I agree that the way we currently categorize race leaves something lacking. Yes, it grew out of racist ideas. It was originally just two major races–white/beautiful and mongoloid/ugly. Doesn’t strike me as entirely useful for other than racist purposes.
Nevertheless, these three major classifications is what we have. When the appropriate scientific disciplines overhaul this system of classification, I will not hesitate to use the new system, unless I think ti’s worse.
And how do we enforce it?
Dissolve their marriages? Do we have precedent that government can do that?
Keep in mind we’re talking a fundamental right here.
And if we are going to devise a scheme to dissolve marriages, what arbitrary time limit shall we set to dissolve it?
How do we know that a childless couple might not have conceived the next day after dissolution? Who’s gonna decide?
I don’t think that the supreme court requires violating other rights in order to make a law more narrowly tailored, does it? As in, we can more narrowly tailor this law by requiring medical tests, even though they are invasive of privacy?
Also of concern is how the public would accept such changes in how we deal with marriage. Furtherly declining marriage rates, I’d guess.
What part, the traditional “say it so and you are married”
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Or the issues with inheritance?
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Assuming this is correct, what conclusion does it lead you to that would effect the state of the law today, taking the state of the law into account?
Does government not have an interest in preventing fraudulent inheritance claims?
I did not say it made it invalid, your claim that marriage is a state interest due to procreation is unfounded and a modern fable.
My claim is that in the US the main driver was inheritance and benefits like Social Security.
Can you provide any cites to show that it was created out of a desire to encourage procreation as it’s primary purpose?
No. if you do not like it, take it up with the Supreme Court. Modern or not, that is the precedent we have to work with.
More technically correct, (but adding a bit to what the Supreme Court has handed down) it is channeling irresponsible parents into being responsible by offering them inducements to marry. The reasoning is, if we offer incentives to marry, then when a couple takes the state up on its offer rather than going their seperate ways as they might without an incentive, there will be fewer abortions/welfare cases/child in need of care cases/ etc. In short in cuts down on bad situations for kids.
This is the position of multiple states either through their supreme courts or pleadings to the federal courts. Again, I did not think this reason up out of fulfillment of personal desires.
And again, it’s already been covered in the thread.
Perhaps you saw a recent news headline “Gays Make Better Parents” the headline was a bit deceptive; getting into the story, it was revealed that the study the story relies upon merely showed that parents who plan for their kids ahead of time make better parents. Undeniably true. We’re not too concerned with how many kids are going to be in poverty/domestic cases/be aborted from these parents. Gays do not have accidental unplanned for kids. Our concern is how to get irreponsible parents who abandon/neglect the needs of their kids to take care of them instead.
Again, not my idea.
How about my suggestion that the title “marriage” be conferred only upon reproduction? Until then we can give it a different name. “Civil Union” comes to mind. Gays can have civil unions, too! And you can rest safe in the knowledge that they will never, ever receive your oh-so-sacrosanct status of “Marriage.”
Of course I assume that in this case we will want to afford tax breaks, visitation rights, etc… on all “civil unioned” couples – we don’t want to be keeping a woman from visiting her SO when he’s hospitalized, right? Or when she’s hospitalized…?
Or, at least as a first step, until everyone is on board with the “civil union” stuff… a woman who has had her uterus removed due to cancer? Sucks to be you. No marriage for you. Menopause? No marriage for you. Just to avoid being sexist – snipped guy? No marriage for you either! After all, in all of these cases we are completely certain that the union will not produce children, amirite…?
LEt me clarify. I said NO because I do not have information on when or how marriage was originally created. This was thousands of years ago, and nobody can be sure what was going on in the first man’s mind who decided to stick around with a woman he mated with, rather than go on finding other women more willing to mate again.
I do have cites as to what the Supreme Court believes the purpose of marriage to be today, which is what we have to work with.
How the original marriage formed. Perhaps some woman made the connection between sex and pregnancy and decide to say to a man NO, not unless you’re gonna stick around and help me and the kid you made with me keep from starving. Basic survival principles must have been in their minds, but this is all speculation, and how far does speculation get us?
Wait…where was the precedent that civil marriage rights was based on procreation?
Cite
An idea with some merit.
As to your last paragraph, can you devise scheme that filters non-reproducers out without violating their privacy? Is the registrar gonna inspect your privates, maybe have a doctor up at the courthouse to figure out if you can have kids?
But we’re not certain these people won’t reproduce. I have heard of women and men who supposedly are fixed who wind up with a kid anyway, we may have near certainty, but not absolute.
I don’t understand why it’s important that we even care.
Reproduction is the fundamental purpose of marriage? Is it a required purpose of marriage? Is reproduction mentioned in any state’s legal definition of marriage? I suppose I could look it up, checking state by state…
No, you can’t, because a child conceived with the help of a surrogate or with the assistance of a fertility consultant is, for all legal purposes, still a child. The notion that medical assistance turns a marriage into a threesome is ridiculous.
I’m not aware of any serious legal debate that supports such a bizarre contention. By that “logic”, if a groom gets injured in a car accident on the way to the wedding and a doctor that saves his life, the doctor is now part of the marriage because without the doctor’s intervention, there would be no marriage.
Similarly, the clerk that signs and files the paperwork that makes a marriage legal is part of the marriage, no? Without the clerk, there is no marriage.
And in any case, I reject your “fundamental building block of society” arguments until and unless you can show me a venue where reproduction is a necessary element of legal marriage.
Read the thread and pay particular attention starting at #58, as I advised you to do before.
Skinner as precedent for Loving. I’m not explaining it again.
This is an answer to you, too, Bryan Ekers.
I like your idea of maintaining privacy.
So, if a pair of people show up at the registrar’s, how about we avoid infringing on their privacy and we don’t ask them what their gender is? 
OK, I’m joking, but only partially. Of course getting a marriage license involves some invasion of privacy. The registrar will want to be sure, for example, that the marriage candidates are not siblings (and in many states, not first cousins.) It’s just a question of where we draw the line.
Gays do not reproduce with each other. They reproduce with people OUTSIDE their marriages. The fact that a few gays have utilized science or surrogates and the DNA of third persons does not make their reproduction fundamental to the survival of the nation. In short, take this out of the picture and the nation still survives.
There is a reason marriage is a fundamental right, and gays are outside of that reasoning. Like I said, take it up with the Supreme Court if you do not like it.
Other more reasonable posters can accept the fact of court precedent, and have started asking questions along the lines of how we could more narrowly tailor marriage to achieve it’s fundamental purpose.
This is #58 there is no cite here, Griswold v. Connecticut makes no mention of procreation when it gave the rights to purchase birth control to married persons. If this is so blindingly obvious why would the court be so forgetful.
You are claiming that showing your face in public violates your privacy? generally the registrar can see whether a couple is opposite sex or not. If the registrar is mistaken, I suppose it is not too much to ask that a couple prove they are of the opposite sex contrary to appearances. i’m glad you’re at least partially joking.
We do not assign the registrar to check for close sanguinuity. This is a matter of criminal incest law, at any time it may be discovered.
I asked for precednet before that government dissolves marriages against the will of both parties. i suppose this is more along the lines of annulment (the legal fiction that the marriage never happened) rather than dissolution.
Oh, I’m confident that I have a fair handle on the situation. Frankly, watching you pull in increasingly absurd arguments is amusing, bringing in fictions even while you demand I argue on points of law.
So eventually the Justices of SCOTUS will debate what level of scrutiny, if any, to apply. This isn’t a math problem, so even given identical inputs and formulas, we can expect the individual justices to come to different conclusions. Maybe some have already made up their minds and are musing on ways to legally rationalize their desired result. That’s fair; they’re human. My personal view is that if a vote could be rationalized either way, it may as well be in the direction of equality. The American people (well, most of them) will get over it, eventually.
Oh I see you are trying to use Skinner v. Oklahoma vs using case law that directly relates.
The standard of review for Equal Protection is useful in Skinner, to say it defined marriage for SCOTUS is just absurd.
Looking at Skinner you may have ignored the word ‘AND’. How do you read that and make the claim that the purpose of marriage was procreation?