| | Michael,
I said, "Government should never be involved in marriage (except in civil court to resolve differences). And at the national level it is absurd! Where is the power to define "marriage" located in the constitution?"
Nothing in your reply answers the question of where in constitution do we find the power to define "marriage" - I, and everyone else, knows that the constitution was amended to permit income taxes and that there are different rates for married and unmarried individuals - that is NOT the same as defining marriage. I pointed that out, yet you continue to ignore it.
1) Declaring, at a national level, that gays cannot be married couples, is not the same as 'national government is involved in marriage.'
2) My discussion was about what government should and should not do, so why you choose to describe what some states or cultures currently do is beyond me.
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You asked, "Would you say that under objective law, rather than having 'marriages,' all that could exist would be parternships, as with any other business arrangement[?]"
Not exactly. I would say that people can do anything that they want to do that doesn't violate the rights of another. That would include establishing certain agreements - like pre-nuptual agreements, guardianship arrangments, wills, medical trust agreements, etc. It doesn' t matter that these would relate to a romantic partnership or people in family structure. These are civil arrangements and would be adjucated, if needed, in a civil court. If I make an agreement with my neighbor regarding the use of shared gardening tools, it doesn't imply the creation of a "partnership" of any kind. There is no need to establish a legal status that is on-going like "partnership" or "corporation" or "married couple" - not for the law, not for government. All that is needed is an understanding on things like dividing common property in breakups, child care, wills, etc. This can be with filed agreements, or the law will handle things just as when a person dies without a will there is a probate court.
There are many relationship types that people can have that don't require, and should NOT have government interference: friends, friends with benefits, lovers, cohabitating couple, roommates, engaged couple, married couple, etc. People establish a relationship, and they define it explicitly or they don't, but in any case it isn't a place for government. If you want to discuss property then you can do so without reference to the relationship.
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You keep saying that marriage is about property. That is only one aspect of marriage, and not a necessary one. Two people in love run off and get married without a thought about property. They have no property to speak of. That is proof that you statement is false. Robinson Crusoe decides to get married and you start thinking of property which doesn't make sense. Robinson Crusoe may be a man who believes that marriage is a moral state and he creates a ceremony that he and girl Friday perform to create their state of marriage. If marriage hadn't been taken up by government, which starts making rules about things like common property, divorce, etc, then property wouldn't be a part of marriage except where the couple chose to make it so.
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I don't know why you repeatedly exempt marriage, which you say is about property rights, from the law of identity. Nothing is exempt from the law of identity - that is the nature of a metaphysical law.
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You wrote, "They can be married only if they both came from cultures with marriage rites. If for some odd reason one of them came from a society without any marriage rites, it might well be impossible for the other to explain."
I disagree. Marriage was a human invention. It is seen differently in different cultures, and different people in the same culture view if differently - humans created it, changed it, and adopt it in unique fashions each and every day. If a person born in a culture that has a marriage custom can learn it, so can a person not born in such a culture. Is a person who was born in a culture with no understanding of electricity doomed to never being able to understand it - forever blocked from learning of that kind? Not hardly!
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I said that marriage is a "private, personal social issue" - if you look at the context of the discussion where I said that you can see, that I meant that it was private rather than governmental, and I meant that it has a primarily 'personal' rather than business function in our culture. And I meant it was social in that it often includes friends and family to participate in the celebration, and that society recognizes the 'married' status - it is a social distinction.
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You said that marriage can ONLY exist in society. I disagree. It only requires two people - they could be alone on a desert island. But I would agree that it has a place in society and becomes a part of a societies culture.
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Cultural anthropology tells you what different societies have defined as marriage. That is a pursuit that can be done objectively. But what is more important is to define what marriage should be (which can also be done objectively).
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