Several years ago I wrote a “Judeo-Christian” defense of marriage privatization, by which I mean getting the government out of the business of deciding what marriage is and by what terms it should be governed. As the cultural wars over same-sex marriage intensify, that idea has gained wide popularity across the political spectrum. For example, in their popular book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein devote an entire chapter to advocating marriage privatization.
Many advocates of marriage privatization seem to think that disentangling the state from marriage would be easy. They argue that the government should just stop issuing marriage licenses. Marriage would then become a private ceremonial and contractual matter. The state would enforce marriage contracts just like other contracts.
Although I remain an advocate of marriage privatization, disentanglement would be far from that easy. The state is thoroughly intertwined with marriage; the Gordian knot cannot be neatly severed. I’m currently working on article entitled How to Privatize Marriage that tries to work through these complex issues. My bottom line is that privatizing marriage does not mean that the state would get out of regulating and recognizing intimate unions altogether, but that it would try to create a wider space for regulation and recognition by individuals and social and religious groups.
I’m still working through these issues and won’t try to offer a comprehensive solution yet. For now, I’d like to raise three difficulties with marriage privatization that need to be addressed as part of any privatization proposal. They correspond to functions currently served by state marriage regulation and recognition.
First, the state uses marriage as a marker for the dispensation of state benefits and the extraction of obligations owed to the state by individuals. This is most obvious in the taxation context, but occurs across a tremendous range of state activities. (I’m using “state” in its broad sense to include all governments). For example, selective service (i.e., the draft) has typically differentiated between the married and unmarried. The rules of evidence create “marital privilege” allowing spouses not to testify against each other. If the government were to stop issuing marriage licenses, it would need to account for the thousands of ways in which laws draw distinctions based on marital status. If marriage were a purely private creation—anyone could call themselves married according to whatever criteria they chose—these thousands of legal categorizations would collapse.
Second, the state has traditionally regulated marriage to prevent certain kinds of abuses. For example, prenuptial agreements are not enforced as routine contracts because of the potential for unfairness and imposition by the strong on the weak. The easy “pro-privatization” answer is that civil courts would continue to enforce marriage contracts only if they were fair. But what if the married couple had agreed, for example, to be bound by principles of Christian marriage and to have any disputes within their marriage resolved through a process of conciliation, mediation, and arbitration within the Catholic Church? Nominally, a civil court’s job would be to enforce any arbitration award coming out of the Catholic Church, as courts currently do under the Federal Arbitration Act. But now imagine the entanglement problems when, for example, the wife challenged the arbitration award as unconscionable or against public policy because the arbitrators had discriminated against her because she was a woman or had left the Catholic Church or wanted to use birth control or had come out as a lesbian or any number of other potentially objectionable reasons. Having civil courts scrutinize religious arbitral decisions for fairness and conformity with public values raises severe establishment clause and free exercise problems. And having courts simply rubberstamp such arbitration awards means that the state would have to abdicate its traditional function in preventing various kinds of abuse and unfairness within marital relations. Just to raise everyone’s hackles, imagine the proceedings to enforce a Sharia divorce judgment in a family court in San Francisco.
Finally, state recognition of marriage plays an important role in facilitating market transactions between private parties. For example, car rental companies typically allow a married renter to add his or her spouse as a driver at no additional charge. Insurance companies set premiums for all kinds of policies based on marital status. And there are many other examples. In certifying who is married, the state performs a function that markets value, much as the USDA does as to various kinds of food certifications. This is not to say that private organizations couldn’t replace the state’s certification role, but, to play law and economics for a moment, that might greatly increase various kinds of transaction costs. This last point is one that I don’t think has been widely appreciated, but is quite substantial.
I believe that there are answers, which is why I remain an enthusiastic marriage privatization proponent. But privatization advocates need to start engaging more systematically with these thorny problems.
Perhaps I’m being overly simplistic in this assessment, but I would like to see the term Domestic Partnership replace Marriage in civil law. You articulate very clearly a number of issues with civil law getting out of the marriage. Of course, civil law has a right and responsibility to mediate contractual disputes, but I’d like to at least propose a related, but slightly different trajectory.
It seems to me the primary objection to civil unions, same sex marriage, or the like is the idea that the law implies an endorsement of the relationship. http://bit.ly/JKl0S Note the reasons Pope Benedict gave why the Church couldn’t endorse civil unions. Specifically, because it implied an acceptance of the relationship as a good.
To me, domestic partnership, could communicate a very different, and more acceptable reality that more closely conforms to the proper duties of civil law. Insofar as it is domestic, it applies to the living arrangement, not to the relationship. If we were to cast the net just a little wider, to include those who wished to live together and share many of the civil benefits of marriage, but did not have any particular romantic or sexual relationship, we might be able to find a realistic middle ground that preserves religious freedom, while granting legal standing. For example, if two widowed sisters wanted to live together, sharing living expenses, serving as power of attorney for each other, and other related possibilities, they could share a domestic partnership which would look materially like a same-sex marriage, even though there was no romantic relationship.
Once the net was just a little bit wider, then the religious issue of condoning the relationship would not exist because the legal status was not dependent on relationship, but on the intended living arrangement.
Of course some issues, like adoption would still remain, and some restrictions might be necessary on who could claim that status, to protect against things like parents forming a partnership with children to avoid inheritance tax, but by in large, I think it would be a much more feasible project than trying to privatize marriage altogether.
I agree, Mattb, but why should the gummint get involved in favoring the two cohabiting widows with tax deductions, visitation rights, inheritance rights, immigration rights and 1000 others that are denied to widows living separately?
The only solution is to accept that distinctions based on sex and marital status, like race, and religion, should be abolished from ALL laws of the land.
The problem is with the people who seek power. It is painfully obvious that the main reason gays want their marriages legalized is to be given governmental benefits that will give them power. Some aren’t even after “equality” which would mean guaranteeing all marriages equal (polygamous ones included).
I acknowledge that it won’t be easy or happen overnight, however a good start would be to slowly “chip away” at the privileges granted exclusively to married couples, we need not deny married couples these privileges, instead we can expand them to unmarried couples.
We have discrimination laws against martial status for example in housing,employment,credit, and insurance in some states but not others.
Why not extend those laws to cover insurance,tax,immigration,social security,etc.
Here’s the problem with marriage itself which many gays fail to acknowledge, currently most gays are better off if they marry, and sometimes you take “more of the good with the bad”, but let me give you a hypothetical example.
Let’s suppose a state has a law saying that only married couples can get fertility services or let’s suppose you need to get married to sponsor a couple. Let’s suppose you want more children and you can afford those children because you as a couple are lawyers or for less of a stereotype two underwater welders.
By getting married, you may be subject to a hefty marriage penalty or AMT (although its more likely to happen in higher cost blue states than lower cost red states), but beyond that let’s say your no longer eligible for subsidized health insurance. It’s not far-fetched, obama for example has proposed and got certain taxes. For instance, in the fiscal cliff deal a couple of years ago a “married couple making over 450k faces a tax hike”, but two singles making “390,000” do not face a tax hike, the medicare tax is similar in which two singles making 190k do not face a tax hike, but one married couples making 250k (one making 210, the other 40k) face one.
By getting married you gain access to certain benefits but less of others, solely because you decided to make more money and want more children then to just have one child or be childless.
The ultimate goal is to privatize marriage and enforce and expand laws against martial discrimination. It won’t happen overnight because we are trapped with over 1,000 laws related to marriage, but step by step we can dismantle and reform them.
Of course marriage privatization could be subject to limits also, I doubt the government would allow a marriage based entirely on islamic law or even catholic law where divorce can be hard to get depending on church doctrine or protestant doctrine whre divorce is only allowed for adultery.
This is a topic that is going un noticed sadly by most folks in favor of expanding same-sex marriage, without realizing that the discriminatory marriage law itself is the problem and you can still get tangled up in its knots.
Let me add the “privatization” is also a distraction, over the years privileges,rights, and responsibilities have been available to unmarried families and their children.
For instance the head of household tax status, child rights, anti-discrimination laws due to martial status,adoption rights being granted to unmarried couples or singles.
For instance let say Cuny had job openings and housing only available for married couples (I’ll use it as an example since st john’s is a religious one),
Gays and lesbians would want to get married to get the benefit of getting jobs only available to married couples.
Extending those laws and adding rights is an alternative to privatization because more rights would be available without marrying, also privileges available to married couples could be eliminated, to be fair also penalties.
We can work and allow privatization but its a misleading distraction, the government for instance allows pre-nups, but government can also allow alternative routes.
To those who defend the existing route of marriage, government cannot and should not force marriage privileges in an unhappy marriage to discourage divorce and have folks remain unhappy.
Thus privatization may not even need to be necessary at this point.