Soooo I heard some interesting banter yesterday on talk radio. The slightly right-wing host (‘slightly’ as in Shag is slightly tall) was discussing the topic of Maryland’s courts hearing testimony on the constitutionality of restricting marriage to a man and a woman. He had a guest come on who has written a book about marriage and the new American caste system (http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=1921). The synopsis is that in the past three decades, women who go to college have followed the traditional “woman meets man, women marries man, they have baby” scenario in life, while women who don’t go to college more often have babies out of wedlock. As you can probably predict, the college-educated women who marry are better off than their single-mother counterparts.
The host kept trying to turn this into an argument against same-sex marriage, but the guest kept resisting it. And I agreed. Same sex unions who raised kids would presumably be better off and give their children better iving conditions just like their traditional counterparts. It’s not the fact that they’re man and woman, it’s the fact of having two adults pooling their resources to raise a child.
Then I wondered: Why do married couples get a tax break anyway? Perhaps in the past once marriage came, there would be a purchase of a house, and therein a need for a tax break. But we get tax breaks on mortgage interest anyway. So…why not do away with the tax break for marriages, create a civil union status for non-standard couples, and then give more tax breaks for those raising children. Because face it: the drain on your pocket when you get married in negligible compared to the drain on your pocket once you reproduce.
So allow same-sex unions, but don’t get any tax benefits to them (or married couples either). Just give the benefits to those raising children (married and civil parents alike). Because in the end, the purpose of life is to propagate the species. Otherwise, why do I have all those nerve endings in the reproduction areas?
My $.02 Weed