I Learned About Marriage Rights This Week

And what we did before 2015.

Photo by Yannis Papanastasopoulos on Unsplash

There is a page on Wikipedia titled Rights and responsibilities of marriages in the United States. It’s actually a pretty long list. These are things you just get automatically, if you are officially recognized as married by the US Government.

What did people do before that?

Well, they didn’t have those rights. Or, they hired lawyers, to get some of them. Like custody. Power of attorney. Hospital visitation rights. Free transfer of property upon death. These are all things that you just get, automatically, if you have a marriage certificate. If you don’t, you have to secure things by other means. And some of these rights can’t be alternatively secured at all.

This is why people fought for marriage equality (and continue to fight, because there is still a lack of marriage equality for the disabled). When there are concrete rights and privileges granted to married adults that are not granted otherwise, who gets to be counted as married adults does in fact matter.

And what if those gains in marriage equality are lost? As far as I understand, hire a lawyer and draft up some documents. It’s work we shouldn’t have to do. But it may not be a bad idea to secure these rights beyond what was granted by a court case, just in case another court case comes along and upends it.

I don’t mean to be bleak. I mean to be practical. This is a concrete, defensive action people can take to reduce disruption in their lives. It’s one I learned about recently. I’ll be sharing more as I learn about those too.