1. What does the government get out having people be married?
A husband and wife, living together and caring for each other and possibly for their children is a social unit that is likely marked by a degree of stability: people living together (even if not in the same place) can rely on each other to weather the minor irritations of daily life and can lean on each other for support when crises of more tragic magnitude come along. Affection makes this association a pleasant one: people want to help those they love. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services,
A focus on the most rigorous recent evidence reveals that marriage has positive effects on certain health-related outcomes. These studies find, for example, that marriage improves certain mental health outcomes, reduces the use of some high-cost health services (such as nursing home care), and increases the likelihood of having health insurance coverage. In addition, an emerging literature suggests that growing up with married parents is associated with better health as an adult. Marriage has mixed effects on health behaviors — leading to healthier behaviors in some cases (reduced heavy drinking) and less healthy behaviors in others (weight gain). For other key health outcomes — in particular, measures of specific physical health conditions-the effects of marriage remain largely unaddressed by rigorous research (Source).
Even discounting some of these claims (this report was, after all, written during the Bush II Administration), it seems likely that marriage provides some health and social benefits that are likely to save the government money.
2. What incentives does the government provide to encourage being married (and discourage not marrying or divorcing)?
The government provides incentives directly as a result of marriage (joint tax filing; social security for spouses, etc.), plus it provides legal protections for spouses in other settings (allowing family leave to care for an ill spouse and securing the right to visit a spouse in the hospital, for example). A list of marriage benefits provided by the government and laws benefiting married people can be found at
3. How does the focus on marriage result in the government missing some significant opportunities to benefit from the commitment of adults to each other?
By creating incentives for marriage rather than for the commitment of adults to each other, the government mistakes a private religious sacrament for a public contract that has a positive social value. In the United States, the state should not pretend to any religious aim, but only to what provides a secular benefit to the state. The aims of the state should be limited to reducing public costs by having adults and children in living conditions that are conducive to their wellbeing. A formal relationship of contractually binding commitment among adults to care for each other fulfills the state’s aim. Marriage, a fundamentally religious arrangement, can be that kind of formal relationship, but it need not be the only kind.
Two sisters – never married, divorced, or widowed – who choose to make a formal commitment to care for each other and live together provide a benefit to the community and to the government. As they grow old together, the likelihood that they would need significant government services is lower than for similarly situated people without such a relationship. They should be allowed to file taxes jointly and have other benefits if they take on a formal commitment above and beyond what is normally expected of sisters.
These two sisters, a heterosexual couple, and a gay couple provide the same kind of benefit to the state and should be rewarded with the same kind of incentives to form formal commitments and to maintain them. The bar for entry into any kind of a government-recognized and rewarded formal commitment should be high, as should the bar for exit (dissolution of the commitment).
From what I have read, I believe that there is sufficient evidence out there for the benefits of paired committed relationships to make this claim about how such relationships are good for the state and society. (Anyone out there have citations?) A provocative question, one that requires empirical evidence to evaluate, would be that committed relationships of more that two people (a polygamous marriage would be an example) could provide the same kind of positive benefits to state and society as a relationship between two people. On the one hand, my bias is to see polygamous relationships as inherently bad for women: one woman is always going to be the less favorite and she will be the one who is in the weaker position vis-à-vis the others. On the other hand, I don’t recall seeing any credible studies of the social dynamics of polygamous relationships. But whether formally committed relationships among more than two adults count as something the government ought to reward with incentives for entering into that contract and disincentives for exiting should not rest on how well or poorly the relationship corresponds to the majority’s belief about the sanctity of marriage as being “between one man and one woman.” Instead we ought to take an evidence-based approach: Do such relationships create a net benefit for state and society?
4. What should our state governments in the United States do about marriage?
In a word: nothing. Leave marriage to the church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or whatever self-organizing group wants to create what they call a marriage.
The government should be in the business of encouraging adults to commit formally to care for each other and any children that come of their relationship. These commitments should be real contractually binding – the committers must promise to support each other financially and care for each other’s physical and emotional wellbeing. If this is to be a relationship in which children do or may play a role, the committers must promise to jointly raise and care for those children. It would be advisable to require witnesses who know the committers to come forth and swear that they believe that the committers are mature enough to make this commitment and that the committers are making the commitment in full cognizance of their responsibilities to each other and to the community. Only after a serious, state approved contract would committers be granted the privileges the state now reserves for the married. And like today’s marriage, the state would require significant efforts to be undertaken to dissolve the commitment.
Such a policy change would place marriage back in the hands of clergy. Whether a clergyman performs gay marriages is going to depend on his or her faith. That’s fine. Anyone can shop around for an appropriate officiant. Some formal committers will have only the state commitment (two sisters being an obvious example); others will have both a formal commitment and a marriage. It’s even possible that some will want a marriage without a formal commitment. Perhaps the difficulty of dissolving a formal commitment would be enough to dissuade these hypothetical people. That would be fine by me: the state should only give those benefits to people who are truly committed to caring for each other for the long haul.
5. Concluding comment
Our current policy in the majority of states of the Union is that the government rewards people for having a religiously approved sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex. Why? The government should instead reward people for being in committed relations that provide benefits to state and society. It’s the commitment to care for one another that matters to the government. Such commitments should be rewarded with government provided and protected benefits; such commitments should be hard to enter and hard to dissolve. Getting the government out of the marriage business would be good for committed people and good for society.
