I'll probably regret this

sometime later in my life, but I'm going to wade into the Family Marriage Act discussion because the solution seems so simple despite all the controversy surrounding the topic of gay marriage. You know what that solution is? Get the government out of the marriage business. I mean, why do they care, seriously? Outside of tax purposes and laws directly related to marriage and divorce, the fact that someone is recognized as married or not seems to be completely irrelevant to anything the government is doing. Thus it would seem relatively easy to change the tax laws and re-work the marriage/divorce laws to encompass any communal association between people as having tax and long term income consequences and let people behave as they'd like.

Historically speaking, marriage is a religious ceremony that was adopted by the government based on its prevalence in society. By separating this religious recognition from state interference (and continuing to separate church and state), the public objection to gay marriage will wane. It's the word we're fighting over here, not the social contract between two consenting adults. Religiously speaking, marriage is a sacred vow. Governmentally speaking, marriage is a social contract subject to dissolution much like financial contracts. The government doesn't care whether two people are meant for each other or if they are in love, they only care that these two people have agreed to contractually join together as one entity to be recognized as such in their dealings going forward (or not, as they choose). The gays that I know are fighting for the governmental benefits of being "married", not the religious recognition of their social contract as a sacred vow. Yes, the later is important to some, but there are churches out there who would do this today, regardless of the legality of this recognition.

But wait, you say, would this impact heterosexual marriage as well? Yep. Any couple who wanted to join together under a social contract be it heterosexual, homosexual, or non-conjugal in nature, would indicate their willingness to do so through a process similar to getting a marriage license today. Once that license was granted, people could go to a church if they wanted their civil union recognized religiously or to a judge to have it recognized legally, and that'd be that. They could throw a party, have a reception, go on a celebratory trip, and everyone would be happy.

Of course, there are things like insurance policy implications, health benefit implications, employment implications, etc. that would have to be dealt with, but these would become economic decisions instead of social ones. Companies could recognize or ignore these social contracts as they saw fit based on the profile of their prospective employee. Insurance companies could give discounts to people in social contracts or not and rights of survivorship could transfer or not depending on how the company wanted to do business. Since all contracts would be social in nature, whether they were straight, gay, or otherwise would be irrelevant to these companies. Family court would be replaced by social contract court and all dissolutions of social contracts would be treated like divorces today.

I believe that science has shown that it's the long term social commitment between two individuals that is beneficial to people's health, their children, and their overall happiness. This has held true regardless of whether the couple in the long term social relationship has been legally/religiously married or not. Since the act of getting married is no longer indicative of people's commitments to these types of long term relationships, those supporting the FDA would be better off supporting long term relationships generally than supporting the 51% of people who get divorced. Separating religious marriage from governmental social contracts would allow the sociologists in favor of these relationships to support them, it would allow the religious people to have their word back, and it would allow others to reap the benefits of these social contracts without having to worry about the nature of their relationship. It seems like a perfect solution to me.