Wedlockstep

When I was quite young, my entire image of marriage was filtered through the bible of Bride Magazine. I thought about how lovely I would look in white tulle, and about the kind of love that could turn frogs into princes and pumpkins into coaches. My head spun with romantic images, as well as religious ones, cobbled from one part Jane Austen, one part "Colored Francie"--the first black Barbie Doll--and five parts earnest prayer that I would one day end up at an altar vowing eternal fealty to someone with just a quarter of Paul McCartney's manly virtues. It was a bit of a lead balloon as fantasies go, weighted down with enough political confusion to spell doom for all actual suitors.

Years later, I went to law school and realized that there was a parallel universe. Here, there was also something called marriage, but it was first and foremost a subspecies of contract. In this decidedly unfrilly model, the marriage bureau acts as a kind of repository where individuals formally register their intentions regarding the sharing of private wealth, responsibility in case of emergencies or death, and the distribution of any public benefits for which they may be eligible. If a "will" disposes of property after death, marriage in the eyes of the state was a kind of contract that assigned the benefits of the same estate during life. Indeed, the litigation that made it into our textbooks almost always involved spouses with sufficient resources to fight over.

It was simple and unadorned when you thought about it like that. The essence of all contract law is to provide a way of allowing people to privately order their lives and for the state to remain outside the maelstrom of emotions that would be involved if there were no expectations about who gets what when two individuals and their families hitch their fates to the same pool of property. A marriage license is a way of saying that one's spouse and/or the children will inherit rather than having the kind of disorder that would ensue if a random judge were always to split the goodies among nearest and not so dearest. Given the straightforwardness of this structure, I see no reason that gays, elderly or friends shouldn't be able to "marry" in the eyes of the state, as long as the parties are of sufficient rationality and age to consent.

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