On Privatizing Marriage...

Just finished “Nudge” – a libertarian tome on how to help people make better choices without restricting their freedom. One of their nudges was the proposal of privatizing marriage.

This would essentially turn what we know as marriage today into simply a civil union. Instead of getting a marriage license from the state, you would get a piece of paper licensing a civil union. Any contract beyond that would be dealt by another institution – the church. I presume that the majority of protestant churches would go on pronouncing folks man and wife as per usual. And your church would decide whether or not you can marry under their auspices, and certainly a whole marketplace of religious houses already exist so that practically any two people who desired would no longer have an obstacle.

What this would do would essentially eliminate the debate on gay marriage – the government would no longer be involved in or associated with the notion of “marriage” at all. They would have nullified the argument not by granting homosexual marriage rights, but by moving everyone down to the civil union level. No distinction between the benefits of being married and the benefits of having a civil union. It seems like human rights activists would have to be appeased by this – if all benefits are present, and all are equal, how can you take issue with that arrangement – no matter what you call it?

But if you simply find-and-replace “marriage” with “civil union,” are there any other ramificiations? Are marriages less consequential somehow without government sanction? i.e. Would we see any social changes that would affect our society for better or worse? Certainly, we could expect the amount of marriages overall to increase, accounting for all of the people who could now marry as a result. Would heterosexual marriages also increase? Would it all seem like “less of a big deal” such that we’d have high school sweethearts rushing out to get married, ahem a civil union, with the deep underlying knowledge, that they may have multiple marriages in their lifetime, creating a new social norm that makes it even less sacred than it already is? Would good friends across the globe apply for civil unions for the government benefits alone? Would our society be less stable if people saw not having a civil union with someone as “leaving money on the table.” Or is that argument inane simply because, nothing’s stopping anyone from doing that now, other than the fact that it says marriage instead of civil union on the document.

Or is the concept of privatizing marriage too idealized? When we privatized healthcare with the HMO system, government was still very much entangled, via a world of lobbyists vying for favorable legislation. What sort of additional “marriage markets” would crop up for various couples, and how would the government still be involved with the industry if not the endorsement of marriages.

I did find another interesting 2007 OpEd which brings in a lot of the history of marriage, but didn’t help me resolve any of these thoughts…. I’m intrigued by these libertarian folks…