Marriage serves little or no purpose now-a-days except that it grants you a bunch of neat tax breaks and legal protections. While I doubt (m)any people will admit it, most people get married for these reasons only. I didn’t love my wife any less before we got married, marriage changed absolutely nothing for us, except we now file our taxes differently and if I die she’s got dibs on the money. In the end that’s what all this really is about, few people care about the words, what they want is equal protection under the law.

A simplistic solution I’ve been talking about forever is that the government should get out of the marriage business altogether. They’d issue civil union contracts to everybody regardless of the make-up of the relationship. Marriage would be the privy of religious institutions. However I wonder if it’s possible to take this one step further and remove the government from the equation all together. Instead have legally binding contracts where each couple spells out their wishes. This would require a major reworking of the tax code though, which I can only see as something positive.