The recent victory for Gay marriage in California seems to be making way for social movements that have long been due. It's not that people want to marry their cats or cacti just yet, the slippery slope slips into unexpected areas. Now that marriage is seen as gluey cohesion for the similar sexed as well as the opposite, what else could be beneficial to the stability of our society that was hardly noticed before? Friendship! A movement has emerged (reported in the Boston Globe which feels that friendships should be quantified just like marriages have been in the past. Doesn't it all come down to the fact that married people are less prone to do risky or frisky things because they don't want to devastate their spouses?

If that is the case, then why can't friends get marriage benefits from being friends with other people. People with friends are much less likely to commit suicide or be unpredictable in a socially debilitating way. Without friends, who would be there to pressure you to buy new clothes and neat gadgets? Without needing gadgets, why would you need a job? For that matter, why clean your room or do the dishes? Without friends, the brisk, lucrative world simply, sadly stops spinning. It's not coffee that greases the gears of a smooth economy, it's friendship! Isn't that just marvelous?

Of course, one of the reasons that marriage has been so easy to quantify as a stabilizing union is because it's so much of an miserable operation to separate. It seems that unless we want to get into more legally binding contracts with the people we like to hang out with, it does not really matter if we throw a crowbar and wedge a friend off. Actually, that's what most people do when they get married!

Mark Vernon, author of The Philosophy of Friendship, on the same subject, offers perspective on what's to come:

there is that excellent new institution, the civil partnership. Personally, I think of civil partnerships as a specifically committed friendship that is marriage-like rather than identical to marriage (though I think the legal entitlements should be equal).

How popular widespread, and common can make civil unions get? I guess the next step is to look into exactly how annoying they are to get. I started to look, but the first google results just made me laugh too hard. Of course it had to be:

obtaining civil unions - Google Search

How to obtain a dissolution of marriage or civil union
Civil unions, which were introduced on 26 April 2005 by the CIVIL UNION ACT 2004, are dissolved by the same process as marriages. ...

Oye vey.