Redefining marriage is all fun and games until a leftist common-law wife misses out on the millions from her non-husband's inheritance.

This is a pretty interesting article on Stieg Larsen, the author of the "Girl who..." books. The article contains this:

Blood Trumps Love

Gabrielsson and Larsson weren't just a couple, but also a leftist action group. First they were Maoists and then Trotskyists, voicing their criticism of the Swedish welfare state from a leftist point of view. She was an architect, while he worked for a news agency. They managed to make ends meet, and had no children. Like many Swedes of their generation, they were anti-bourgeois.

In their social circle, while couples may have been monogamous, they didn't marry. But under Swedish law, a member of an unmarried couple doesn't inherit anything from his or her deceased partner, no matter how long the couple was together. Blood trumps love, unless a will exists, but Larsson hadn't written one. For that reason, the rapidly growing proceeds from the sale of the books and the film rights went to two biological relatives, Larsson's father Erland (his mother Vivianne is dead) and his younger brother Joakim. "The money went to us, but we didn't ask for it," says Erland Larsson, 76. They could have turned down the inheritance, but that wasn't what they wanted.

The father and the brother still live in northern Sweden, in a city called Umea. The father occasionally visited his son in Stockholm and tried to convince him to get married, but the son only laughed at his father's suggestion. The brothers, Stieg and Joakim, were not close and rarely saw each other.

After Larsson's death, when his novels suddenly became such a huge success, the widow who isn't a widow under the law sat down with Erland and Joakim Larsson to discuss what should happen next. An agreement seemed possible. But then attorneys took over the case, and an inheritance war ensued -- one in which the Stieg Larsson fan community has participated extensively.

Two camps have since formed in Sweden: the (primarily female) Eva camp, with its own website (www.supporteva.com), and the (primarily male) Larsson camp (www.moggliden.com).

Devalue marriage and marriage becomes devalued. Do Larsson's other friends have a claim on his inheritance? How about friends who knew him longer than Eva?

Is it important that Larsson and Eva lived together? Presumably, that is important because it implies that they are cohabiting as a heterosexual couple for the purpose of having children and Larsson would have wanted his children cared for by their mother.

But Larsson and Eva didn't have children. So, why should the state or anyone else care?

Marriage plays an important role in demarking certain kinds of relationships that the law has an interest in protecting, specifically for the purpose of protecting the offspring of the marriage. Aside from the free-ride that Eva gets in this argument because other people place her in the mental terrain of other women who have children with husbands who they then raise, why should she be more entitled to Larsson's inheritance than his family? After all, he could have married her. He could have given her his inheritance in a will. Why should we presume that these weren't intentional decisions on his part?