Of possible interest to the Bleeding Heart Liberverse: my review at Reason.com of Elizabeth Brake’s Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law.

An excerpt:

For Brake, marriage not only should not be restricted to opposite-sex couples, or indeed to couples at all. It constitutes unjust discrimination, she argues, to restrict marriage to romantic or sexual relationships. Instead, the social and legal status of marriage should be available to “caring relationships” of all kinds ….

She takes as her starting-point the idea of liberal neutrality, according to which it is unreasonable to impose controversial conceptions of the good (even correct ones) on dissenting citizens, since respect for the coerced requires that coercion be justified in terms of reasons that they could accept. Liberal neutrality is often invoked on behalf of same-sex marriage, but for Brake, restrictions on multiple-partner marriages are no less problematic. And just as heteronormativity privileges opposite-sex relationships over same-sex ones, so “amatonormativity” (Brake’s coinage) privileges amorous relationships over other caring relationships such as friendships. Thus, the state violates liberal neutrality when it allows controversially amatonormative views about good human relationships to shape marriage law. ….