Re: They already are, redcocoa101....

How many mammals not only give birth to their young but stick around to raise them for some period of time?

None for so long, developmentally speaking, as us.

Now, if you go back and look at my post, you'll see that nowhere did I claim that this gives parents any special right to abuse or harm their children, or really to do anything.

OK, not completely unrestrained rights (marriage doesn't, either); but still very strong rights that we would never accept in any other social relationship. Much less in any other social relationship that we ask the state to uniquely recognize and enforce.

As I see it, Goethe simply takes this point to the extreme and is proud of so doing; but the slippery slope is always there. It's only protectiveness that (some of the time) prevents real parents from going all the way.

The point was that parenthood is a fact of nature, just like the earth being round, the existence of gravity, etc.

(Naturalistic fallacy? I can do it too! :P)

But really this is a weakness of the argument as much as it is a strength. No species maintains a parental bond for so long as we do. If we take nature to mean that parenthood should be recognized, it would also mean that the age of majority is more around 5 or 6 than 18.

Living together is not marriage.

Historically that is not entirely true, but I will give you the point because it tends to be this way in the modern world, even in different cultures (and thus religions).

And the state must also recognize the fact that, unlike with most mammals, for a time human children are entirely helpless.

There is models for that too, in marsupials and in some birds. Still, they would point to an age of majority at 5 or 6, not at 18. More like the Catholic age of reason (and thus, responsibility for sin) at 6 or the common law age of criminal responsibility at 7 than anything in the modern world.

What, then, would you propose be the alternative to parents being responsible for the offspring they bring into the world? Oh right, I believe you're one of the people who would grant them complete autonomy from the very beginning. :-S

It's one thing to be responsible and another to require such a strong domination. Actually government is a good example [red herring]. Even accepting that government has a duty to keep citizens alive and safe, it doesn't imply that it can make unlimited rules upon their lives in the name of that mission. Parents should be at least as accountable as a good government would be. My alternative at least allows parents who do not want to be responsible to give their children away without penalty (currently they are stuck with them which only increases abuse from irresponsible parents); it gives others who want to step in and really help the child, CL or not, the chance to do so legally without repercussions or red tape; and it gives children a position to have a cushion to fall back on, beyond the evils of abusive parenting, the cruelty of the state system or the gamble of running away. Abusive husbands control their wives best when the wife knows that if she ran away she'd be alone and penniless [red herring]; making the children alone and penniless artificially, more so than most of them already are naturally, is a crime.

Marriage was not created by the state, but subjecting it to state authority places it in the same arena as business transactions.

Marriage precedes the state, but has always been a contract. Even in the least technologically advanced societies we know of, it is upheld by oral law and tradition.

Now, its traditional function as a contract that gave all the husband, wife(s) and children some rights and some responsibilities towards each other and society... you can successfully argue that has been superseded in the modern world by other institutions and laws, and that the parts that haven't, would still work best as contracts negotiated on a specific basis between two free agents than as one-size-fits-all solutions for everyone that do not really fit complex societies as ours.

Still, it is a contract; and its strong identification with romantic relationships is a relatively new Western innovation. Medieval troubadours composed for a Lady that was explicitly NOT their wife. Sure, every society trusted that marriage with love can work better, but none presumed that marriage would always, or even usually, would be for love; except maybe in social classes too poor for it to matter. (Ironically, we are now too rich for it to matter)