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Notes -
This was the same argument that Virginia made in Loving and the court rejected it then. Black people are free to marry other black people and white people are free to marry other white people so what's the problem?
Well, at least that's the conservative fantasy. If you look at the way the laws surrounding marriage actually operate, and have historically operated, it's pretty clear that the legal purpose is to regulate property transfers among family members. The only historical precedent which has to do with natural children is the legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children, absent other evidence. While this may be a useful feature these days, it's no longer a necessary one, as states have been keeping records of these things for over a century, and technology has allowed paternity disputes to be resolve fairly easily. Beyond that, historical laws relating to marriage were based on the presumption that women couldn't own property in their own name, that wealth was basically synonymous with real property, and that widows were likely to be an undue burden on society. Today, of course, we live in a property where women are more economically equal than men, where the family farm isn't the primary source of income (or, realisitically, doesn't exist), cash is more important than real property, birth control exists, Social Security exists, etc. As a consequence, the laws surrounding marriage have changed since the turn of the last century to keep up with the times.
An along the way, we've created a whole host of new rights relating to marriage, notably ones concerning medical matters like the right to make certain decisions and the right of visitation. In other words, as the circumstances surrounding marriage have changed historically, the laws have changed along with it, and if you want to figure out the legal purpose of marriage, you have to look at those laws. If you want to believe in an idealized version where the laws that matter are the ones that have "stable families" or whatever as their obvious goal, you're going to be left with very little.
What do you make of prohibitions on marriage between sufficiently close relatives? ...what do you make of exceptions to those prohibitions when one of the two individuals could demonstrate that they were sterile?
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