Freedom in the 50 States

An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom

Marriage Freedom

The marriage category includes the ability for couples to enter into private contracts, both civil unions or marriage.
Choose a dimension of freedom below to see rankings on the map, or use the map to explore results by state.

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Marriage Freedom

Most of the weight of the marriage freedom category is tied to the availability of same-sex partnerships, whether civil unions or marriage. The remainder is tied to waiting periods and blood test requirements, availability of cousin marriage and covenant marriage, and sodomy laws, which were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003. If one believes in protecting liberty to the fullest while remaining neutral among competing conceptions of the good, it follows that state governments should treat marriage as a contract that is “registered” or “recorded,” rather than a personal status that is “licensed.”

States that prohibited same-sex couples from entering private contracts that provide the benefits of marriage (whether termed “marriages” or “civil unions”) clearly took away an important contract right from such couples. Some states merely refrained from providing a convenient mechanism, such as civil unions or marriage, for same-sex couples to make contracts covering inheritance, hospital visitation, medical power of attorney, and so on. Other states went further and expressly prohibited any private contracts intended to provide benefits equivalent to marriage. For instance, the Virginia Constitution still states, “This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage.” Such state laws are sometimes called “super-DOMAs,” after the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Other states that, by statute or constitution, prohibited all marriage-like private contracts for same-sex couples are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin (which is a curious example of a state that had limited domestic partnerships but also a super-DOMA, banning contracts offering benefits “equal to marriage”).

Now that the Supreme Court has nationalized same-sex marriage, those distinctions among states are irrelevant. The 2022 ranking on this variable is driven mostly by cousin marriage, which is more important in our rankings than covenant marriage and vastly more important than blood tests and waiting periods.1

The freedom index has long used an estimate that the freedom to marry is worth about $2,500 per year to same-sex couples and that about 900,000 couples would take advantage of this opportunity when it became available nationwide.2 Those estimates have proved reliable in subsequent research. Over a million Americans are now in same-sex marriages.3

Footnotes

1. Although cousin marriage is rare, bans on the practice receive the constitutional weight of 10 because they prevent certain couples from marrying altogether. Covenant marriage, waiting periods, and blood tests, by contrast, do not receive the constitutional weight.

2. M. V. Lee Badgett, “The Economic Value of Marriage for Same-Sex Couples,” Drake Law Review 58, no. 4 (2010): 1081–116.

3. “U.S. Census Bureau Releases CPS Estimates of Same-Sex Households,” press release, Census Bureau, November 19, 2019. For 2016, see Richard Wolf, “Gay Marriages Up 33% in Year since Supreme Court Ruling,” USA Today, June 22, 2016.