LOL! Do you want websters definition of marriage, or are we going to go around in circles like Socrates did, getting nowhere?

1. the social institution under which a man and woman establish their decision to live as husband and wife by legal commitments, religious ceremonies, etc.

Marriage is an institution in which interpersonal relationships (usually intimate and sexual) are acknowledged by the state, by religious authority, or both. It is often viewed as a contract. Civil marriage is the legal concept of marriage as a governmental institution, in accordance with marriage laws of the jurisdiction. If recognized by the state, by the religion(s) to which the parties belong or by society in general, the act of marriage changes the personal and social status of the individuals who enter into it.

A marriage is often formalized by a ceremony called a wedding, which in modern times is usually performed by a religious minister or a civil officer. The act of marriage usually creates normative or legal obligations between the individuals involved. In some societies these obligations also extend to certain family members of the married persons.

Marriage practices are very diverse across cultures and may take many forms. Some examples include:

A heterosexual marriage uniting a man and woman as husband and wife (also known as a monogamous heterosexual marriage)

A same-sex marriage uniting a man and a man as husband and
husband, or a woman and a woman as wife and wife (also known as a monogamous homosexual marriage).

Polygamy in which a person takes more than one spouse has historical precedent in the Old Testament (for example, Abraham). While illegal in most Western societies as in many others, it still remains common in some societies. Most countries where polygamy is still legal are moving to repeal those laws.

Anthropological definitions

Attempting to encompass the various types of marriage in various cultures without knowing if they have a common origin, anthropologists have proposed several competing definitions of marriage.

Edward Westermarck, in his book The History of Human Marriage (1921), defined marriage as "The more or less durable union between man and woman and marital and paternal care probably due to instincts once necessary for the preservation of the species" including both monogamous and polygamous unions.

The anthropological handbook Notes and Queries (1951) defined marriage as "a union of a man and a woman such that children of the woman are recognized as legitimate by both parents." Because the Nuer of Sudan allow for female-female marriage, Kathleen Gough suggested modifying this to "a woman and one or more other persons." A legitimacy-based definition has been criticized because some societies do not require marriage for legitimacy. In societies where illegitimacy means only that the mother is unmarried and has no other legal implications, a legitimacy-based definition of marriage is circular.

Edmund Leach argued that no one definition of marriage applied to all cultures. He offered a list of ten rights associated with marriage, including sexual monopoly and rights with respect to children, with specific rights differing across cultures.

Duran Bell proposed defining marriage in terms of sexual access rights.


Legal definitions

Roman law described "Marriage as a union of man and woman and the inseparable association of their lives. "An English common law definition was established in 1866 as: "...marriage, as understood in Christendom, may for this purpose be defined as the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others". In Canada, this definition was ruled unconstitutional and altered to refer to "two persons" to include same-sex couples.

State recognition

In the early modern period, John Calvin and his Protestant colleagues reformulated Christian marriage by enacting the Marriage Ordinance of Geneva, which imposed "The dual requirements of state registration and church consecration to constitute marriage" for recognition.

In England and Wales, Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act 1753 required a formal ceremony of marriage, thereby curtailing the practice of Fleet Marriage. These were clandestine or irregular marriages performed at Fleet Prison, and at hundreds of other places. From the 1690s until the Marriage Act of 1753 as many as 300,000 clandestine marriages were performed at Fleet Prison alone. The Act required a marriage ceremony to be officiated by an Anglican priest in the Anglican Church with two witnesses and registration. The Act did not apply to Jewish marriages or those of Quakers, whose marriages continued to be governed by their own customs.

In England and Wales, since 1837, civil marriages have been recognised as a legal alternative to church marriages under the Marriage Act of 1836. In Germany, civil marriages were recognised in 1875. This law permitted a declaration of the marriage before an official clerk of the civil administration, when both spouses affirm their will to marry, to constitute a legally recognised valid and effective marriage, and allowed an optional private clerical marriage ceremony.

Same-sex Marriage

While it is relatively new phenomenon that same-sex couples are being granted the same form of legal marital recognition as commonly used by mixed-sexed couples, there is a long history of same-sex unions around the world. Various types of same-sex unions have existed, ranging from informal, unsanctioned relationships to highly ritualized unions. It is believed that same-sex marriage was a socially recognized institution in some Native American tribes, regions of China, such as Fujian, and at certain times in ancient European history . A law in the Theodosian Code (C. Th. 9.7.3) issued in 342 CE prohibited same-sex marriage in ancient Rome, but the exact intent of the law and its relation to social practice is unclear, as only a few examples of same-sex marriage in that culture exist. Suetonius mentioned (in the context of Nero's vices) that Nero married a slave boy, and also a male friend; Martial also mentions same sex marriages taking place.

Rights and obligations

A marriage bestows rights and obligations on the married parties, and sometimes on relatives as well, being the sole mechanism for the creation of affinal ties (in-laws). These may include:

Giving a husband/wife or his/her family control over a spouse’s sexual services, labor, and property.

Giving a husband/wife responsibility for a spouse’s debts.

Giving a husband/wife visitation rights when his/her spouse is incarcerated or hospitalized.

Giving a husband/wife control over his/her spouse’s affairs when the spouse is incapacitated.

Establishing the second legal guardian of a parent’s child.

Establishing a joint fund of property for the benefit of children.

Establishing a relationship between the families of the spouses.

These rights and obligations vary considerably between societies, and between groups within society.

Right to marriage

Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses." The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam gives men and women the "right to marriage" regardless of their race, colour or nationality, but not religion.

State recognition

In many jurisdictions, a civil marriage may take place as part of the religious marriage ceremony, although they are theoretically distinct. Some jurisdictions allow civil marriages in circumstances which are notably not allowed by particular religions, such as same-sex marriages or civil unions.

Marriage relationships may also be created by the operation of the law alone, as in common-law marriage, sometimes called "marriage by habit and repute."

The status in the eyes of one authority may not be the same as for another, e.g., a marriage may be recognised civilly, but not by a church, and vice versa.

Financial considerations

The financial aspects of marriage vary between cultures and have changed over time.

In some cultures, dowries and bride prices continue to be required today. In both cases, the financial arrangements are usually made between the groom (or his family) and the bride's family; with the bride in many cases not being involved in the arrangement, and often not having a choice in whether to participate in the marriage.

In Early Modern Britain, the social status of the couple was supposed to be equal. After the marriage, all the property (called "fortune") and expected inheritances of the wife belonged to the husband.

Modern customs

In many countries today, each marriage partner has the choice of keeping his or her property separate or combining properties. In the latter case, called community property, when the marriage ends by divorce each owns half. In many legal jurisdictions, laws related to property and inheritance provide by default for property to pass upon the death of one party in a marriage firstly to the spouse and secondly to the children. Wills and trusts can make alternative provisions for property succession.

In some legal systems, the partners in a marriage are "jointly liable" for the debts of the marriage. This has a basis in a traditional legal notion called the "Doctrine of Necessities" whereby a husband was responsible to provide necessary things for his wife. Where this is the case, one partner may be sued to collect a debt for which they did not expressly contract.

Critics of this practice note that debt collection agencies can abuse this by claiming an unreasonably wide range of debts to be expenses of the marriage. The cost of defence and the burden of proof is then placed on the non-contracting party to prove that the expense is not a debt of the family.

The respective maintenance obligations, both during and eventually after a marriage, are regulated in most jurisdictions; alimony is one such method.

Some have attempted to analyse the institution of marriage using economic theory; for example, anarcho-capitalist economist David Friedman has written a lengthy and controversial study of marriage as a market transaction (the market for husbands and wives).


Taxation

In some countries, spouses are allowed to average their incomes; this is advantageous to a married couple with disparate incomes. To compensate for this somewhat, many countries provide a higher tax bracket for the averaged income of a married couple. While income averaging might still benefit a married couple with a stay-at-home spouse, such averaging would cause a married couple with roughly equal personal incomes to pay more total tax than they would as two single persons. This is commonly called the marriage penalty.

Moreover, when the rates applied by the tax code are not based on averaging the incomes, but rather on the sum of individuals' incomes, higher rates will definitely apply to each individual in a two-earner households in progressive tax systems. This is most often the case with high-income taxpayers and is another situation where some consider there to be a marriage penalty.

Conversely, when progressive tax is levied on the individual with no consideration for the partnership, dual-income couples fare much better than single-income couples with similar household incomes. The effect can be increased when the welfare system treats the same income as a shared income thereby denying welfare access to the non-earning spouse. Such systems apply in Australia and Canada, for example.


Other considerations

Sometimes people marry for purely pragmatic reasons, sometimes called a marriage of convenience or sham marriage. For example, according to one publisher of information about "green card" marriages, "Every year over 450,000 United States citizens marry foreign-born individuals and petition for them to obtain a permanent residency (Green Card) in the United States." While this is likely an over-estimate, in 2003 alone 184,741 immigrants were admitted to the U.S. as spouses of U.S. citizens.

Some people want to marry a person with higher or lower status than them. Others want to marry people who have similar status. Hypergyny refers to the act of seeking out those who are of slightly higher social status. In most cases, hypergyny refers to women wanting men of higher status. Isogyny refers to the act of seeking out those who are of similar status.


Termination

In most societies, the death of one of the partners terminates the marriage, and in monogamous societies this allows the other partner to remarry, though sometimes after a waiting or mourning period.

Many societies also provide for the termination of marriage through divorce. Marriages can also be annulled in some societies, where an authority declares that a marriage never happened. In either event the people concerned are free to remarry (or marry). After divorce, one spouse may have to pay alimony.

Several cultures have practiced temporary and conditional marriages. Examples include the Celtic practice of handfasting and fixed-term marriages in the Muslim community. Pre-Islamic Arabs practiced a form of temporary marriage that carries on today in the practice of Nikah Mut'ah, a fixed-term marriage contract. Muslim controversies related to Nikah Mut'ah have resulted in the practice being confined mostly to Shi'ite communities.

Hey, TC. Most words have specific meanings, and there is nothing you can do to change that!

You could write your own dictionary and pervert words if you wanted, but in AMERICA, marriage means primarily ONE specific thing.

Your terminology may mean multiples of things, I have no idea. Specific words mean specific things like duck fucking means a water bird with a bill!

I didn't make up the word! Yell at webster for that and I don't reclaim offensive words either, although it is funny to call my white friends cracka! LOL! Instead of relying on a word that has a specific meaning, join 2 words like you already did, civil-union. Why you would advocate that is like I said beyond me.

They're treated as lower class citizens and it's not fair.

Honestly, Tc...

What have you done other than bitch about shit?

Have you joined any action groups in real life?

Did you march in any parades?

Did you vote or support any political groups that support your views?

So these ideas about right or wrong laws affect you on a mental level, but not your daily life.

Do you expect at one point to get out of your armchair soapbox and do something about how you feel?

Gay people may have problems depending where they live, but they are not lower class people. I find that statement offensive.

If you are living someplace and not happy with the laws, MOVE!!!

I'm not saying that you're wrong, just that the act is unjust and unconstitutional...