@RareDenver – Yes, married couples have a whole slew of legal rights that non married couples do not have, including tax advantages. Just for example, the ability to file one’s taxes jointly…can’t be done in the US if you’re not married. Yes, for some couples, our tax structure is set up so that there is a “marriage penalty” and for that reason couples can file separately instead of jointly if it saves them money, but for most couples, it’s a tax advantage to be able to file jointly.
Second issue is health benefits…with our current messed up for profit health insurance system, it’s really, really dangerous to be uninsured, and for a LOT of couples, it make a lot of sense for the whole family to go on one worker’s plan (for some couples only one works). Most employers who offer health care coverage subsidize it to some level for their employees as a benefit (though the high profit margins have made this less of a sure thing). For example, maybe you can get insurance for yourself for $200 a month and for your spouse for $400 a month on your employer’s plan, still pretty steep, but if your spouse, whose job doesn’t offer health insurance were to seek out a plan, they might pay $800 a month for themselves. Now the difference between the $400 and the $800 per month is pretty big to begin with. But there’s a double whammy here. Let’s say the company pays $800 per person per month for health insurance, so they’re effectively subsidizing $600 a month of your premium and $400 a month of your spouse’s premium. Let’s say you work for a progressive company which offers “domestic partners” this subsidy…in fact, before my wife and I got married, but after we had been living together, we would have qualified as “domestic partners” and I DID work for a company which offered her benefits. But we didn’t take them, evne though it would have been subsidized. Why? Because the portion that the company paid on her behalf would, for tax purposes, be considered “taxable income”, and having an additional $400 a month in compensation added to my W-2 would have made my taxes go way up, so yeah, there were tax consequences that way.
But tax benefits are just the start of it. What if you want kids? Well, let’s say 2 people of the same sex have a kid, the kid is biologically one partner’s, but the other partner is going to have a hard time legally adopting the kid. And let’s say they do everything right, but the partner whose biological kid it is dies, that person may have been a parent to this kid for say 15 years, but if some sixth cousin, twice removed comes out of the woodwork and wants the kid, THAT person has more legal rights in the US than the adoptive same sex parent! This will often happen if say the dead party is the one who made all the money, let’s say they were a one income family, one party stayed at home, built the family, basically was the backbone of that family, but blood supercedes that person’s rights, so they could end up losing their kids, their home, EVERYTHING because some greedy person had the thinnest of blood relations to the other person and maybe just plain didn’t approve and wanted to shut this other person out.
There are something like I believe I heard 2,000+ legal rights that are conveyed with the contract of marriage, and some can be obtained easily through a separate contract, some are much harder to contract for and some can’t be contracted for outside a legal marriage. Another example would be, one partner gets sick, ends up in the hospital, their life partner can’t even VISIT their sick partner because they are not related.
It’s WAY fucked up, it’s writing discrimination and hatred into law.
