Maggie's Farm

a non-religious marriage is more than a secular contract, between two individuals. it establishes a kind of entity itself, which has a set of default rights and duties against the rest of the world, and the man and woman have with and towards each other. this includes contract, property, in/testate rights, etc.

looking at it from that point of view, and given the fact that any attorney can draft a set of contracts, deeds, etc., that closely mimic the economic relations in a marriage of two normal people, I'm troubled by the slight distinction between the default set of property rules of normal marriage and the mashup of agreements for gays. clearly the gays have the worst of it.

but is this a fight worth fighting? unfettered economic freedom to me is more important than whether gays can order their economic lives.

if someone wants to totally trash the economic rights of gays (e.g., denying gays the common practice of holding property as joint tenants survivorship rights as a pseudo-marital property right), fine by me, but can this be done without wholesale interference with the economic rights of the rest of us normal people (e.g., denying gays the right to mimic marital property rights might interfere with how I purchase property owned by gays holding as joint tenants)? I don't think so, and if its tried, it will be absurdly intrusive.

that said, the very idea that gays can form long term stable relationships that are marriages in the normal sense is patently stupid, beyond those outriders on the bell curve.