Quote of the Day
by JS
To be blunt, the systems aren’t set up to handle it. The paper forms have a space for the husband’s name and a space for the wife’s name. Married people carefully enter their details in block capitals and post the forms off to depressed paper-pushers who then type that information into software front-ends whose forms are laid out and named in precisely the same fashion. And then they hit “submit” and the information is filed away electronically in databases which simply keel over or belch integrity errors when presented with something so profound as a man and another man who love each other enough to want to file joint tax returns.
There’s quite a bit going on in the linked post. On one level, you have a somewhat tongue-in-cheek introduction to the kinds of issues that come up when designing databases. On another level, you have examples of how data storage schemas often reflect implicit biases. Then there is the sometimes mentioned interaction between application level logic and schemas. Finally, the author reflects on what marriage concepts could be easily supported by database schemas. Not surprisingly, database design is not the roadblock to marriage equality in this country.
As a supporter of gay marriage, I’ve thought a little bit about whether I would support other kinds of marriage arrangements as well, particularly marriage involving more than two people. One issue I might have with such an arrangement is not with the arrangement itself, but rather the cost of dissolution if things don’t work out. Divorces can be expensive, and seem to incur various kinds of social costs. Would these costs be amplified in the case of more complex arrangements? Would these costs actually decrease?
We also have to consider whether the benefits of marriage would scale to larger arrangements. Under the binary marriage regime in the linked piece, would joint taxes cover everyone in a connected component? How would deductions scale? How would various health and care decisions be made? Majority vote? This, I think, is a symptom of the generality of graphs as a data structures. Sometimes the graph itself is not as important as the logical constraints of the larger system.
