Nadenu the Furtive wrote:
The Glorious Atomicflea wrote:
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but the institution of marriage conveys a built-in assumption of a child producing couple.
Since when? 1940? The 50's?
My thoughts exactly.
I have 2 children. Neither was conceived while I was married. After my second one was almost a year old, my b/f and I got married.
I have my tubes tied. Should we get divorced?
Hmmm... To paraphrase Smash: Just because you personally choose to marry and not have children, does not mean that others may not choose specifically to marry for the purpose of having children.
Unfortunately, when you come right down to it, marriage exists for the purpose of ensuring legitimacy and inheritance of children (as well as ensuring economic support for women). All of the legal benefits are pretty obviously aimed in that direction if you step back and look at them. Even if you choose not to have children, the assumption is that you *might* have children. Traditionally, of course, there wasn't really any reason to get married unless you intended to have children, but we don't follow tradition much anymore.
This is where most of the problems are coming about. Marriage doesn't seem to "fit" with homosexuality at all. Of course, marriage doesn't fit today with most people's lifestyles. We have lots of laws and legal arrangements that don't "fit" today's world. The common law marriage idea is definately one of them. Why were they created? To prevent men from avoiding the responsibility for women and children by simply refusing to marry them (the women, not the children). The *assumption* was that if a man and a woman were living together, they were having sex, and were likely to produce children eventually. The certainly didn't consider that in the future, adult males and female would share appartments as a matter of financial convenience with no sexual relationship assumed at all.
Same with marriage. Today, lots of people get married simply for the finacial convenience (ok, and "love" thppth...). Quite often, there's little or no plan for children at all. The issue though is that the traditionalists can accept that sort of arrangement between a man and a woman because they *might* have children, or *might* raise a family at some point in the future. They can kinda brush the fact that marriage has changed under the rug and ignore it because the potential for it's original pupose is still there. If you start allowing same sex marriages, it basically tosses that change right into the face of the social conservatives. You can't hide the fact that a gay marriage has nothing to do with children, and is purely an economic and social contract.
That's where I see the issue. We've already kinda sureptitiously changed the meaning of marriage over time, but have never had to face that change directly as a society. Gay marriage forces us to do exactly that. I think it'll be "interesting" at least, to see what happens.
What I find really amusing is that what gays want most is the social contract bit. They want joing power of attorney. They want joint guardianship over eachother. They want join finances. They want to be able to sign hospital release forms and be considered family to their SO. That's it. If the conservatives had just given them that stuff, then they wouldn't now be in danger of "losing" their precious institution of marriage. Morons...
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Personally, I'm embarassed that my state California - not exactly a bastion of right wing ideology - had a proposition pass defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. It's obvious to me this is a religous definition and that we will have gay marriage eventually. It must be so frusturating to be a conservative; you must know you are going to loose eventually.
Yup. Actually, what's going on in California right now is probably the best thing that could have happened for gay rights. California conservatives stupidly put their law in writing. That makes it challengable in court. That's exactly what's happening. You see, they can't throw out all those marriages that are being issued in San Fransico right now. They are in every way "legal". They have to bring them to court and try to get each one revoked based on the new law. This allows automatic appeal. It's going to go straight to the State Supreme Court, and is virtually guaranteed to go to SCOTUS right afterwards. That will force a rulling on the constitutionality of the state law, at a time when it's most likely to be overturned.
If they'd waited for the Religioius Right to push through their US Constitutional Amendment defining marriage, there would be a whole different problem with trying to get the law tossed on constitutional grounds. The law has to be tried based on its legality at the time, so assuming a win for the gay rights folks, this will establish a whole ton of precidence, and likely prevent the ammendment from ever getting off the ground.
It's a good thing.