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Well, in my opinion, same-sex marriage and polyamorous marriage are no-brainers. If we can come up with legal code and policies that allow same sex siblings to inherit wealth from their parents and otherwise be considered a family, and if we can construct policies to allow a company to be legally represented as an individual, I fail to see why we can't allow same-sex couples and/or polyamorous relationships to have legal status. The tricky part is with incestuous relationships, and I have to say that from a purely hypothetical viewpoint I don't really have a problem with it. In my little imaginary world, it would require a lot of paperwork and checks to be considered (how many years of generational incest involved, age of the people wanting to enter into the contract, history of abuse, combination with polyamorous links within the same family, etc), but I don't really have an "ethical" problem with it. I think it does go into defining what state-sanctioned marriage means. Is it a state-sanctioned opportunity to have "real sex," or to strictly reinforce childbirth? If so, then all this seems perhaps relevant to me, perhaps not (particularly in the cases of same-sex and polyamorous)...if it's about recreating a family structure with all the benefits of being in the "same family," for medical insurance, tax assessment, hospital and medical decision reasons...I really don't see the issue.
At the root, I separate the issues of sex and marriage. While for me personally, they may be linked in my own relationship...I don't presume that's always the case. I think there are a number of reasons people choose to get married, and I don't have any real problem with that. The Sacred Institution can easily mean different things to different people, and I know a number of people who have decided to get married for reasons having nothing to do with the classic fairy tale. People don't seem to go out of their way to judge these instances when they happen in heterosexual couples who are not direct blood relatives, so why should they do so in other instances?
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