Seems more like you’re describing an adulterous affair than friends with benefits.
You’ve left your original basis for marriage reform, easing the burden on the court system, FAR behind with this latest proposal. Now courts get to intervene in every breakup and every case of infidelity. Delightful.
Do you sincerly believe that legal contracts between every couple is something people want and would participate in?
Wait, I see it now!
With only 50% of marriages ending in divorce, attorneys only profit in half the marriage businees, at best. By doing away with marriage, pchaos has assured a way for attorneys to get in on the front end and back end of every relationship.
He’s managed to create a whole new profit stream for his profession.
It’s diabolically genius!
James Bond, agent 697, with a license to shtup.
Besides being sure that stuff people do naturally is not illegal, what more is required?
Boy; I came in there thinking that this thread was going to about what I consider to be a generally pretty good idea, but it’s incredibly muddled.
I guess my theory doesn’t actually involve “abolishing” anything. My idea is:
Strike the concept of “marriage” from all legal use. Replace it with the identical concept of “Domestic Partnership” or whatever the heck you want to call it. This will be IDENTICAL to “marriage” in ALL legal senses, be just as binding (or not), confer all the same rights - joint tax filings, hospital visitation, whatever marriage currently grants. And it would be available to ANY two people who want to make that kind of commitment.
People could still go to a Church and get married, and if they wanted, they could also file all the appropriate government forms (which they already do anyway, if they want a legally recognized married) to establish a domestic partnership. Now since the rules of “marriage” are defined by your local parish church, tabernacle, temple, or voodoo priest, no one has any right to complain that the government is in some way “ruining” marriage by allowing two people of the same gender to get “married”.
There really isn’t any reason to tie the legal benefits of making a life commitment to a religious ceremony. In a number of ways, they’re already not tied together because you can get married by a Justice of the Peace. So if we shed the problem word, and call the legal arrangement something else, we eliminate all this vexing argument about “the traditional definition of marriage is…”
Note: I do not view this as feasible in any way, because people are inexplicably attached to the word “marriage” but hey, this thread seemed like the place to mention it.
So here’s the problem: think of all the legal places that refer to how married people are to be treated, both by the government, and in business relationships. You want to change ALL of those to this Domestic Partnership contract. I guess you could pass a law that says that any law or contract that refers to marriage now applies to these Domestic Partnerships.
And why do you want to do this? To appease the bigots.
That’s the problem - creating a whole new legal term and trying to think ahead of all the unintended consequences of changing over from marriage, just so that you can get the bigots to go along with it. I used to advocate the same position that you’re advocating here, but realizing the above changed my mind. And anyway, do you think the bigots would even be appeased anyway?
Right! That’s why marriage is a legal term, independent of any optional religious ceremony that the parties may want to participate in.
Can’t be done, the term “marriage” as said is deeply imbedded in the law. It would also be inferior to marriage due to not being recognized outside the country.
Plus of course it would cause a tremendous backlash against homosexuals for “destroying marriage”; you’d see their rights rolled back all over, probably quite a lot of violence against them as well.
Why should the institutions that exist for all of us get the term recognized as inferior while private entities that exist for the select few get the term recognized as superior? “Civil unions” and “domestic partnerships” were created for the reason that the word “marriage” was considered too good for gay people.
My attachment isn’t inexplicable. It’s because the other terms were created to vilify people like me.
It’s inexplicable to me, because I am interested in the practical results, not in what it is called.
The objective is simply to distinguish the legal partnership side from the “under God” side. There is no connection now, but people insist on trying to prevent people from making legal changes because we use the same word for the legal stuff that we do for their “sacred institution”. There is nothing sacred about the right to visit your life partner in the hospital and file joint taxes.
ETA: Other people are right though - this is entirely too much work to be feasible. That said, I think it makes an interesting mental exercise, which, it seems to me, is the only possible point of this thread.
You might ask yourself why the federal law does not recognize civil unions now - and what the reaction of the Republican Congress would be if a law recognizing them was introduced.
It is not God that is an issue, since I’m not aware of any effort to require marriages to be religious. It is at root the desire to exclude certain groups from the privileges of marriage. And civil unions versus real marriage looks a lot like separate but equal to me. And, like the other use, the separate never wound up being equal.
Last thing needed is a hypersensitive reactionary board monitor accusing people of being a “troll.” Look at the sociological and demographic data, the poster was making a valid point statistically.
That’s irrelevant, since the post was still off-topic. Unfortunately, commenting on rules violations like trolling is part of my role as a moderator. To that end, I’m warning you, too. If you want to discuss your view of that demographic data, open a new thread.
Isn’t solemnize already a perfectly good word meaning (marriage + religious rite)?
Currently a registry office marriage is every bit as legal and binding as one celebrated by a grand-poo bah in an outrageous hat. (Not true world-wide, but this is a largely US-centric discussion).
The practical solution would appear to be “marriage” for everyone – priests / churches can then choose to “solemnize” or not as they will.
Isn’t the poo-bah version essentially meaningless (in legal terms) until you file the same sort of paperwork as the people getting the registry office version?
I mean, you could say God needs to satisfied with the binding, hence the requirement for pooh-bah ceremonial supervision, but that doesn’t carry any legal weight that I’m aware of in the U.S.
Exactly. Hence solemnizing is already marriage (the legal binding secular contract) + religious rites, and as you say the religious side alone doesn’t carry legal weight. Most probably not true everywhere in the world, but true in the US, and in NZ; we had a minister as a celebrant but still had to fill in and file the paperwork.
It’s germane here at the moment in reference to the Marriage Equality bill that’s making its way through Parliament – it looks as though members of religious organizations will be free to turn down same-sex couples (or I guess anyone else who fails to meet their acceptance criteria), but independent celebrants will be bound by the usual non-discrimination laws that businesses operate under.
Actually I believe “solemnize” means, essentially, “officiate” – to act in a publicly recognized capacity in the leading of a semi-ritualistic set of acts aimed at giving social recognition to a desired state of affairs. E.g., getting away from religion and marriage, an adult or couple feels parental towards a child in his/her/their custody who in turn feels filial love towards him/her/them. After doing what may be required to demonstrate acceptability to do so, they go before a judge who asks them specific questions or takes specific vows, then declares the adult(s) to have adopted the child. He officiated at the adoption. So too a judge/JP/mayor/municipal clerk/minister/priest/rabbi/imam officiates at a marriage, whether purely secular or including a religious component. (Note in France, Germany, and other civil law countries the functions of civil marriage and holy matrimony are separated into two ceremonies.)
You may well be correct – I was under the impression that solemnize had implications of a religious officiant… but this may not be right.
Even when there is a single ceremony there are the mandatory bits (the legal ones) and the optional / variable bits (determined by religion or celebrant or bride & groom, or wedding planner, or whoever).
When I was married we were designing our own ceremony (we wanted an old-ish form as it was a medieval styled wedding) and our celebrant (the bride’s father, a Methodist minister) checked over what we’d done to ensure we hadn’t missed anything mandatory.
IIRC the only mandatory bits were a declaration that we were doing this freely and knew of no impediments, and the signing of the license copies with witnesses. Everything else was “season to taste”.
I like being married
Your reply is spot on.
The “institution of marriage” is a fairly new creation in that it is only a few hundred years old, but marriage, in its true form, has existed since the beginning of time.
I’ve written a small book called Marriage Without a License (available through Amazon), which explores how it came to be that the civil and religious institution are now viewed as one and the same even though they are quite different in origin.
I agree with LMarie and Lemur, marriage has been around for thousands of years in one form or another. I have no problem with the institution of marriage, being happily married myself. I think marriage, like so many other things in our society, is a choice, a reflection of free will to enter into a contract as it is defined. Many people make that choice, and in doing so accept the benefits (or sometimes consequences) of that choice. Other people choose not to get married, and make a commitment to each other on their own terms as they choose to define them between themselves. So as an institution, I don’t see a need to abolish marriage because it’s simply a decision, an outlying of terms that people can either choose to be a part of or not choose, based on their free will and understanding of that choice.
My problem with marriage is only that this choice is not readily available to all who wish to make it. We don’t need to abolish marriage to appease the bigots, we only need to fight bigotry by ensuring EVERYONE has the same choices and the same opportunities as we should all have under the equal protection clauses of the Constitution. If people from the LGBT community have the choice of marriage available to them, then they will have the same rights as any two consenting adults who wish to enter into a civil contract as defined by the law and society.
Somewhere along the way the historical roots of marriage got confused and, to some, replaced by the notion that marriage is a religious contract. To some it is, but once again that is a choice that they made, an addendum of the terms of marriage as part of a personal choice. But marriage is not a religious contract to many people on a personal level, nor is it a religious contract as defined by the law. I got married by a dive captain in Mexico. My marriage is no less valid than someone who got married in a church. So when people pull out the old Biblical definition of marriage to excuse bigotry and argue that gay marriage shouldn’t be legal it really pisses me off. Marriage existed long before the Bible did, and long before the advent of many modern religions. Pure and simple, under the eyes of the law, it is a civil contract. Religion can be added to that contract as a choice, but it isn’t the basis for the institution of marriage, not in this society and not in history. So religion should never be used as an excuse to prevent two people from entering into a civil contract.
What would this 1984-style wordsmithing accomplish? You want the concept of marriage, but not the word itself. What is so offensive about the word “marriage” that what it does can remain identical in every way, but we must create another word or term to describe it?