So, Xoc and Ganesh, for example, would be bad parents, because they cannot get married, and without a marriage license will not provide a stable, two-parent home?
Well, not exactly. I tend to think anyone who's been together for a certain length of time *can* provide a stable, two-parent home. In my home state, we called them "common-law marriages" (although these aren't recognized any more, for whatever reason).
In my specific case, I was sort of walking into something that was already in progress, though. The kids were already there (and were included in the wedding vows). So the marriage thing, in part, was sort of a process of naming something a family without having to put in the same amount of time.
And that naming-this-thing-a-family is, as I said upstream, a franchise I'd like to see extended to pretty much everyone who wants access to it.
Well, "marriage" is the legal definition of "family," so you run into problems when that kid who always threw spitballs into your ear in third grade and wound up living downstairs from you has the same access to your estate as the person who slept with you for 30 years.
So, Xoc and Ganesh should not have a stronger claim on each other's estates than that kid who threw spitballs in their collective, part-elephantine ears, because they cannot get married, and thus cannot be part of a family?
No, they *should*. That was an example of one of the legal repercussions of eliminating marriage privilege that I can't see a way around. We want specific people to inherit/have intimate access to us & our goods, and we have to label them in some way. A will might be enough for inheritance, but that's not the only kind of access next-of-kin gets (and only counts if you take the time to draw one up). So maybe we could name someone next-of-kin in some legal way that we didn't call marriage, but in effect it'd be the same thing, as far as I can tell. |
