Reply #27: Absolutely. That is what marriage is.

[politicat]

It's not about love - love doesn't need marriage. Marriage is a financial and social partnership that provides legal remedy for progeny and offers legal security and economic benefits to each partner that cohabitation does not. It conveys rights of survivorship, medical and legal privilege and legal protection in cases of death or other damage that strict cohabitation does not. Sorry if you don't like the fact that I'm very hard-headed and logical about this, but in law, we cannot define love. We can define financial, social, legal and taxation rights and responsibilities and since marriage is a legal status, we must define marriage in terms that can be defined legally.

I absolutely believe that any group of people who are capable of giving consent, regardless of sex, number or relationship (though not age - marriage is an adult's privilege and responsibility; it should not be thrust upon a child who cannot make such legal and economic decisions in other matters), should be able to benefit from the voluntary economic partnerships that are conveyed by the status of marriage. Don't get me wrong - I'm an ardent and strident supporter of same-sex marriage; however, I'm also a supporter of communal family groups that may not conform to the new social concept of nuclear family. Throughout most of history, people have lived in communal groups, not in dyads with a single set of common children.

Love is great... but the piece of paper that my late (American term: girlfriend; legal term: domestic partner; my term: wife) and I had from the Netherlands did not change our love. Nor does the piece of paper that my present husband and I have. (I'm a monogamous bisexual.) We loved each other before and after we got our legal documents that ensured that I could inherit their properties in the cases of their deaths, that I could make their end-of-life medical decisions for them, that I could sign consent for medical procedures when they were incapacitated.

The major difference in my two marriages: marriage to my husband took 20 minutes and $15 for the license. The subequivalent to marriage to my late partner took more than six months, well over $4000 in legal fees, and was not complete when she died, so I was not able to make the decisions she wanted me to make. (Fortunately, her father, a very kind, accepting and gentle man who was her next of kin, didn't violate her end-of-life wishes and was amenable to a property settlement that was acceptable to both of us.)

My late partner and I still didn't get the tax benefits of marriage; she could not deduct my tuition payments from her taxes, for example, and only could have claimed me as her dependent after we had lived together for an entire calendar year. Compare this to my husband and I, who, though we married at the end of December, were able to file taxes for the entire tax year as MFJ and he has never had to claim me as a dependent.

Love is delightful, but the money and the legal issues are at least as important, if not more so in terms of how real people live.