Charlton Hall, a licensed marriage and family therapist and an American Druid, is conducting research on Pagan attitudes towards marriage.
You may take a short survey and register your opinion here. The link is in the box on the upper left.
Feel free to pass on this link to other blogs, forums, etc.
My Pagan perspective on marriage is pretty simple: I’m against it. Or, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”
Folks should be allowed by secular authorities to take part in working relationships of various sorts. Even ones solemnized before and by Deities, Guardians, Powers, Totems, Tribes, Trads, and Cultures. Such working relationships should enjoy the privileges and responsibilities of corporate persons.
I don’t care whether we call such working relationships “marriages” or not. But each and every one ought to enjoy equal legal standing and consistently just treatment in law and manners.
My position is that there should be no such thing as civil marriage. On reaching maturity, everyone should specify an agent, who should then have the rights and responsibilities that we now think of as a spouse’s (tax, inheritance, finance, right of attorney, hospital-visiting, etc.) It is clearly inappropriate to assume, legally, that the person with whom one has sex is also the person to whom one wishes to entrust one’s financial and mundane affairs.
However, I do not mean this as hostility to marriage as a social form. Talking descriptively rather than prescriptively, most people seem to want to live in faithful, monogamous relationships. Even many gays, once the avant garde of the sexual revolution, seem intent on emulating 1950s-ish domesticity. I also think that children tend to do best when living with two biological parents. I even think there is something to be said for Christian views of marital morality, which are not all that different from the views of Hindus, and some other non-Abrahamic cultures.
I just mean that marriage in a church or temple should have no legal status.