system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I think the government should get out of the marriage business. CMV

I think the government should stop recognizing marriage as a legal institution and stop giving it special legal status (e.g. Tax breaks, Estate planning benefits, etc.) I think the legal function that marriage serves can be facilitated by legal contracts between the two parties. This would also solve the problem of recognizing non-traditional marriage (e.g. Same-Sex marriage, Polygamy, etc.) Marriage seems to me to be a religious institution and therefor should not be interfered with by the government.
gpt
>I think the government should stop recognizing marriage as a legal institution and stop giving it special legal status (e.g. Tax breaks, Estate planning benefits, etc.)

You're advocating the abolition of spousal privilege in court cases, abolition of the ability for spouses to inherit property without being subject to estate taxes, abolition of spousal immigration benefits, declaring marriage an invalid reason for changing one's surname, and banning government jobs from offering health insurance that covers one's spouse?

>I think the legal function that marriage serves can be facilitated by legal contracts between the two parties.

Given the common two-party benefits of marriage—assigning next-of-kin, power-of-attorney, medical proxy, joint adoption, etc.—shouldn't there be a common contract for those? And aren't a lot of those benefits, structurally, only functional in an exclusive relationship and thus necessitate some kind of oversight to make sure there isn't already a contract in place with someone else?

>Marriage seems to me to be a religious institution

It's not. Marriage started out as a secular institution—predating modern religion—and religion only got involved because churches were the only reliable recordkeeping bodies out in rural areas, not because of any spiritual significance to the institution. Direct religious involvement in marriage only dates back to the mid-1500s, and was in fact so contentious that it was one of the driving factors of the Protestant Reformation.

The idea of marriage as a uniquely Christian institution is the worst kind of revisionist history.