Wendy McElroy has a good column today taking a position that I've long shared. The state should butt out of marriages, except to enforce contracts that the couple agrees to themselves. The current one-size-fits-all mentality is a cause of much social dysfunction.

She makes a lot of sense. I never could understand why the state thought it should have a hand in marriage anyway.

The state involvement in marriage is a remnant of pre-Enlightment traditions.

A good case can be made for making the state a registrar of marriages, although that it has or has not registered a marriage ought not to be considered as irrefutable evidence. A good case can also be made that the state should provide a default set of rights and responsibilties, which can then be modified if and as the spouses see fit.

IIRC, the Netherlands does not recognize religious officiation at marriage. Perhaps this ought to be the first step here also (Europeans aren't always idiots :) ).

State involvement in marriages is for raping you more tax wise.

Well can't agree more, there is no reason the state has anything to do with marriage. They claim to want to encourage it but the tax code and the bureaucracy involved says the opposite.

Ah-ha, Mr. Simberg, the mask has slipped! You are obviously one of those wacky libertarians who believes the state has no business interfering in our private lives.

Well, if the state won't do it, who will ensure we all do appropriate things? And who will extort money from us for doing them, if not the state?

I wonder if there's a libertarian on the net who can come to grips with the fact that an institution that is as old as human history and, in one form or another, virtually universal, might have some purpose other than to annoy the ghost of Ayn Rand. Could it possibly have something to do with the need to institutionalize the protection of children? Is this purely a private concern or does the state have an interest here? (And what do you have to believe about human nature to answer "No" to the second of these questions?)

State interference in the marriage contract goes far beyond the interests of children, and the current regime often acts against their interests by allowing them to be alienated from their fathers.

I don't much see how state interference in marriage has anything to do with the protection of children. You can have children without getting married, after all. State interference in the definition of marriage prevents couples who would otherwise be married from doing so, for whatever reason that might be (they're two women, they're two women and a man, they're two men). In addition, laws regarding child rearing and protection are already in existence and apply whether you're single or not.

I'm a strong proponent of multiple parent households (if two is great, why can't three be better?), but I see no reason why the state should have anything to say about what makes a marriage.

I dislike arguing with people whom, on other issues, I'm largely in agreement. (Okay, you caught me. That's a lie.) But it seems to me that to start with the proposition that you don't see that marriage has anything to do with the protection of children is to introduce so many assumptions into the argument that it becomes fruitless to deal with them. Marriage is as old as human history and is found is virtually every culture. Its purpose is solely (I would argue) to create a stable environment for the rearing of children. If it has some other function, if it was adopted by virtually every culture for some other reason, I'd like to know what it is. The libertarian argument, it seems to me, is not whether marriage should be a state-endorsed institution, but whether is should exist or not. If it ceases to exist, the state, I think, will still have an interest in creating other institutions to protect the child, the one party to the institution incapable of protecting itself.

Heinlein once wrote that the purpose of marriage was twofold: to accumulate and pass on wealth, and to provide care for the children. Now he was a fiction writer, and therefore nothing he wrote should be taken unsupported as evidence of his personal opinions.

But I always thought it was a good definition.

So the question then becomes, to what extent should the state protect this arrangment, and under what conditions should the state intervene. I would argue that, in general, we have permitted (and in some cases requested) a dangerous amount of intervention in marriage. Further, I fear that we have ignored hostility to the concept of marriage, which is sometimes overt, but more often simply an outcome of otherwise well intended policies.

In general terms, I believe that the best arrangement for children is a two parent mixed couple household, with at least one parent continuously present. That's a statistical generalization, however, and there are obviously other arrangements that can work as well.

It seems to me that we need at least a minimum state recognition of whatever we conclude is a marriage, if for no other reason than to allow basic protections.

I'm really not sure where I'm going with this. I'm pretty sure that Andrew Sullivan and I would have some disagreements on detail... but I think we have come to a point where it's no longer possible to assume that everyone is working form identical definitions.

My two cents. But for you guys, it's free.

Watch yourself, Skubinna. You've inadvertently posted something I agree with, which could portend serious problems for you down the road. A point that hasn't been raised about marriage: it's an essential element in domesticating young males, who, left to their own devices, would spread their seed as randomly as possible and never accept responsibility for rearing their young. Those alternative institutions we use when marriage breaks down tend to put the whole burden of rearing the young on the mother (welfare, in fact, used to require the father to be absent from the family unit before a mother could access it) or to be wholly punitive, threatening deadbeat dads with fines and jail time. Meanwhile, there seems to be mounting evidence that children, on average, do better when they have both a mother and a father in the house. It seems to me that society has an interest in furthering this sort of arrangement to the degree it can. I am, finally, uncomfortable with people who can discuss the pros and cons of marriage without reference to the needs of children.

The discussion seems to have gotten off track. Neither Wendy, or I, were proposing that marriage is unnecessary. The only point is that under the current laws, the marriage contract lacks flexibility, and that people should be more free to make their own arrangements under contract (which would still be enforced by the state.

As just one example, a married couple shouldn't be required to be a single economic unit for tax purposes. This one change alone would eliminate the marriage penalty.

Kenneth,

You misread me. I said that I didn't see how state interference with the definition of marriage had anything to do with protecting children. Not marriage itself. When I have children, they'll be raised in a two-parent dual-sex household, and I'll stay home with them until they are at least school age.

I just don't think that the government should say what makes a marriage. Mormons (until the government sent the cavalry after them) and Muslims (to name just a few) both allow polygamy. Our current laws, however, prevent these people from truly living as they wish. How has the government's enforcement of anti-polygamy laws helped Tom Greene's six wives and children? Now the man is going to jail, which is no place for a man with his number of responsibilities.

I'm very pro-marriage. I'm against the state telling me how to do it though.

I accept Rand's injunction to stop the discussion. On a purely factual matter, Tom Green is going to jail (if convicted) for impregnating a thirteen-year-old girl he didn't happen to be married to. (He married her later, but apparently you can't undo statutory rape.)

Well, I wasn't trying to "stop the discussion," just clear up a misapprehension. You seemed to me to be attacking a strawman.

It seems to me that marriage was invented not to protect children, but to insure that the male participant would receive and own property and goods from the female participant's family. In most cultures the female children as well as all but the eldest male offspring were seen as liabilities and were often sold, indentured, or abandoned with the approval of the state apparatus.

Yes, this notion of marriage being to protect children is a rather recent invention, probably a late twentieth-century one.

It takes more than a decade to bring a human being to a state where he can survive independently. He is born with two instincts (I may be out of date here, there may be more or none at all): sucking and fear of falling. He has to be protected for at least ten years and he has to be taught everything.To suggest that marriage (i.e., a social system designed to institutionalize the family) wasn't, in large part, a product of social evolution designed to provide the necessary framework for this protection seems to me to beg an awful lot of questions. Pre-agrarian societies encountered by the colonial powers in modern times all, as far as I know, had some such institution. Even those that didn't associate procreation with intercourse found it necessary to work out social arrangements designed for no other reason than to ensure the survival of the helpless young.(And no species could possibly survive if only the oldest male of the litter was given the sort of protection necessary to give him a reasonable chance to survive. Always excepting, I suppose,egg-laying insects.) Pre-agrarian societies (i.e., societies still in the hunting-gathering stage of development) did not work out this system to ensure the transfer of property. The idea of "property" is a social construct which doesn't exist, as we understand it, in hunter-gatherer societies. Absent a special concern for one's children, by the way, who the hell would care what happened to his property after death? The suggestion that marriage evolved in order that young men could get the property of their wives' families. . . But, damn it, they'd have to have wives before this question could even arrise. What property could a "wife's family" have to leave unless the family already existed?

If I'm off the subject again, I'll desist. I thought the subject was whether the state has a vested interest in supporting and regulating the institution we know as marriage. I didn't realize it was whether or not we should tinker with the tax laws.

And damn it again, Rand. I really like this blog and I really like what you write in it ninety-seven per cent of the time. But what in hell did you mean by posting that comment that the idea of the family as a franework for protecting children was a late twentieth century concept. (I'm betting you were thinking of some pop-pych pap you came across back then.) If you're right, then my parents never heard of the concept and the Catholic Church was founded some time in the Reagan years.

OK, make it twentieth century or even nineteenth. It certainly doesn't go back millennia, as you claimed. Mating, bonding, and raising children do, but not marriage in the modern sense. And most of the laws regulating marriage *are* for economic and property purposes--not child-rearing. The current divorce laws in particular seem to make children an afterthought.

And no, I don't believe that the state should "regulate" marriage--just enforce it. It doesn't have a good track record of doing that, and has caused a great deal of societal dysfunction in its attempts to do so.

Kenneth,
Perhaps Greene isn't the best example, although the fact that his wife is unwilling to bring charges against him and claims to have been a willing participant makes me think the state has no business bothering with it anyway. The fact remains that there are an undetermined but substantial number of plural marriages throughout the U.S., and the children in these families risk being sent to a foster home simply because daddy has more than one wife. How does that protect children?

Greene is definitely not a good example of how the state should stay out of relationships. Besides impregnating young girls who were not old enough to give consent, (13) he had a substantial fraud business going through food stamps and welfare because he fathered more children than he could support. The government was definitely involved in his personal life, and he had invited it there.
Which does bring us to the question of what form responsible reproduction would take? How would the inheritance laws be covered? Every marriage contract would reinvent the wheel... which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that would have to be done.