LGBT marriage should never have been legalized.
Within the structure that already existed, allowing LGBT marriage was the right decision. The state controlled civil marriage, tied rights, benefits, and obligations to that status, and offered it to heterosexual couples. When it denied the same recognition to LGBT couples in equivalent circumstances, it was not merely preserving a tradition. It was using its own monopoly to decide which couples could access legal effects that only it controlled.
But the mistake began before that exclusion. The state could deny that recognition only because it had first been given the power to define which conjugal relationships would be considered valid. LGBT couples should never have had to convince a majority, a court, or a bureaucracy that they could form their bonds. Willing institutions should never have needed political authorization to recognize them and assume specific obligations by contract either.
State recognition corrected real discrimination within the existing system. The prior question remains: why did a peaceful relationship between adults have to pass through the political judgment of third parties?
The legal issue
A conjugal relationship arises from the mutual will of the individuals who form it. People may celebrate it for emotional, family, property, or religious reasons, but agreements, commitments, and duties assumed by the parties themselves sustain it.
When the state concentrates the formalization of the bond and its legal effects, the parties become dependent on it to obtain a status applied to a relationship that already exists between them.
That recognition, however, need not belong exclusively to the state. Churches, associations, communities, families, and other institutions may celebrate, register, or recognize a conjugal relationship according to their own criteria. For those institutions and the people who accept their recognition, the couple may already be considered married without a political authority having to create or authorize the bond.
This does not mean that every effect of a conjugal relationship can exist without the participation of third parties. When the couple wants to arrange property, insurance, benefits, or other obligations, it must find companies, associations, and institutions willing to participate in those agreements. The difference is that those institutions assume only the commitments to which they have agreed, without receiving the power to decide whether the bond between the couple may exist.
In a contractual order, no company or institution would be required to assign the same effects to every conjugal bond. It could refuse them because of its own convictions, accept them because it approves of the relationship or, despite moral disagreement, find it economically advantageous to serve that demand.
In any of these cases, the institution would not necessarily be declaring that it considers the relationship morally legitimate. It would only be deciding which contractual effects it is willing to accept in relation to that couple.
Unlike civil marriage, contractual recognition binds only the institutions and individuals that agreed to assume those commitments. In civil marriage, the state recognizes the conjugal bond and assigns general legal effects to it throughout the structure it controls, including in dealings with people and institutions that did not participate in the agreements made by the couple.
That status does not produce a single isolated effect. Civil marriage brings property, inheritance, social security, tax, and family consequences under one legal classification, without requiring the parties to negotiate each one separately. The state does more than recognize that two people form a couple. It turns that recognition into a set of effects applicable throughout the legal structure it controls. Under contractual recognition, each participant chooses which commitments to assume. Under civil marriage, the state gathers those commitments under a general status that it defines in advance.
What about LGBT recognition?
The absence of a state monopoly over conjugal status would not eliminate the needs arising from a shared life. LGBT couples would still need to arrange property, insurance, benefits, representation, and other commitments connected to the relationship. The need is real whether or not the state recognizes the bond.
Those couples would seek companies, insurers, associations, and other institutions willing to assign specific effects to the relationship. That search would create demand for contracts, benefits, and services capable of meeting needs that already existed. Serving it would become valuable to institutions interested in winning customers, attracting workers, or reaching a previously neglected public.
That pressure, however, would not always work in the same direction. A company that refused certain benefits could face boycotts, lose customers, drive away workers, or bear reputational costs greater than the value its owners placed on maintaining the refusal. In some cases, recognizing LGBT couples would be more economically advantageous even for owners who morally disapproved of the relationship.
But there could also be demand for institutions guided by religious, cultural, or conservative values and willing to adopt different criteria. Some consumers might prefer companies and associations that did not recognize certain bonds or that organized their services according to their own convictions.
Freedom of contract does not guarantee that every institution will move in the same direction. In an environment where none of them has the authority to prevent the others from operating, different preferences could become different forms of association. The result would not be universal recognition, but the possibility for willing couples and institutions to cooperate without depending on a single political decision.
Who would provide it?
Under this arrangement, private recognition would be decentralized. Instead of a single authority defining every effect of marriage in advance and applying them through one legal status, different institutions could assume specific functions according to their capabilities, criteria, and the arrangements they were willing to offer.
No private institution would necessarily be responsible for reproducing civil marriage in full. A church could celebrate the bond, an association could register it, an insurer could provide coverage to the couple, an employer could grant benefits, a bank could arrange certain property effects, and a certifying body could verify the authenticity of records issued by other institutions.
Each participant would take part only in the dimension for which it had the competence and interest. Recognition of the bond would not depend on an organization capable of controlling all its consequences, but on cooperation among specialized institutions, each accepting specific effects in relation to the parties with which it had chosen to contract.
The definition of the bonds and their associated benefits would not rest exclusively in the hands of institutions either. The couple itself could choose which forms of recognition, services, and commitments best suited its needs and preferences. Instead of receiving a general legal status defined in advance by the state, it could contract for separate effects or join packages offered by networks of conjugal institutions. Decentralization would therefore occur on both sides: institutions would choose which effects they were willing to offer, while each couple could assemble its own arrangement from the available alternatives.
Some functions that could be offered
Companies and insurers could create benefits aimed directly at life together. A worker could register a partner to include them in a health plan, name them as a life insurance beneficiary, request leave to accompany them during a hospital stay, or receive assistance in the event of death. Conjugal packages could also emerge, combining home insurance, medical coverage, funeral assistance, and financial protection for both members of the couple.
Other institutions could address the social and community dimensions of the relationship. Churches, associations, and communities willing to recognize LGBT couples could offer ceremonies, records, conjugal counseling, conflict mediation, mutual-aid funds, and activities for families recognized by their network. An association could, for example, issue a record used by partner companies, maintain a list of emergency contacts, and offer financial or legal support to member couples. Recognition would then amount to more than a symbolic declaration: it could provide the basis for concrete services organized around the needs of conjugal life.
Institutions devoted to registering conjugal bonds could also emerge. A church, association, or local entity could verify the identity of the parties, record their consent, store the documents chosen by the couple, and maintain information about beneficiaries, contractual changes, or the possible dissolution of the relationship. Instead of placing everything under a single legal status, the couple could purchase anything from a simple record intended only to prove the bond to more comprehensive services capable of gathering and integrating documents issued by insurers, banks, service providers, and other institutions, such as powers of attorney, property agreements, and financial protection contracts.
In everyday life, that record would serve as a common reference for companies and service providers. The couple would not need to prove the relationship from scratch for every new contract because it could present a document issued by an institution already known in that region. Acceptance of the record would depend on the trust the entity had earned. Institutions that verified information poorly, lost documents, or facilitated fraud would tend to lose ground to records considered more secure.
Regional recognition, however, could encounter difficulties outside the environment in which it was created. An insurer in another city, for example, might not know the association that issued the record and might have no interest in investigating its procedures on its own. This would create demand for certifying bodies capable of verifying the authenticity of those documents and assessing the reliability of the institutions responsible for issuing them.
Those certifying bodies could create common standards, confirm that the bond remained registered and had not been formally dissolved under the rules accepted by the parties, and connect the records to broader networks of companies, insurers, and service providers. They would not decide the substantive validity of every contract associated with the couple on their own, but would verify the authenticity and status of the record used as a reference. For the couple, this would give the recognition greater portability: a bond registered by a local institution could be accepted elsewhere without requiring the couple to prove its existence from the beginning. For companies, the benefit would lie in lower verification costs. Instead of analyzing hundreds of regional records separately, they could rely on a few known certifying bodies and decide which standards they were willing to accept.
What about those who refuse recognition?
So far, I have presented different services, institutions, and mechanisms through which LGBT couples could organize a conjugal relationship with defined commitments. But there is an important point: many institutions would not recognize those bonds. The same freedom of contract that allows some to offer recognition, benefits, and services also allows others to refuse them.
That refusal, however, would have limited reach. A company could decline to offer a particular benefit, a church could refuse to celebrate the bond, and an association could adopt different recognition criteria. None of those decisions, however, would dissolve the relationship, withdraw recognition granted by other organizations, or prevent the couple from seeking institutions willing to serve it. That is precisely the difference between decentralized refusal and the use of the state monopoly to decide which relationships would receive legal acceptance: the first closes off one alternative; the second can close off all of them.
A stronger objection arises when an institution offers benefits or services to heterosexual couples and denies them to LGBT couples. The criticism concerns a specific relationship, such as an employer that grants a conjugal benefit to some workers or a company that offers a service to the public but refuses certain couples.
Different treatment may provoke moral condemnation, boycotts, and reputational loss. But a legal obligation requires a different basis. The couple's freedom to form the relationship does not by itself create a duty for third parties to assume commitments toward that couple.
The institution creates that basis when it makes a commitment. It cannot advertise a benefit, receive payments, or enter into a contract and then deny what it promised. It may change its criteria for future agreements, but it remains bound by existing contracts. The freedom to refuse new relationships does not authorize breach of contract, the unilateral withdrawal of benefits after the couple has organized its life around them, or fraud against those who relied on the terms offered.
The state cannot refuse
An ordinary company may refuse a new contract without preventing other institutions from offering the same service. Its decision has limited reach over the relationships in which it chooses to participate. The state, however, does not occupy that position. It levies compulsory charges, establishes general rules, and holds sole control over several legal effects connected to marriage. As long as it keeps that status under its control, it cannot offer it only to couples it considers morally acceptable.
The same criterion applies to state institutions and, in the exercise of a delegated or protected function, to private companies operating through a concession, exclusivity, or public privilege. When the state restricts the entry of competitors and gives one institution control over a particular service, its refusal no longer occurs entirely within a voluntary relationship. In the protected activity, it relies on a politically protected position to deny a service that other institutions might not even have permission to offer.
How far does this proposal go?
The argument presented so far does not set out to demonstrate that private contracts could immediately replace every effect of civil marriage. It demonstrates something more specific: a conjugal relationship can be formed without state authorization, private institutions can recognize it, and the parties can arrange various commitments connected to their life together through contracts, records, and services offered by willing parties.
Some effects currently associated with marriage involve people who did not participate in the agreements made by the couple or structures directly controlled by the state. Matters such as inheritance, responsibility for children, public social security, taxation, immigration, and disputes with creditors would not be resolved automatically by the existence of a private conjugal record. Each would require a separate discussion about the rights involved, the people affected, and the rules that should govern those conflicts.
That limit, however, does not restore the state's right to control the entire conjugal relationship. The fact that certain effects require rules applicable to third parties does not mean that a central authority must create or authorize the bond between adults. This text has not demonstrated that a single private arrangement could replace all of civil marriage, but it has shown that the couple could form the relationship and arrange various effects of its choosing without depending on political approval.
Conclusion
Therefore, LGBT marriage should never have needed to be legalized, because a bond between adults should never have been made conditional on political authorization. Within the structure of civil marriage, recognizing LGBT couples was right and necessary: as long as the state controlled that status and its associated legal effects, it could not apply them unequally to couples in equivalent circumstances.
The mistake came earlier. LGBT couples should never have had to convince a majority, a court, or a bureaucracy that they could form a relationship with each other. That bond could arise from the will of the parties themselves, receive recognition from willing institutions, and produce specific effects through agreements, contracts, and networks of trust.
The issue discussed in this text also extends beyond marriage. When the state monopolizes legal recognition of a peaceful relationship and controls the effects connected to that status, it turns a choice between individuals into political permission. Equality within that monopoly may correct real exclusions, but deeper freedom begins when no one needs authorization from a political authority to form their own bond.