I also don't think the one-size-fits-all model of marriage is a great one- and I'm especially peeved that you can't legally grant kinship status to an unrelated person any other way, except by adopting a child who has no say in the matter. If you want to establish legal kinship with another adult, the only way to do it is under the marriage paradigm, and even that option is not available to many people for one reason or another.

Marriage and kinship, as currently defined in the U.S., are too privileged in their legal status, and too restrictive of who is allowed to practice them. They are separate but intertwined issues that need to be dealt with in a more flexible way.

There was an episode of Kate & Allie where they were going to get kicked out of their apartment because they were two families in a designated single-family dwelling. Someone has condensed that plotline of the episode in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAMEtWAbz5Y

This aired in 1984, I looked it up on imdb, it was the 2nd episode and the series even ran 6 years after this. "Gay liberation being what it is..." What happened?

That makes sense to me, Revy, as challenging as such an enterprise would be.

If I were king for a day, I would remove all government involvement in marriage. I would substitute it with a menu system of 'domestic partnerships', where people could easily grant the legal privileges to a partner, or partners. They could pick and choose which parts they wanted to include, and which to leave out. My favorite example is the movie '3 Men and a Baby'. None of the three men were gay, they all lived together and shared the parenting duties of the baby. Under my system, they could choose to remain financially independent, but choose to legally have custody of the child, and grant hospital visitation rights to the other partners in the family.

Families can come in all shapes and sizes. Having marriage as the default for legally binding people into a family unit is not helpful. We need to junk the whole system and start fresh.

Over at Stop Me Before I Vote Again, the artistes du gauches sauvages are discussing amusingly the question of why government should even regulates marriage and establish this elaborate enforcement mechanism. I loved one comment which I merely wanted to share vis a vis the whole idea of government marriage licenses...

"All the grandiose proprieties have a parasitic enforcement and pathological mediation superstructure. It looks like a jobs and corporate welfare programs for social cretins; infantile fantasists who experience regular psychotic breaks over the "moral failings" of others, but retain enough mental wherewithal to extract a profit from the tragedies and horrors they create. The War on Drugs might be the most blatant example. Extravagant violence and sickly sweet sanctimony go hand in hand." Al Schumann