The practice of having a pair-bonded (mating) couple who have declared to their community that their bond is permanent is something that exists in every culture, and is a part of the human condition. I don't think it's useful to act like there's nothing distinct about it or that being someone's spouse is no different than moving in with your siblings to save money.It seems to me that she is saying that the state has an interest in preserving (or documenting) traditional, family marriage, as long as it is her definition of tradition (a mating couple) and her definition of family (which includes polygamists and homosexual couples, but not other versions of families). This seems a little hypocritical, and gives the argument back to religious conservatives, who say "Yes, and traditionally marriage is between one man and one woman."
The problem with this argument is that the definition of marriage would depend on who decides what the traditional family is. As I see it, there are at least 4 actors in marriage: the people making the commitment, the community, the state and God. For the purposes of this discussion we will ignore God---I hope to cover this on another post.
As Chanson points out, no one can stop the couple/family from considering themselves married. If the community or the state doesn't acknowledge it, this can cause inconvenience (or even loss of life, as pointed out by one of the commenters) but this individual right cannot be denied.
The community gets involved in recognizing the couple and supporting them in their lifelong commitment. This is not something that can be changed by the state. The state can determine how the community treats the couple, but they really can't determine how the community feels about the couple. In many cases, the primary communities of homosexual couples or polygamist families are fully behind their commitment. But there are some communities who don't recognize or support interracial marriage, or call it marriage, for goodness sake! You can't just tell people, "you must support and recognize this couple, because we say so," although you can tell them that "you must treat and act toward this couple the way we say."
The state is the third actor. The state determines the rights and responsibilities of the couple. So if one person wants to sever the marriage, the state sets the rules about how the contract is broken. The state tell each party what they can do, and how the couple interacts with various other legal entities (corporations, the tax collectors, hospitals, for example, but not individuals).
I was also interested to see in Chanson's comments that she equated the record keeping of motherhood with the record keeping of marriage. Motherhood is a biological fact, which is recorded by the state, which goes along with a set of responsibilities related to the biological fact. One can transfer the responsibilities through adoption, but the biological fact remains. Now that many couples don't have children together, the biological fact of marriage is severed from the cultural expression of marriage.
After thinking about this, I suppose I can see the argument a bit better. It goes like this: homosexuals (or polygamists) deserve this certain right to be married because they are just like the heterosexual couples, and not to allow it is just plain discrimination. But as Chanson points out, marriage is much more than something proposed by the state, and it seems to me that people who want to legislate the term "marriage" being used by the state about homosexual marriage are trying to influence the feelings of the community by changing the state. They'd be better off just changing the state, and then getting the community behind them by slower steps.
Note: this post is not about my own personal feelings about legalizing homosexual marriage, which are not settled. It's only about Chanson's argument that the state should not get out of the marriage business, which I think has some flaws.
