There's more at stake than individual rights.
You miss the point. Married couples (de facto or otherwise) do not lead an individual life. They view themselves as 'one' so to speak. To treat two peoples 'joined' life on an individual level destroys what marriage is about; which is the joining of two lives for the purpose of being together. Financially, they are intrinsically linked. Dismantling that renders the concept of marriage in the government eyes as blank. It may as well just absolve itself of the responsibility of legislating it in your view.
My entire point is that government should absolve itself from the responsibility of legislating for marriage, I'm not sure how you've missed that.
I'm fine with the tax being done appropriately, but you're heading to a neo-communist view of things. You and JM are literally the extremes of political spectrum.
How so? My entire argument is that government regulation should be removed and to support that I used the example of economies of scale, a free-market principle. How is that a 'neo-communist' view? If anything it's a borderline classical liberal argument because its premised upon the individual.
Again, you miss the point. Married couples do not view their financial state as independent of each other. What is the point of marriage if you lead wholly independent and separate lives in everything?
You can't claim that the Government should have no role in determining who married couples are and aren't, and then say it should legally enforce its view of marriage upon people as a civil rights issue. If marriage is so low in the governments view that it should not care who is or is not married, then it should butt out altogether - remove it from law and render its position null on what the definition is.
Again, that's my point, it should be deregulated.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, mate. Either its a proper civil rights issue, in which case marriage is something different and needs to be protected by the Government, or it isn't a civil rights issue and it steps away to allow people to do what they want, and passes no judgment on what the definition of it is.
As I've said a number of times now it's a civil rights issue because the State is treating individuals differently based on something arbitrary. The complete deregulation of marriage would resolve this and from a pragmatic standpoint the legalisation of same-sex marriage would reduce this to a degree, which is why I support it in lieu of deregulation which is probably not realistic.
f**k yeah
