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Separation of Marriage and State
Many of my Queer comrades agitate and hope for the extension of marriage rights to same-gender couples. I want to know why anybody, Queer or straight, wants the government to control how their life-partnerships are created and dissolved. Why should the government decide which people are allowed to marry, what happens to their property during marriage, and how their property (and custody of their children) should be divided after marriage? Why should the government decide whether you may get a divorce? I say, keep your government out of my most personal decisions. If I decide to create a formal bond with another human being, I can do so via written contracts and mutual understandings. If we encounter difficulties and need arbitration, then one of us can haul the other into court for an examination of the contracts and the facts. If you think that writing a marriage contract takes all the romance out of the relationship, well, what do you think a standard marriage is?? Marriage is already a contract, only the government writes the terms in a one-size-fits-all fashion, and you don't have any say in the matter beyond "I do". I know it isn't fair for heterosexuals to hoard the benefits and burdens of marriage all to themselves, but that doesn't mean that homosexuals should automatically crave these things as well. In an age when roughly half of all marriages end in divorce, it is obvious that the standard marriage option is not the road to wedded bliss that so many newlyweds believe in. We all might be better off looking at marriage as a contractual obligation between two (or more?) fallible humans, not an eternal bond blessed by God and enforced by State.
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