Good morning X. I wanted to take some time to respond to your post about solving e-Bill's apartment rental problem with gay marriage. I see that in the intervening time lots of people have chimed in to say that of course gays should be able to get married if they want to. As I'm sure you know, I don't disagree with that. On the other hand, I can't be so flip about it. Earnest soul that I am, I can't help but ponder the implications.
I've often thought about why gays might want to get married when I've said for years that I wouldn't even consider it. I suppose that some of it is just wanting to express the commitment of their relationships. And some of it is probably just assertiveness or defiance. But I'd bet most of it is about the perceived bennies.
Married status and single status come with different sets of accounting procedures. There is a lot of law around marriage. I suppose that most of that law derives from the time when men earned and wives and children needed legal protection. As marriage has changed, the accounting procedures have become distorted. I can remember when tax schedules favored me as a married taxpayer. I remember when that switched. And now they're talking about changing it again. We have one set of laws for single and one for married but there are lots of variations in our married couples and the laws don't work well for all of them. I wouldn't consider marriage because I/we would pay more in taxes and get stuck with a lot of boilerplate rules that my spouse and I might prefer to design to suit ourselves.
Enter gay couples. I suppose that some would benefit from the tax law or access to health benefits for a dependent partner, for example, and others would be like me and find the rules confining and the financially detrimental. I don't see why they should not be able to make that choice like anyone else.
On the other hand, when we say anyone can marry anyone regardless of gender, we've taken a big step towards my view that marriage is just a choice between accounting procedures just like merger partners choose between pooling of interests vs. purchase accounting, like businesses choose between partnership and incorporation, like you and I choose between traditional and Roth IRAs, like Michael Jordon chooses between boxers and briefs. I wonder where that might go.
I might change my tune about marriage, for example, as I get on in years and have one foot in the grave. If I plan to leave my estate to a young cousin or a protege or the offspring of my best friend, why not marry that person, in name only, of course, and get the estate tax benefits of passing my money on to a spouse? If my beneficiary were male, I could do that now, but I wouldn't because it seems really weird. However, if we further distort the notion of marriage and I could use that technique with either a male or female beneficiary, maybe it wouldn't seem so weird. Lots of people will do lots of semi-weird things to save a buck. Or maybe I could "marry" my neighbor or best friend or some street person who is a total stranger on my death bed so that person could get survivor benefits on my pension. Why not?
So I wonder if solving e-Bill's apartment rental problem with gay marriage isn't using an atom bomb on an anthill.
Karen |
