The current protracted civil liberty battle for the rights of gay couples to "marry," seems to me a counterintuitive move, but for completely opposite reasons to those that so called social conservatives adduce. I find myself more and more opposed to the institution of marriage, as an institution of dubious heritage, questionable history, negative consequence to individuals and as having an odious role in social exclusionary tactics, cementing particular sorts of political status quo.

Marriage is enshrined in many constitutions as the foundation upon which the supposed fundamental unit of society is based. Consider, with the emotional detachment necessary for reading any document so barbaric as the Irish Constitution, whether the "family" described in this article could be anything other than the traditional, theistic union of woman and man, replete with customary conjugal offspring:

The Family

Article 41

1. 1° The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.

2° The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.

2. 1° In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.

2° The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.

3. 1° The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.

2° A Court designated by law may grant a dissolution of marriage where, but only where, it is satisfied that ­

i. at the date of the institution of the proceedings, the spouses have lived apart from one another for a period of, or periods amounting to, at least four years during the five years,

ii. there is no reasonable prospect of a reconciliation between the spouses,

iii. such provision as the Court considers proper having regard to the circumstances exists or will be made for the spouses, any children of either or both of them and any other person prescribed by law, and

iv. any further conditions prescribed by law are complied with.

3° No person whose marriage has been dissolved under the civil law of any other State but is a subsisting valid marriage under the law for the time being in force within the jurisdiction of the Government and Parliament established by this Constitution shall be capable of contracting a valid marriage within that jurisdiction during the lifetime of the other party to the marriage so dissolved.
I understand that the hitherto neutral (on this) US constitution has been narrowly avoiding for years now a constitutional amendment (the FMA) which might render it similar enough in implication to the rather embarrassing document above.

There are plenty of sources for the case against marriage. You hear about how until recently, marriage was a part of the legal complex of the institutional slavery of women. How it is, by all accounts, an institution with troublingly (for any secular society) religious origins and character. How it may not, in fact, be the optimal frame around which a human being can build her or his life. How it might, actually, play into the hands of the established order that people feel compelled, whether by belief or tradition, to organize themselves in these small units of shared, insular responsibility.

I'm not sure these matter all that much. Certainly some of them matter to me, but perhaps they matter to me for personal reasons. I've seen an increasing number of my childhood and school friends married lately. I've taken to nonattendance at these events, the reason being that I can't shake a feeling of the inherent wrongness of it. That something is happening that I ought to be saving my friends from. I sense that I would feel a similar misgiving if I were expected to be in happy attendance at a ritual genital mutilation, or something else like that; I'm pretty sure there's nothing coincidental about this sense... Both events seem to me to carry the same measure of collective acceptance in the relevant society, the same distinctly religious motivation and history, and both elicit from me the same sort of moral outrage. I get the impression, vindicated by my subsequent observations, that my friends are being pushed to the side of their own lives by unquestioningly giving themselves to a damaging, although invisible, ritual.

So... yes. It's probably personal. Does that matter? The political question is just around the corner.

I'm probably never going to do it. There are without doubt many others like me. Since Roman times and before, however, the legal frameworks of states have starkly incentivized married life, by all sorts of avenues. In the present day, this takes the form of law directly bearing on, or having some relevance to, financial benefits available to married people. The Augustan marriage reforms are a telling example, however, of how consistent this sort of legal consolidation of marriage has been... and there is plenty of lucid analysis in classical history of exactly how the resultant social order was advantageous to the Principate.

People who do not choose to conform to this, on the face of it absurd, societal form of life, by being denied the benefits held out as incentives by perennial political orders: are they not being discriminated against in an unforgivable way, especially considering the fact that marriage as a form of life is as distinctly arbitrary as its archaic and religious status makes it? Aren't the myriad political or ethical reasons for avoidance of marriage sufficient to guarantee that entrance to the institution oughtn't in a civilized society to guarantee its entrants any perceivable advantage over those who refuse? Aren't even personal reasons not to conform to this organizational structure legitimate before the court interested in assuaging the most garish of inequalities sensitive to mere preference?

I am also personally against marriage, but what is my personal opinion should not be generally viewed as having some œnegative consequences to individuals as you make it out to be, especially with regard to gay marriage rights, which to me is challenging the norm far more than our type who think the whole institutionalization of marriage is a political and social facade. Article 41 is certainly problematic when it comes to individual freedom, especially 2.2 which is just pure sexism (and other such articles, such as the illegality of abortion). However, whether or not there is religious or other influences that have created the institutionalization of marriage, there are benefits and there is also the freedom to choose between those who find the ideal of marriage and children and a life together wholesome. I know the arguments that follow, that a certificate does not necessarily mean anything and I totally agree, hence why I am against the whole thing, but everyone is not me. I wanted the answers as to why the clouds stay up in the air as a kid while most girls played with dolls and imitated their parents. Not everyone can function without religion, or without society, or without a lot of the cultural and social customs that have been fabricated to keep people together “ they NEED marriage to give them some sort of purpose. And that™s fine, so long as marriage isn™t coerced onto our type.

When it comes to the information that you provided regarding the constitution, I agree that amendments are certainly around the corner, but abolishing marriage is not the answer “ that is your personal opinion being coerced onto others. I am a vegetarian but I don™t stop others from eating meat, however staunchly committed I am. And your comparison with genital mutilation is fallacious; mutilation may be socially accepted in certain cultures, but there is no choice involved.

Ultimately, it is the freedom to choose that is important. So, go to your friends weddings! :|

I wasn't proposing that we ought to abolish marriage, just that perhaps we should eliminate inequalities which favour married people over singles.

I appreciate that I'm free to choose, but I question whether marriage ought to be set up by the institutions of state as a conduit through which privileges are exclusively bestowed upon individuals, such that to never marry is to be denied these privileges.

I agree with everything else you say, apart from your final imperative. I'm just not a wedding person.

Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

I think we'd have to look at the actual privileges bestowed by particular states upon married couples before leaping to any conclusions about inequality and all that. Insofar as those privileges are just a practical way for the state to categorize and deal with the vast number of their citizens who pair-bond permanently, I see no problem with it. (e.g., hospital visitation rights or what have you -- seems like a no-brainer.)

Anyway, I'm increasingly convinced that, in some senses, being 'to the side of one's own life,' living within a set of well-inscribed and communally understood traditions, lifelong narratives and obligations, and having one's choices constrained by them, can be considerably preferable to standing, alone in the dark, at the centre of one's life. (Obviously not in the sense that such traditions have served to treat human beings as little more than chattel. But I simply can't find it in myself to be repelled by the fact that kids from my graduating class are starting to get married. As a ceremonial public announcement of shared affection, commitment, responsibility, and as a recognition that they and their families belong to one sort of coherent symbolic order, it feels to me like a charming throwback at worst.)

Certainly, in our societies, the institution of marriage has gone a long way toward rehabilitation, in terms of its original role in the trading of children and coercion of women. I wouldn't consider it irrevocably damned simply by its association with that past. But I feel you will object to any sort of social institution that exacts those sorts of expectations on people, which brazenly limits their choices in life, and you're particularly creeped out by anyone's willing submission to it. I certainly cherish my liberty too, but I have little trouble understanding such submission -- it's a marvelous casting-off of doubt and decision-making, affirmed in the embrace of loving family and solid tradition, and I'm not so deluded that I think my quite unbounded-but-unguided approach to life is inherently better or more rewarding.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Having just graduated from school and with no clear direction to my life, the agonies of choice are particularly salient to me at this time.

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But I simply can't find it in myself to be repelled by the fact that kids from my graduating class are starting to get married. As a ceremonial public announcement of shared affection, commitment, responsibility, and as a recognition that they and their families belong to one sort of coherent symbolic order, it feels to me like a charming throwback at worst.
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For those who can actually believe and feel something toward these symbolic gestures, well, I envy them. The problem here is that people like myself CANNOT, it is impossible for us to believe in all the ostentation and pretense that exists in between. I am cursed by being the non-existent existing narrator of the story, not the character who just blindly accepts what comes his/her way. I feel more real, more alive and can sense the world better only when I am alone and separate from all these symbolic orders that make up most of society. We are the cursed, tragic and romantic philosophers that want things that are real or genuine “ hence the problem, since that hardly exists “ the ones that ultimately suffer at the hands of our conflicting perceptions and knowledge of ourselves and others alike. The only thing that keeps us alive is watching others, and like myself, even helping them.

With your full disclosure at completing your studies, I recommend you choose what you feel is right, even if that is marriage to your girl or getting a job and working toward something for yourself. But the prejudice about that life being œsuperior or an ultimate and moral goal should be challenged, but only if you can. You shouldn't see it as some higher order, but just another order.