[Morrigoon]

Alex: all that you suggest may make sense on a purely intellectual level, but in a real world translation, you now have additional marital discrimination, since many low-income people cannot afford the lawyers for all these contracts, making "marriage" such as it is in your world, only for the rich. It also provides yet another disincentive for citizens to enter into an institution which is recognized as contributing to social and emotional stability in our society.

It also leaves out the fact that, by definition, marriage is a way of declaring your relationship to one person as superceding all blood ties (defining one person as your "closest relative", and granting all rights therein). I have yet to see a contract that can do all that a marriage can do in one fell swoop. Shall we start adopting each other then? Is a wife to be declared a daughter? Does that blur the line between what you can do with an adopted daughter (provided Woody Allen hasn't already blurred it enough).

Marriage IS the contract. It defines those rights without having to lay them all out individually.

I find it terribly ironic that the "defense of marriage" people are doing more to threaten the existence of marriage by causing us to have to even discuss possibilities like this, than simply allowing gay marriage ever would.