Civil Unions are of the Devil

No, not for any moral reason. I now loathe civil unions, because while they may be a politicians dream compromise, they are lawyer hell.

We have a huge legal framework for marriage. Huge. I had no idea what a ginormous system I was getting myself into, I was pretty well blinded by love and the promise of sex. But it is absolutely staggering how almost every legal thing has some sort of separate, special box for married folks. Property, taxes, schools, medical, video rentals, pretty much everything you ever have to fill out some sort of a standardized form is affected by that nice little word. 

And civil unions? Great at making you feel good about legal equality without overly scaring the straight folk. really, really bad at a whole host of practical stuff. It's this weird nebulous thing, that is so like a marriage, but because of that stupid little word change, you can't just check the nice neat little marriage box. And don't even get me started about what happens when people dare to move across state lines. Utter chaos.

I'm trying to do a nice, neat, normal legal thing for a client. Something that would be so, so easy if she just had the word marriage attached to her life instead of that stupid Vermont Civil Union. Just one teeny tiny word change, for two things that are supposed to be essentially synonyms would make everything work.

Look, I get that the word marriage has all sorts of nice, cozy meanings for people. But we are also a hugely bureaucratic society and things just do not work when we try to get all fancy and separate. The more and more legal garbage I have to sort through, the more I've begun to abhor how much of our legal system simultaneously tries to support an often inconsistent ideal while trying to also reflect and support reality. Especially in family law. I so wish we could just have a system that recognizes and supports people in how they are already going to live their lives, instead of this schizophrenic mess.