Canada has WMDs

[Occhidiangela]

Small disagreement on just one point: entering assumptions.

Marriages of opposite gender can be assumed to be fruit bearing until proven otherwise, or bearable of fruit. The fact that some couples either can't, medically, or won't, due to personal choices and-or medical imperatives, or try and fail, does not translate find an equivalence in same sex unions: they, by definition and mechanical impossibility, cannot 'bear fruit.' (More on that later, since surrogates, in vitro, and other tools open new possibilities.)

Then why marry?

For man-woman pairs, why marry if you have not intention of having children? The social revolution of the 60's & 70's broke many norms, and the 'living together' model reached far greater acceptance. I myself never had any intention of marrying. When I married Tina, however, we both entered into the union with the explicit agreement and aim, well ahead of time, of raising a family. Had we both not had that idea, had we both not had that goal, I'd be single to this day. (And the poorer for it, in a life sense.)

You put your finger on where the issue at hand lies: the money. The social engineering aspects of marriage laws and tax laws and a host of other regulations are all based on the (possibly defunct) common cultural assumption that a marriage is indeed that of a breeding, or breedable, pair.

If that common cultural assumption is ever rejected or overturned, then other laws can be enacted to imbue the effects of 'supporting families that stay together' (and maybe even executing a divorce lawyer once per month just to keep them all honest) that will approximate some of the tax breaks now designed to ease the tax burdens on parents raising children. Or, children will become to an even greater extent wards of the State, in some Brave New World that I am not interested in living in.

Two ways out of the non-breedable pair issue from above, both of which run into custom, which influences law, particularly in a representative form of government. (Remember China? Against the LAW to have more than one child, unless on wants punishment. In Western Europe, small families have become a matter of choice, not law, so a customary assumption/behaviour was changed.)

One is the redefinition of 'family;' A family is defined once an offspring shows up. In the case of same sex couples, adoption triggers that status, or two lesbians choosing a man as a sperm donor (David Crosby anyone), as it would for man-woman couples who breed, adopt, or whatever. This would have the effect of changing underlying assumptions of man-woman couples in favor of same gender couples, in the case of those who had no children: for any reason at all. Would that create an incentive to breed?

Would that create a disincentive to marry? Hell, is there any incentive now? As it stands now, the disincentive is in the numbers. You have rougly a 50-50 chance of having your marriage break if you marry tomorrow. I don't see those as pro marriage numbers. Ya gotta roll the bones, take a risk. :)

If the above option were chosen, I believe we'd see more adoption, and a better process than the current red tape circus. Maybe a good thing would come about for a bad reason, or maybe fostering and adoption would turn into a national nightmare. Not sure.

The other way out would be to redefine marriage in new terms completely, more along what I guess your suggested theme to be. The problem with that is that you run into a critical mass who will reject such a profound change. It takes votes to make change work, or a Supreme Court decision.

I'd put my money on the Courts beating the legislators for a very simple reason:

IMO, most folks really don't see same sex unions as a marriage, but as a different version of 'man and woman living together/in sin/fill_in_the_blank.'

Or, back to semantics, the term marriage implies and connotes two of two different genders forming a union.

Perhaps our vocabulary at present in insufficient to deal with the issue.