In yesterday’s Times, Stephanie Coontz writes another anti-marriage opinion piece. Coontz always goes for the cool and hip, but leaves the logic behind. Someone at the Times must have said, "hey, let’s distract people from our snoring columnists. Someone call up that kook, Coontz."

Coontz starts off with a history of how the state got into the business of legitimizing marriage. Actually, I found the history quite interesting.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a
marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they
had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the
Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

In
1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in
church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and
obligations as a couple married in church: their children were
legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was
subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.

Not until the
16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be
performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent
unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.

Government began relying on the marriage license in the 1950s, as a way of distributing social security benefits and health insurance. But Coonz says the marriage license no longer makes sense, because people aren’t getting married anymore.

Possession of a marriage license is no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other. But it still determines which obligations a couple can
keep — who gets hospital visitation rights, family leave, health care
and survivor’s benefits. This may serve the purpose of some moralists.
But it doesn’t serve the public interest of helping individuals meet
their care-giving commitments.

So, Coontz wants us to do away with this marriage license nonsense. There are so many reasons to have problems with this argument that I don’t even know where to begin.

I’ll let the social conservatives talk about why state sanctioned marriages force feet draggers to get married and that this is good for children and society. Instead, I’ll talk about why the marriage license is good for women.

So, Steve and I get married  on a mountain top, by a hippie who got his ministerial license from an ad in Rolling Stone magazine. We have no state license, just a batik print paper from the hippie saying that we’re married. We hang out for few years and have a couple of kids. Then he decides that he wants the corporate life and a wife who shaves her legs. He leaves me in the trailer park with the dirty kids. I need to sue him for child support, but now he says that the marriage wasn’t binding, because the hippie officiant was stoned at the time. I think he’ll have the edge in court.

That marriage license provides women with guarantees for social security, alimony, and child support. Women need these protections, because they are more likely then their spouses to stop work or to take less demanding jobs after the children are born. Women are the most vulnerable to poverty in their older years. A marriage license provides them with certain guarantees that private unions cannot.

It might even be better for women if marriage licenses were written with the details of pre-nup contract. It could provide detailed information about property divisions and proportions of future salaries, if the marriage should dissolve.

Coontz’s proposal to get government out of the marriage business might distract us from the latest Dowd column, but it is still a lousy idea.

UPDATE: A different take on this issue from bean. More from Family Scholars. See blogrunner for everything.