A clarified dead-end proposal

I've gotten a couple of comments about my last post, so I figured I would try and clarify what I mean. The idea I presented was my own, and I hold no illusions about whether or not it is a good idea much less a workable one. That said, I will try and better illustrate why I presented it.

As I said, one of the main arguments against gay marriage is the claim that marriage as an institution is designed around raising children. Dan Koborg wrote an essay in 2003 that places highly in google's opinion on the topic of 'against gay marriage. You can find it here.

http://tinyurl.com/yygm3t

I'm not linking it since I don't want to 'vote' for it. But I will quote from it:

The truth of the matter is, marriage is not an institution merely based on love. Marriage is given special legal status, including tax and insurance benefits, for mainly one reason. The reason is that marriage is an institution established for children. Marriage is the only time tested, healthy arrangement for raising children that society, throughout the ages, has found. It is also a fact of life that gay couples are not physically capable of procreation.

Ignore the bad science for a moment and focus on the sentiment. This clearly states that marriage is established for children, and gay people physically can't have children so they shouldn't be awarded the marriage franchise. Keep repressing the bad science, it's irrelevant to the point I'm making here.

By this argument, it can be easily inferred that marriage should be conditional on the presence of children. Unfortunately, over the past century increasing numbers of male/female pairs have married but not ever had children. A lot of these are couples who are childless by choice, yet enjoy the married rights like visitation rights in hospital, default inheritance, and health insurance options.

My idea is to limit marriage to a much more restrictive set of people. Specifically, couples who have dependents on their tax returns or once had dependents on their tax returns. Divorce, lose your tax status and start over. Re-marry with your dependents still on your tax return, you get the status back. But if your children grow and file on their own and then you divorce, you completely lose married tax status until you marry someone with dependents.

1. Married status shall be extended to two adult couples directly involved in raising children, as determined by dependents on the tax return.
2. Married status shall continue for a couple so long as they remain married.
3. Divorce will terminate married status, and not confer rights to regain married status later.

Of course something like this is impossible without a parallel institution to catch those people who now:

• Re-marry after the kids are moved out.
• Never have kids.
• Have kids that have filed for emancipation.

An institution such as civil unions. Something that confers most of the rights of Marriage, but perhaps not the tax-advantaged status of marriage. There has to be a difference for it to be significant, but functionally they'd be very similar.

This provides several family-friendly incentives:

• A disincentive for divorce
• Encourages us to keep the US birth rate above 2.0
• Restricts marriage to those adult pairs who intend to raise children, which is, of course, one man and one woman (sssh, don't tell about artificial insemination and adoption)

It also provides one significant bonus to the increasing US deficit. The decreased number of people filing joint returns will boost tax revenues.

That said, this is a doomed proposal for a few reasons. Chief among them being that it increases taxes for a certain class of people and tax-increases are a hard sell these days. Second among them is the very real possibility of increasing taxes on retired members of AARP, a force to be taken lightly at your own risk.

Thanks to increases in longevity, it is becoming more and more common for people well north of 70 to remarry once their spouse dies. This has very real financial impacts, as marriage at that age can significantly affect who gets what money when a death happens, as well as the marriage deduction on tax returns. For those who haven't saved very well, that extra couple thousand bucks in April can mean quite a lot.

While it does address this frequently stated objection to homosexual marriage, the objection itself is fundamentally flawed. Marriage is a financial state that also happens to benefit children. Marriage is still a very useful instrument for post-menopausal women with no dependents. The argument of, "It's for the children," just doesn't hold much water.

But don't let me stop you. Go ahead and eviscerate Marriage in the legal code. We'll need a non-marriage framework anyway, and I'll be right here to help build it.