This scenario just mushroomed in my head, so I’ll spit it out for you.
The year is 2008. By a stroke of the pen same sex marriages are now legal. A gay doper by the name of Pecox is married off to another doper by the name of stopbull in a quaint New Hampshire Episcopalian church. Monosole was in attendance. Pecox wore a…
A year later , in the great tradition of Henry VIII, stopbull petitions Bishop Robinson for an annulment because Pecox has limited their sexual relations to oral only.
Should Bishop Robinson grant the annulment?
Should oral sex be regarded as sufficient for consumation for both straights and gays.
I’m not even going into what constitutes consummation for lesbians.
We are probably going to have to provide a whole lot of rewrites to a whole lot of laws if we are ever going to achieve full equality in marriage don’t you think? I don’t think just calling the union between Adam and Steve a marriage is sufficient, do you? On the other hand can you see the possibility that instituting gay marriage will impinge on long standing implications and practises reserved heretofore for traditional marriage?
A lot depends on what current statutes are, in which state, legal precedence, etc. Can you give a more specific example?
On a broader note, of course this is going to mean a lot of changes to existing laws. You think Nevada granted divorces and they got every permutation correct the moment the law was enacted? Straight folks have been defining and redefining what “traditional marriage” is as they go along (through the court system, referring to the legal aspects of the OP), and so will gay folks have to when they get the same right.
Depends on how you define “full equality.” I can think of definitions under which homosexuals have it now and I can think of other definitions under which it is almost certain not to occur.
Oh, don’t worry about that! All you gayboys get yourselves legally married now, be loud & proud!
Yep, society’s gonna change, & change big! You’re in the vanguard of the revolution!
[sub] (Don’t mind the skinheads, they’re just waitin’ to able to check marriage records so they can be sure they get the true abominators when the backlash hits.) [/sub]