2004 Issues: does anyone know couples who think marriage is a stigma? [View All]

[AP]

Do you know couples, same sex or opposite sex, who think of marriage as a stigma, and therefore don't get married?

I do.

In some respects, they're crazy. Marriage confers lots of valuable social and economic benefits that shift power from their wealthy employers down to their working/middle class asses. They forego those benefits because they don't like the religious/spiritual implications of marriage.

I think that if the government got out of the business of saying that there was a spiritual element to the rights marrigage confers on them (ie, if the government ONLY issued civil unions to everyone, and got out of the marrigage business altogether), these people would get civil unions and they'd be wealthier and more powerful.