Letting the government decide your life for you? Marriage Licensing.

In a perfect world, the government would have no role in marriage. They would not sanction, prohibit, or treat anybody differently because of it in any way.

But we don't live in a perfect world. The Government uses marriage as a proxy for other legitimate actions. It grants many privileges, such as tax benefits, transferrability of family insurance coverage, and simplified probate/estate processes. It establishes responsibilities, such as joint debt liability. It cements rights, such as power of attorney, visitation, and next of kin.

Yes, many of the second and third order effects the Government allows via marriage are possible to accomplish without marriage. The process to do so outside of marriage, however, is daunting and expensive, to the point of often being prohibitive, and the process to enforce a claim to such rights/responsibilities through contract alone is even more difficult than the process of establishing those rights/responsibilities through contract alone.

So, no matter how much we would like to get government out of the "marriage" game, the realistic likelihood of doing so is essentially nil.

And that goes to the other side of the coin. If the legal contract of marriage grants benefits, privileges, responsibilities, liabilities, and rights, then the Government *necessarily* has a vested interest in creating rules and standards for the entry and dissolution of such a contract. You cannot get the Government out of the process without divesting it also of the claims established.

Once we have all of these claims, and a process for entry/exit, another concern comes in, and that is the Constitutional Right (and from a moral stance Universal Right, even if not legally recognized) to due process and equal protection/application of the law. The issues of marriage equality for same-sex marriages fall into the same bucket as the issues for marriage equality for interracial marriages, etc, etc.

The Government *must* have a compelling reason for a restriction on who may enter into that marriage or those so blocked are being denied their due process and equal protection/application rights. restrictions on the civil and contractual act of same-sex marriage, no matter how strong the religious exception taken may be, utterly fail to have a valid, compelling government interest, just as restrictions on interracial marriage did a generation ago.

Sir, I agree we let the government have to much control of what we do. But the real question is why does our government even care about this issue shouldn't they be more worried about our homeland security and the threats of ISIS on our home turf. With that said as long as people keep feeding in to this and discussing these small issues the government will continue to put there hands in it cause it puts there names is the public eye. Instead people should address these matters throug voting and putting the right people in office instead of complaining about the ones that are there.

It is based around the tax code. As marriage has a tax incentive it needs to be managed federally. The only way to change the federal requirement to marry is to change the way we collect federal tax. The fair tax (sales tax no income tax) would solve almost all of these issues. Won't help the state law items like death taxes and insurance plans, but would alleviate the federal problems. (needs an amendment to make it legal)