Common Law marriage laws are immoral. This is not because people choose to cohabit. It is because the laws of society force the marital state onto people who have chosen not to take that version of the contract. As the grey swan notes:

Look, if people want a legally-binding marriage, it is a simple matter to do so.  Go down to the local Justice of the Peace and fill out some paperwork.  That’s it.

That there are some who are unwilling to do so should indicate that the legal arrangement of marriage is unsatisfactory to both the parties involved.  I would imagine this is due to the existence of alimony, child support, the ease of divorce, and the newfound tendency for some judges to toss out binding prenuptial agreements.

If one is serious about saving the institution of marriage, it is obvious that there is right way to go about doing so, and a wrong way to go about doing so.

The wrong way is by instituting/supporting common law marriages.  If people don’t enter into a marital contract, it is because they don’t want to do so.  It is profoundly immoral to force them to do so by back-door legal means.  And doing so does nothing to save marriage anyway.  All it really accomplishes is subjecting men to the profoundly anti-man side of the legal system known as divorce law.  And that is no way to win friends.

In contrast, the right way to go about preserving and defending marriage is to “deregulate” it, in a sense.   Child support needs to go.  Alimony needs to go.  These things are merely market distortions, and, as such, create a market imbalance, as seen by the declining participation rate.  Men don’t want to marry because marriage becomes, essentially, a 35% income tax rate (alimony and child support payments can eat up to 70% of a man’s income, and there is a 50% chance of divorce, yielding an effective income tax rate of 35%).

When all is said and done, marriage, legally speaking, is just a contract.  One of the great things about contracts is that they are highly customizable.  Unfortunately, the governments’ involvement (at the behest of conservatives and feminists) has led to market distortions.  As is seen in the labor market, the government artificially increased entrance costs to marriage.  And like the labor market, participation in the marriage market has declined in response.  Quelle surprise, non?

via Le Cygne Gris.

I partially agree. The secular state should keep out of marriage. In a theocracy, the state church should render marriage… by the ancient laws, which do not include alimony and assume paternal custody of children.

If you are living in a secular state, you can marry as you choose, by which contract you choose. The Kirk can keep the discipline of preserving those consonantal marriages people choose to have. Or choose not to. This allows women and men to choose the structure they agree to… or choose not to commit.

But the current system of compulsion profoundly removes from all the ability to choose.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Daybook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.