I'm not entirely sure it's a good thing for society, however it is a cultural institution in our society, which carries with it a host of explicit legal rights (including power of attorney, inheritance rights, child custody, job benefits, insurance benefits), which, if we were to disband marriage, would have to be established separately, probably by an attorney, which would be prohibitively expensive for a poor couple.
I don't disagree.
However... don't those things have to be established separately anyway? I mean, you have to visit $will_dude to have a will made, you have to sign up and pay for your dependent on health care anyway, you have to pay to fill out the insurance forms... and you have to do that after you're married. Most of them cost money.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I am for getting marriage out of the legal realm, but only because it seems everything important about marriage has to be declared and configured separately anyway. It just seems that marriage is a legal form you have to fill out just to have permission to do those things, instead of the thing which represents all those priviliges inherently.
But I very well could be wrong about that, as I'm not exactly an expert in legally bonding, partnership-centric paperwork.
I could be wrong, but doesn't a marriage license automatically grant some measure of power of attorney to each partner in the event the other is capacitated?
I'm thinking specifically of the case of medical care; if one spouse is unable to make a medical decision, doesn't the remaining spouse get priority say in making medical decisions?
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I could be wrong, but doesn't a marriage license automatically grant some measure of power of attorney to each partner in the event the other is capacitated?
I'm thinking specifically of the case of medical care; if one spouse is unable to make a medical decision, doesn't the remaining spouse get priority say in making medical decisions?