishes a supernatural bond between the marrying parties. (If you believe in that sort of thing.)
When my friends find love worthy of a commitment, I am joyful regardless of their gender, age, race, religion (or lack thereof), national origin, native language, occupation, eye color, number of thorax segmentations, length of antennae or CPU size. There should be no difference in the way the law treats them before they make the commitment vs. after.
Oh? I'd like to hear what others you've encountered or come up with.
But my point is there is no call for marriage to be legislated at all.
Well, actually, you can't have marriages of type #2 without legislation --- so, if you believe that there is a benefit to having such things, there is no reason why a rational state can or should not enact such laws in the interest of its citizens. There is no call for the government to attempt to legislate the other three types of 'marriage' -- but as been earlier noted, most people fail to distinguish between the various types.
My gripe is with #2. I do not agree with the current practice of the government or commercial entities (such as insurance companies and health care facilities) of granting rights or privileges to married people which they do not grant to single people. We are supposed to all be equal under the law.