Two straight Canadian men to marry each other

[andrewducker]

There's an article here about two straight men who have noticed that there's a significant tax break for married couples - and are planning to take advantage of it.

Which, I think, just goes to show, that if you allow people to do things for one reason, they'll do it for their own reasons too.  Or as William Gibson once said "The Street finds its own uses for things."

How long, one wonders, until marriage is broken down, and you get to form your own contract using a CC-style choose-your-own-license?

I would like {Insert Name Here} to (a)inherit all my worldly goods (b)have power of attorney (c)love, honour and obey me (delete as applicable)

Comments

[pisica.livejournal.com]

Well, I've heard some arguments to let siblings 'marry' each other - in the sense of, if you and your spinster sister live together for thirty years, why can't one of you inherit everything from the other (including pensions and the like)?

[fire-sermon.livejournal.com]

The boyfriend of someone I work with registered at his local gym as a couple with one of his (straight male) mates because they got a discount...

[diotina.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a discussion that was on my journal recently re: the terms of the ceremony themselves and how legally defensible they are. It seems to me that if the words of the ceremony are not legally binding, then it doesn't have any contractual legitimacy anyway, which confuses me a bit...which is why I tend to look at it as an entirely social/personal thing rather than a legal thing, but admittedly, the lines are very blurred, which allows these two to do this in the first place!

[heron61.livejournal.com]

It seems likely that in civilized nations (ie the US will either not go this way or will take several additional decades to do so) marriage will either be replaced by such a contract or will become such a contract. The entire idea of marriage as a special set of rights limited to only specific types of relationships seems fairly antithetical to free and diverse societies. When birth control and easy divorce became basic civil rights and both men and women working outside the home became fully accepted, traditional marriage was essentially doomed. We are now seeing the results and I am very pleased. OTOH, in the US, you also predictably have a reactionary backlash in the form of idiocies like "covenant marriage"</a.