Ralph Wedgwood on Marriage:
“In this way, marriage’s social meaning makes it possible for couples to communicate information about their relationships in a particularly effective way. This is important because people do not only care about tangible benefits (such as money or health care or the like); they care about intangible benefits as well. In particular, people care deeply about how they are regarded by others — which inevitably depends on the information about them that is shared in their community.
If these are the crucial intangible benefits created by the social meaning of marriage, the assumption that marriage is the union of one man and one woman has no real importance. For virtually every adult member of society, it is already a publicly known fact whether that adult is a man or a woman. So, when a man and a woman get married, the fact that they are a man and a woman was already known before they were married; the fact that marriage is only available to opposite-sex couples does not help them to communicate any information that was not already publicly known.”
