My head…

Wow, great question, and it reinforces my opinion that the marriage contract should be established federally and not on a state-by-state basis. If the contract you establish in one state is not portable to another, what good is the contract?

And I hadn’t thought of the bigamy angle. I guess my husband and I won’t be marrying those nice ladies across the street after all!

I’ve heard people argue that government should “just do civil unions” and “leave marriages to churches” because that would “solve the problem”. Yeah, except for the establishment clause in the First Amendment.

@Kristie: To add to what Cory said, the govt-free marriage argument is ridiculous. Spouse is a legal status and the government enforces this status. Cory already listed some examples as to where this status comes into play. How do you resolve these legal relationships by abolishing legal marriage? You can come up with another system, but it would still take some level of government to enforce it, otherwise it would be useless. Or is the goal to have private entities pick and choose which marriages they want to recognize? I suspect a field-day of discrimination will follow and ignoring spousal relationships in order to avoid paying benefits.

There are yet some issues regarding polygamy that can’t be neatly solved under the current legal construct that is marriage. Mostly having to do with property rights, custody of children in the dissolution of the marriage, inheritance issues, etc. These are all coded to deal with a partnership of just two people. To legalize polygamy would require a radical redefinition (and not just the dictionary kind) of marriage – in addition to every single law where the term “marriage” is used. It’s one thing (a very easy thing – see Canada) to open marriage to same sex couples, as none of the technical rules change. To open marriage to polyamorous relationships is, under any current legal infrastructure, impossible.

Barring the Loving v. Virginia decision which found marriage to be an unenumerated right relative to race, thereby making such discrimination illegal and the question moot, how were interracial marriages ignored – or were they ignored – legally, prior to the LvV decision?

Some jurisdictions with gay marriage only recognise foreign gay marriages, not marriage-equivalents. This was the case when the Cortes Generales legalised gay marriage in 2005: initially it was possible for someone in a British Civil Partnership to get a gay marriage in Spain.

Some jurisdictions with marriage-equivalents don’t recognise marriage-equivalents from other specific jurisdictions. For example, the UK doesn’t recognise DC registered partnerships or HI reciprocal beneficiaries.

Other jurisdictions don’t recognise any out-of-state marriage-equivalents. This was the case in DC until mid-2009.

All this means that in 2006-2008 it was possible for someone already in a Hawaiian reciprocal beneficiary relationship to get (in order) a Domestic Partnership in Washington, a Civil Partnership in London, married in Madrid, then married in Rome.