Abolition of Marriage Essay

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Tannia Echeverria
Professor Michael Yarbrough
Gender and Law
December 18, 2013

Should legal marriage be abolished?

The legal concept of marriage means the union of two people who love each other making their relationship public, official and permanent. It is the contract of joining two people in a bond until death, but in practice is terminated by divorce. The coexistence during the marriage period may change in their personalities, body age and romantic and emotional situations. No marriage is free of conflict but this is the way to be permanent in a bond for a certain time.

It is not comprehensible that most opponents think that marriage is just in interest of the state. The state is just pretending to protect and give some benefits to married couples, leaving behind or discriminated determinate people, lesbians and gays, because the state recognize marriage as a "fundamental right", but just for certain people, men and women.

It is correct that marriage is the union of two people all over the world but if we pretend to live in an "imaginary" world where marriage does not exist and religion does but not included, every state should consider constitutionally a world without state-recognized marriage even for same-sex couples.

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The inequality of same-sax marriage as seeing in Baehr v. Miike case, where the
Judge Levinson gave out an opinion; "the court ruled that while the right to privacy in the
Hawaii state constitution does not include a fundamental right to same-sex marriage, denying marriage to same-sex couples constituted discrimination based on sex in violation of the right to equal protection guaranteed by the state's constitution" (p. 113). At this point, there are two ways to promote equal marriage, to let every person in or exclude, but obviously the first option is the official concept.

Now, in the imaginary world the second option will be

acceptable so the state should privilege any family relationship.

The abolition of marriage in the "imaginary" world, Patricia Cain says: "people could choose their intimate association or [could] choose to avoid intimacy altogether"(p. 29). She states that people in general, men, women, gays and lesbians, choose their living arrangements, with friends or alone but the state would not interfere with the decision. They can marry in their communities with the number of people they choose and any class of gender, race or age and also what they believe yet the state would be out of these decisions.

There are some arguments that the Supreme Court has described marriage as interest.
In Loving v. Virginia, Chief Justice Warren's opinion was "Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth
Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law"
(p.304). The Supreme Court , based on unanimous decision, overturned the convictions of
Virginia's arguments that law forbidding two people of different races from marrying, giving

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them penalties to both races, could not be interpreted as racially discriminatory, for instance, the court ruled that both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause was violated in Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute. Marriage is viewed as a fundamental right and its abolition would violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet, the Constitution protects the right to marry; the states have full power to determine the content of the marriage right is and what the benefits might be.

Moreover, it is true that women are the center in the world of marriage because they, in some way, are slaves and they dominated by the men in all aspects. Women, after they got marriage, should share their interests, thoughts and points of view with their

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