Do you have evidence of cases of civil partnerships permitted under laws designed to give them equal rights as hetero couples where the homosexual couple was in fact denied those equal rights?
If so, you have defeated the crux of my argument and gotten me to join your side. Lay it on me, man. I’m ready to sign on.
I think your arguments are based on an incorrect understanding of how our legal system works. But, since you asked for evidence, this Wiki article states that a number of New Jersey civil union partners have been denied spousal benefits from their employers.
All of them, in America at least. As has been pointed out, civil unions simply don’t get you the same legal rights as being married does, and only straights can get married.
But the point I was making with the adultery bit was that even though there are some small differences in the way the laws are written, they are of no practical effect whatsoever.
If one party to a marriage commits adultery, can the other party obtain a divorce? Yes.
If one party to a civil partnership commits adultery, can the other party get the partnership dissolved? Yes.
Sounds equal to me.
Well, I’m not an expert on English law. If you say the outcomes are the same, I’ll defer.
But I can easily picture the scenario you describe having different outcomes under US law. If the plain wording of the laws specifies adultery for marriage and doesn’t specify it for civil unions, then in the US, a court may very well decline to read adultery into the law governing civil unions.
I accept that the legal structures of the UK and the US aren’t the same so it’s not necessarily possible to create an identical option for CPs in the US as here. My point is that if they were equal under the law, does the name matter? And as a step in the right direction, wouldn’t that be better than nothing at all?
The fight for gay legal equality in the UK has been a pretty slow and difficult one over the past 60 years, but we got there in the end. I can’t think of any areas where we suffer discrimination under the law now apart from the definition of adultery still being classed as heterosexual penetration, but as that doesn’t stand in the way of someone claiming unfaithfulness as a reason for disolving a CP I don’t think it matters. I just think the US would be doing itself a big favour if it were willing to go for a less-than-perfect alternative for now rather than holding out for a fairly seismic shift in the definition of marriage. Only six countries in the world have same sex marriage, but plenty more have civil unions which, no doubt, will eventually lead to same sex marriage. I don’t think any country has gone from nothing to same sex marriage in one step.
Without the name, they won’t be equal under the law. That’s the point of creating civil unions in the first place.
Civil unions are no more a path to same sex marriage than segregation was a path to equal rights. At best, they’ll just be something else that needs to be thrown out before same sex marriage becomes a reality. This is just history repeating itself.
Actually, this is incorrect. In most US jurisdictions, marriages must be licensed and solemnized by an authorized officiant, either a civil official (judge or other officant authorized by law) or by a clergy member. A marriage performed by a clergy member (who may be determined to be such under the religious rules of his or her denomination, or by actual spiritual leadership of a congregation) is a fully legal marriage, and performing a religious marriage without going through the civil licensing formalities may be a criminal act by the officiant. Conversely, in those jurisdictions which don’t require licensing, if a couple goes through a religious marriage ceremony, they are considered to be legally married despite not going through civil formalities.
Similarly, in bigamy or polygamy prosecutions, in most states one may be convicted by undertaking religious marriages to multiple purported spouses even though the second and later marriages have no legal validity.
What you may be thinking of is that certain denominations such as Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism believe that a civil divorce does not dissolve a religious marriage, and that other steps must be undertaken to permit remarriage within the denomination, leading to a condition in which a person may be legally unmarried but considered to be married by his or her religion.
Essentially, the legal system will grant civil divorces without considering religious objections, but objects to religious marriage ceremonies that do not or can not convey the civil rights of marriage.
No, you are the one who is incorrect here. In order to have a valid legal marriage, there is a list of requirements you must fulfill. As one of these requirements, many states require some type of witnessed ceremony. As a matter of convenience and for historical reasons, these states allow a religious ceremony to fulfill that requirement. However, you must still fulfill all the other requirements in order to have a valid legal marriage. Simply having a religious ceremony does not in-and-of-itself grant you legal recognition. For example, in California, all marriages must be registered with the state. If a couple goes through a religious marriage, but fails to register with the state, then they do not have a valid legal marriage.
Now, it is true that most people will fulfill these legal requirements during the course of their religious marriages, but you can have a valid legal marriage without doing anything religious at all.
I’m going to need a cite that having a religious marriage ceremony, in the absence of any other activity (such as mixing funds or living together) constitutes bigamy or polygamy.
Well, this is my point. If the two institutions were the same, it wouldn’t be possible to be legally divorced yet remain religiously married, now would it? The state doesn’t tell you that you aren’t divorced until the Catholic church weighs in on the issue.
Again, incorrect. I’m free to go down to a church and have a religious ceremony and the state isn’t going to do anything about it. This is why, prior to the recent court ruling in California, gay people were perfectly free to go to their church and get married, even though such a marriage didn’t carry legal recognition in California.
Given that it’s extremely difficult to confer full equality on two separate institutions in the US, I don’t see any reason to settle for civil partnerships. Yes, they’re a step in the right direction, but why should that be adopted as an end goal?
For all I know, pushing for gay marriage has resulted in civil unions as a compromise. If people had pushed for civil unions instead, the compromise might have ended up with far fewer rights for gay people. So, I’ve got no problems with people pushing for full equality.
It’s difficult to compare the situation in the UK and the US. In the UK, the government can establish civil unions with the same rights as marriages. In the US, marriage is a state level matter. So the likely approach is that states make the determination (assuming federal courts do not rule that denying same sex marriage is a violation of the federal constitution, which doesn’t seem likely); even if the state establishes a civil union pathway with all the state rights of marriage it won’t come with the federal rights.
That was indeed more or less what I meant, but more precisely, I’m also wondering whether a polygamous union that involves more than one man is legal anywhere in the world. All the places I can think of that allow polygamy contemplate an arrangement that involves one man and multiple wives.
A marriage involving multiple men isn’t polyagmy, it’s polyandry.
Well, whatever - my question stands.
A marriage involving multiple any gender is polygamy. A marriage involving multiple men is polyandry. A marriage involving multiple women is polygyny. But both of those fall under the polygamy umbrella. And none of those is usually used to refer to multiple same-sex marriages, having many decades of usage under their metaphorical belts in anthropology to refer to, respectively, a woman marrying multiple men and a man marrying multiple women.
I don’t know the state of the social science as far as where the same-sex permutations of these would fall, though. I don’t know that you can really call a multiple-male same-sex marriage as polyandry, since (at the moment anyway) polyandry is pretty much defined as a woman married to multiple men.
Thanks. I’ll do some learning and come back when done.
In a thread a few months ago, we discussed When Exactly are You Married, with some detailed legal citations for various states. In post 46 of that thread, I quoted New York Domestic Relations Law § 25, which provides that failure to procure a marriage license for an otherwise validly solemnized marriage does not render the marriage void. I also cite to Persad v. Balram, 187 Misc.2d 711, 724 N.Y.S.2d 560 (Sup. Ct. Queens Co. 2001), in which a court found that a couple had been validly and legally married when they went through a Hindu wedding ceremony but never applied for nor obtained a marriage license.
The rest of the thread is an interesting discussion on the laws of various states and other jurisdictions. In particular, it appears that the law of Illinois supports your statement, but it varies significantly by location.
In this earlier thread , there are several quotations of various state’s bigamy laws, which provide that someone is guilty if they “purport to marry” when already married. Thus, if a clergy member purports to marry a person already legally married, it’s bigamy.
You’re free to go down to church and have a religious ceremony, but not a religious marriage ceremony (in many states). There is a an important legal difference between a religious ceremony in which an officiant uses the legal power he or she is granted by the state to declare the couple married, and one in which he or she uses his or her religious authority to bless the union or declare the couple united, or some other non-legal recognition.
In the first thread linked, WhyNot discusses what she does as an officiant:
Maybe, maybe not. But given the legal structures of the US, they won’t be equal under the law.
To use your earlier analogy - it sounds like in the UK that you’ve got a situation where you have a very stable .9 or even .95 - so fighting for 1 may seem rather a waste of time. Here, however, civil unions are a highly volatile .2 to .7 (at best) that can change at the drop of a hat and will change every time a person crosses state lines. Given that state of uncertainty and chaos mixed on top of the obvious inequality - it makes sense for people to say “Fuck this, I want 1.”
That’s a good summation amarinth.
There are clearly differences between the situation in the US and UK (and NZ), which are useful to know about, and helps with understanding why the US dopers see the situation of having only Civil Unions for gay couples (instead of Marriage in name) as a bigger issue than people in other countries might.
My friends with a civil union had a wedding and got married, even if it was under the Civil Union Act 2004, rather than under the Marriage Act 1955, and with the exception of being able to adopt (as a couple) have the same rights and responsibilities as my wife and I who contracted under the Marriage Act 1955. (I hope the adoption inequality is redressed).