You do it, exitus. I can't get excited about it
Just staring at all of that data, I couldn't get too excited about it either, that's why I put it up here to discuss first.
Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish from good law and good intentions!!
In my idea of an ideal world, the government would not license marriage. The only role government would ever have is in recognizing the rights of individuals and of families, and the greatest extent necessary for recognizing marriage would be through census activites. To elaborate on these thoughts, it might be preferrable to go to the
General Libertarian message board topic, I guess.
But since we are dealing with realities as they are, and all of the states license marriages, we should consider those factors in which the state seeks to control the right of individuals to marry and voluntarily form families.
As to cousin marriages, I understand the practice is actually more common than most ever realize, among widowed seniors that is. But as to people of child-bearing age, no matter how much of it is a taboo and how much is just good breeding, I think any animal breeder, botanist, geneticist, whoever; will confirm that plants, birds, bees, people, and what have you, will stand a better chance of hardiness and decrease odds of amplifying problems if you breed outside of close relations. The fact that Vermont hopes that people will get it right without trying to impose speaks well, the fact that Maine accommodates the practice but gets people to take genetic counseling first at least says they are not entirely authoritarian on the matter.
As to Vermont's same-sex "civil unions" law, further reading on the subject reveals that it is not hardly any measure of libertarianism 'open-mindedness. Instead of trying to reform property laws and such the Vermont legislature adopted civil unions at the urgence of leftist homosexual groups who actually wanted to implace same-sex marriages. It is an example of where a bad law is reformed through more bad laws. And as Zxcv points-out instead of correcting enequities in the law, it merely created new ones. I would not weigh this one all that high, if at all at this point.
As to the seemingly trivial delays in obtaining a marriage license. It seems silly, but just as we look at waiting periods on the purchase of guns and see potential problems, and as Martin Luther King stated, "A right delayed is a right denied" I think it is a strong factor in light of 'unintended consequences' of the law. While there are good intentions on having people wait a bit, and there is good evidence that the intention of the law is not just due to administrative functions, but an intentional waiting period. I can think of one example of where delays may be a problem: my own grandmother and grandfather, who were married for over 60 years before death. My grandfather had already proposed to my grandmother months before at the time he got drafted into the Korean war. He had three days of leave before he had to go fight in Korea, somehow they got married, had a honeymoon (conceived a child), flew across the country from Kansas and said farewell in less than 72 hours. I think a lot of events in our family's history would have been dramatically different if some waiting period had been imposed there.
As to blood tests, I think that is not only an inconveniece but insulting and might even go against some people's religious beliefs. It is a wonderful good intention to try to stop the spread of AIDS, but it is a bad law. Along those same lines, when I get to Idaho, when and if I ever do, I am going to make that mandatory reading of that brochure a part of my mission to tackle bad laws. I think blood tests should be weighed heavily.
Well, just some thoughts. These decisions of scoring the relative level of freedom within the laws are difficult, to say the least, but if we are going to do it, better to do it out in the open like this where they can be openly debated and all considerations can be made. I hope that all the people who are going to vote for which state know how much work and consideration has gone into all of this spreadsheet work.
