No - Second Lateran Council, convened by Pope Innocent II in 1139, made priestly celibacy the general rule.
Opposition to celibacy was one of the points put forward by Protestants such as Luther.
The Council of Trent re-affirmed celibacy of the clergy, in response to the Protestant challenge.
That is just saying that the number ‘two’ is the more important aspect of the law and must be preserved rather than the sex orientation of the people it applies to. Why not a law that says something like “Marriage is between consenting adults”?
Because the relationships between 3 or more people needs to be defined.
Say you have two men and one woman.
Are the men married to each other along with the woman?
Is the woman only married to each man separately?
What if all three are married to each other and one wants a divorce from only one of the others?
Bringing in a fourth person, who must approve? Is the fourth person automatically married to all or must each person be married to the fourth separately?
Same sex marriage can be accommodated in the legal system by replacing “Man” and “Wife” with “Spouse”.
Even 3 people gets far more complex and the laws need to be written from scratch.
Except you don’t have to do that right away. Instead, you can let people live how they want without necessarily legally recognizing it, just don’t arrest them. Then after a couple of decades of seeing how these arrangements work in practice we can start figuring out how to recognize them.
But at this stage, we’re basically in the 1920s, when you could be arrested for gay sex, or living as man and wife in an interracial relationship. For starters, we can just leave these people the hell alone, and I hope the courts at least recognize people’s right to associate freely under the 1st amendment and puts a stop to a practice that really shouldn’t exist in the 21st century.
Easy. The same law applies as it now, but isn’t limited to the number of people that can marry. You don’t marry a group, but each member of the group. Think a matrix. Nodes can branch in many directions and leave as they wish. When you divorce you divorce the person you don’t want to be married to any longer.
So a woman can be married to two men who are not married to each other, but each of them may be married to someone else.
We have that now. Did you actually imagine that people get arrested for co-habiting in groups of three or more?
Sure why not? What do I care? Why should I or anyone else give a damn about it? Barring actual harm, why the hell should any of us decide that some people aren’t deserving of the love they feel towards whoever?
Incestous couples get arrested even if they are consenting adults. It does appear, however, that polygamy laws are not being held up in court the way they used to be:
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/12/16/sister-wives-defeat-polygamy-law-in-federal-court
Although it looks like that was a religious freedom issue.
Marriage has to do with sex. When and who you should have it with. So I think the OPs point is well taken that if you are recognizing the existence of bi people, and you are recognizing their rights to be in a marriage that fulfills them, the way they were made, then it would need in many cases to be with someone of both sexes. Otherwise you are legally proscribing someone from being themselves by participating in a legal marriage.
Bob and Jane are married. Jane wants to marry Frank. Does Bob get a veto on that?
Bob is married to Jane, and Jane is also married to Frank. Bob and Jane decide to get a divorce. How many of Jane’s assets can Bob claim, and how many can Frank claim?
Bob is married to Jane, and Jane is also married to Frank. Jane dies without a will. How do you divide her belongings?
Jane was married to Steve, and they had a couple kids, but Steve died. Then Jane married Bob, and then Frank. Then Jane dies. Who has custody of the stepkids?
None of these questions are impossible to solve, but they still have to be solved. And that really only scratches the surface of the issue - someone more versed in divorce law probably has bushels of much tougher hypotheticals.
Which is not to say that it shouldn’t be done because it’s too hard; just pointing out that it actually will take a lot of hard work to get a legal framework for poly marriages in place, and I’m not seeing a lot of pols out there anxious to get their hands dirty on this issue.
Arrested, no. But if you’ve got kids from a previous relationship, and you’re living in an open relationship with more than one person, that can and has been used as evidence that your child is being raised in an unsafe environment in custody hearings. That’s at least one example of a protection that would be granted by legal recognition of poly relationships.
Nope. He can divorce his spouse if he doesn’t like what she is doing.
Frank can’t claim anything as he isn’t married to Bob. Jane’s net worth is a combination of her assets, her assets with Bob and her assets with Frank. They split that however their original contract states. Maybe there is a caveat that any divorce only can consider the immediate spouse’s assets and not those gained as being married to someone else.
However the marriage contract states. Why does the marriage contract not contain these provisions now?
Under current law does the step parent gain automatic custody of the kids? Personally, I’m thinking Thunderdome as a possible solution.
None of it is more complicated than the way corporations are put together. Maybe it would make far more sense to have these contracts in place BEFORE people get married to cover these eventualities?
:rolleyes: By that “argument”, you could claim that men who are attracted to both blondes and brunettes should be legally entitled to marry one of each simultaneously, or that women who are attracted to both smooth and hairy men should be able to marry one of each simultaneously, or that so-called “versatile” gay men should be able to marry a “top” and a “bottom” simultaneously, etc.
Being bisexual doesn’t mean that you need both a male and a female sex partner to be sexually fulfilled: it just means that you can be attracted to either a male or a female partner. Marriage equality doesn’t mean that you have to be able to marry everyone you’re attracted to at the same time.
Mind you, I personally don’t have any objection (in the abstract) to legalizing poly marriage. But there is absolutely nothing about legalizing same-sex marriage that compels us to legalize polygamy. Two-partner marriage and multi-partner marriage are two separate issues, whether the partners are male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or any combination of the above.
I’m not convinced your argument is logical. I didn’t say you can marry as many distinct features or things as you like.
There must be many different styles of bisexuality. How can you determine what makes "sexual fulfillment " for everyone who self defines that way? I certainly did not in my post. I don’t think you can see the issue through with that approach. The law criminalizes their self definition.
I don’t know if there’s ever been a poll of bisexual people asking about this, but most bi- people I’ve known are not fulfilled just being exlusively with one person.
The thing I can find is this:
It doesn’t seem that most bisexuals HAVE to have sexual partners in both sexes, but they tend to not be nearly as enamored with monogamy as gay or straight people. Figuring out whether this is an innate trait or a “choice” is the next step I guess.
Oh, well, if it’s only as complicated as corporate law!
The reason that marriage is a government function is that there’s a huge amount of possible legal situations that come up when two people join themselves together like that. Your average marriage document doesn’t cover every possible contingency for how the marriage might change, grow, or terminate. Rather, there’s reams and reams of laws and precedent governing what a “marriage” is and how it works. A significant amount of those laws and precedents don’t work when applied to poly marriage. At the very least, an equal recognition of poly marriage would require that all of those laws be overhauled so that they work with the concept of poly marriage, and all those precedents likewise revisited. And all that’s before you start considering situations that have no parallel in dyadic marriage. Legalizing poly marriage is not a trivial task.
:dubious: If you’re saying we should replace legal marital monogamy with polygamy to better accommodate people who are (or may be) innately non-monogamous, fine, knock yourself out.
However, that has nothing to do with marriage equality in the sense of allowing participation in legal marital monogamy by same-sex couples who do want to be monogamous.
Why reinvent the wheel? Unless you’re a lawyer and it pays you to do so. Everyone is a corporation.
Um, corporations generally have teams of lawyers on staff to monitor their interactions with other corporations. Individual marital partners probably will need something simpler and more do-it-yourself.
Seems to me that a multiple marriage is kinda like having a band. With all that entails as far as rights go when someone leaves or is fired from the band.
Except for minor things like communal property, alimony, children, pets, etc.