I think Marriage certificates should be given to pregnant women in order to compel their Male Lovers to provide child support.
While we're dictating our desires for legalities and parenthood, I very much want to see a mandatory DNA test before any man can be listed as a father on a birth certificate. I don't care if the couple is married or not. Men have a right to know, and having to ask for such a delicate thing is an undue burden.
Basically, marriage is a financial contract between the 2 spouses, and in the event of a divorce the richer spouse pays alimony to the poorer spouse.
Married couples are taxed preferentially to unmarried couples in the income tax, particularly if they have disparate incomes (if one is a stay-at-home parent). Additionally, married couples are entitled to increases in certain child support and other family government credits (generally also in their tax payments/refunds). Additionally, there are no estate taxes on transfers between spouses (only applicable to about 0.1% of the population, but still), and no gift taxes on transfers within the marital unit, taxes that unmarried couples must pay.
Furthermore, there are a raft of other, less tangibly economic benefits like hospital visitation rights that are extended to spouses and not to unmarried couples.
This isn't true. Households in which both spouses work receive equal benefits.
This is also true of straight spouses.
This is false. Biological parents do not have to pay child support, and very few same-sex couples with children receive any kind of child support from biological parents. Most same-sex couples with children either adopted those child or had them through surrogates, where child support is not an issue. Among those few who did not, almost none receive child support.
If the point is to subsidize schools, couples without children should pay more taxes regardless of marital status or orientation. That would be arguable (probably idiotic as policy, but internally consistent), but it is not the current system, nor remotely resembling it.
Furthermore, many of the policies I cited, like the estate tax and gift tax, are benefits designed for internal support between spouses rather than support of children. Federal law treats married couples as a single legal unit, regardless of whether they have children or not. The support of children is not even a factor in gift or estate tax. Gifts to children are tax-free regardless as they are considered "support", so no gift tax between spouses provides no benefit at all to children. Additionally, children inheriting
are subject to estate tax, regardless of where the money is coming from, so the exemption again is clearly to benefit the spouse and not the children.
As above, if this were the case, marriage tax breaks would only benefit families with children. It does not. Even if it did, it would not be an argument against gay couples with children from having marriage benefits. Therefore, either the purpose is not to benefit families with children, in which case your premise is false, and therefore nothing follows from it, or gay couples with children should be allowed to marry while straight couples without children should not be allowed to marry, in which case your premise is true but your conclusion is false.
