Children aren’t the purpose of a marriage.
The last time I checked I could name anybody I want as the beneficiary on my insurance policy and as far as state benefits are concerned, I thought I make it clear that those should be restricted to families
They aren’t considered married until they have children.
Life insurance, sure. Try adding your neighbor to the medical plan you get through work.
There’s a local race to protest the amendment in Minnesota. This sheet is on their website. (PDF)
On what planet???
Children aren’t the purpose of a marriage.
To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t anyone (government or religion) that forbids marriage between a post menopausal woman and a man. It would be interesting to find such a society…there might be one out there, which would imply that for THAT society, marriage was for the purposes of procreation.
Damn, I was going to say this also. If the issue was the Catholic view of marriage, state recognition for divorce and divorce by Protestants, Jews and atheists would seem to be just as damaging to marriage as SSM would be. I think the church lobbies against relaxation of divorce laws, so I’m not claiming that they are being hypocritical, just supporting that the institution of marriage and marriage as a Catholic sacrament are two different things. Certainly no SSM law would require the Church to recognize SSM (even though they may have to pay married benefits.)
My question is how can they (homosexual people) possibly mess it up more then it is already? Also I do have a question for the homosexual people as to why they would want to marry, marriage has become in the hands of heterosexual people is a total mess of broken families, hearts, dreams and no love (and therefor no God, as God is love) to be found in it.
I remember this being the premise of two unrelated but virtually identical subplots on episodes of e.r., showing a rather disturbing lack of originality on the part of the writers. A middle-aged lesbian couple comes in, one partner suffering serious health problems, but because there’s no paperwork, her longtime partner gets shut out of decisions, such reverting to the patient’s semi-estranged brother. Then about two years later, a middle-aged gay couple arrives, one partner suffering serious health problems, but because there’s no paperwork, his longtime partner gets shut out of decisions, such reverting to the patient’s semi-estranged family.
I know these stories are supposed to push my “that’s so unfair” buttons, but geez… get some paperwork, people!
[quote=“Kimmy_Gibbler, post:49, topic:587381”]
If the annulment of marriage 2 didn’t occur until after marriage 3, then marriage 3 can’t have been performed by the RCC, and as such, no annulment of marriage 3 is required since the marriage was not valid in the eyes of the RCC.
[QUOTE]
I am not sure of RCC rules on the matter, but generally, annulment meaning that the marriage never happened due to defect, if marriage number 2 was no marriage at all, then marriage number 3 is really marriage number 1. Since nothing ever happened that rose to a level of marriage before number 3, there is no impediment to marriage. Nor does something that never happened need wait to be declared so in order to treat it so.
Legal fictions, and specious indeed, but that is the way our law works.
Some states have waiting periods akin to divorces associated with annulments in order to prevent technical snafus of the sort described. It is permissible to pass such statutes and change the common law. But if your state does not have such statutes you need not wait around for a declaration that the fake thing was fake before starting the real thing.
You aren’t safe no matter how much paperwork you get, unless one of thoses papers says “marriage certificate” on it. Wasn’t there a case a few years ago where a lesbian couple (traveling with their children) on a cruise, one woman had a heart attack on a shore excursion in Florida, and her partner & children were denied access to her as she was dying because their paperwork on onboard the ship & when it arrived the hospital insisted on having their attorney review it before letting them see her or make decisions? The woman ended up dying alone. Do hospitals ever make straight couples show their paperwork? Let’s say my father had a heart attack and my mother drove him to the ER. Would they stop her at the door as he was being weeled in for treatmant and say “Sorry Ma’am, we have no way of knowing if you’re related to this man. Go home and fetch your marriage certificate. If after careful review our staff think’s it’s real then we’ll talk to you and let you visit him if he’s still alive”. Is there a single hospital anywhere on the planet that pulls crap like that with married couples? :rolleyes:
How do you figure that? Assets in many cultures were not distributed to the spouse but to the first male child.
I’d say the institution existed for thousands of years based on concepts of normal physical relationships.
Marriage being how it was established that the first male child was indeed the child of the asset holder. Rememer the ancient legal saying “The mother is always known, the father is whoever she was married to at the time.” It sounds more impressive in Latin.
Thats a great question Kanicbird and I believe I have a good answer.
I have been concerned about the state of marriage long before the question of gay marriage came up.
Let’s say you own a house. One day an earthquake comes along and does some damage. Not a bad earthquake nor is too much damage done. You clean up and do some repair but still your house is a little not like it was.
A week later a wildfire blows along and doesn’t quite burn your house down but again, some damage is done–it burnt one corner of the roof and the paint is ruined, not to mention your formerly acttractive lawn.
While you still have the tarp on the roof it finally rains stopping the wildfires but the thunderstorm has shearing winds that remove a little more of that bad corner that burned. You’ve now abandoned half your house, but you’ve nowhere to go
so you get to work trying to keep up with the damage again.
It rains again and a tornado picks up your house and sets it back down. Your once nice though modest house is now a rickety shambles you’re afraid to go into, and you are thinking about a bulldozer when all the rain causies the hillside next to you to let lose and your house is smashed by a landslide.
Your neighbor who has been indifferent to your misfortune the whole time walks by and comments while you rip your hair out and cry to God:
“Why should you care about a landslide? Your house was already trashed.”
I know if I was on the homeowner’s jury, if I heard the above story, I’d acquit him even though I also knew for sure that the homeowner broke his neighbor’s nose.
Why?
The fact that previous damage has been done is no reason not to care about further damage.
In the 40’s-60’s there was a trend in domestic law called heartbalm statutes which are named backwards to their function. I call them as I see them, anti-heartbalms. The idea was that a person should no longer be able to sue a person who had committed adultery with your spouse. You could also sue if someone maliciously caused your marriage to fail. Because inferior judges were crying their dockets were too full and their cases too hard, the legislatures simply outlawed that sort of cause of action.
of course at that time there were outcries that this was destructive of marriage.
Next, in the 60’s and 70’s there came the no-fault divorce trend. Again it was said that this served government economy and conversely that it was destructive of marriage. Along with this came a trend to refuse to prosecute adultery as a crime or to repeal adultery statutes. About half the states today have been too embarrassed to call attention to their lack of enforcement of adultery by repealing the meaningless statute; it doesn’t look good in conservative states after the politicians have railed about family values.
The next trend was blown out of proportion domestic violence policies. These usually viewed women as victims and men as aggressors and completely undermined any father’s role in the family should he happen to be accused. This time the cause was women’s rights rather than judicial economy (Read: Judge’s golf time). This time crowding the court docket with the mostly truly frivolous resulted in hiring more judges and police.
All of the above can easily cause anyone who has been involved in any of it to become jaded at the concept of marriage.
Well proven is the theory that less than a natural nuclear family. particularly if it is done on purpose, leads to many social ills in children.
How much more can the sacred union that gives life to each of us be degraded. It’s meaningless, but for a thousand years you could sue over it and win compensation. It’s meaningless, but for most of a thousand years you couldn’t end it, and then you had to prove something was seriously wrong your marriage to get one. Or start your own church. (Ha ha, comic relief moment)
It’s not a serious issue at all, if you’re female you can through your man out with no evidence with same day service. He doesn’t get to take anything with him but the clothes on his back and all a woman has to say is I’m scared.
Now the presumed boon of producing children doesn’t even matter.
I never have claimed that gay marriage alone will utterly wreck the concept of marriage. If it were five hundred years ago when marriage was still a serious matter, and I saw two priests caring for an orphan, and they all lived together, gay or not I wouldn’t care, I’d be willing to extend to them any benefits any other couple had in order to promote child rearing.
Who you love isn’t the issue–getting some help from those around you raising kids is.
Now we must weigh in the balance whether artificially created families to further a social agenda is a valid prerogative of the people in general; should we or should we not assist homosexual unions? Does it further society to help two people who, on the face of the matter, can never produce a child, the protection of which is the goal of marriage generally? We must weigh these questions against how much what could reasonably be called a mockery of child production will damage the concept of child production in the minds of people who can actually produce children with their desired partner.
If the damage to natural nuclear families and children is too great in comparison to the harm done to gays by disallowing what has essentially become a tax break and not much more, then we should not allow gay marriage.
The successful continuation of the species is our prime prerogative. I am not swayed by an argument that the world needs fewer people. It is just as valid to say the world should better utilize its resources instead. Gay people do not have children anyway regardless of marriage or not. I am not against a gay couple raising a child because it is one of their lot in life to have a child…better than no parent. I’m not against giving them a tax break or other benefits if the reason is to raise a child. But if they adopt for no other reason than to make a showing that they are the equivalent of straits, the motivation is false and not a valid reason for societal assistance. That is putting the cart before the horse, very plainly.
Now, should anti-gay marriage advocates favor anti-heartbalms, no fault divorce, run away domestic violence and adultery, they are perfect hypocrites to claim it is destructive of marriage. Just like the other neighbor who laughed at the fire and flood and tornado that all damaged your house in a minor way, but cumulatively made you wanna chuck it, and then took the andslide seriously, it makes no sense. But a hypocrite picking up a cause in no way proves the underlying cause invalid, as gay rights activists argue. What it means is the hypocrite should realize he is not a good image for the cause and not much more.
Our society has completely forgotten anti-heartbalms; most of us don’t realize that adultery is still a crime in about half the states, though unenforced. We do recall the idiocy of no fault divorce; indeed valid movements for creating covenant marriages, where no fault does not apply, are in our memories.
Destruction of traditional marriage is a valid reason to deny gay marriage. It is not a reason to deny homosexuals who happen to have a child (now how did that happen) a tax break for rearing the child. Gays who adopt in order to play make-believe can make believe they have societal benefits too. I couldn’t care less about fakers.
XX+XY is the recipe for life, and nothing else.
Coming particularly at this time after marriage as a concept has endured blow after blow after blow against it, ove rthe forgotten last seventy years, we cannot afford to pretend that gays create human lifeand that their union is the equivalent of XX+XY.
I also assert that gays couldn’t have ever hoped to succeed with their agenda of gay marriage if marriage hadn’t already been brought to its knees by other factors.
I’m a thinking reasoning and fair man. But if I ever find that gays have been behind all these factors destroying marriage in order to bring us to this point, there is no argument you can give that will make me approve of your desire to marry. I can think of nothing more wicked than purposely causing the heartbreak borne by the children of broken families.
Of course that last bit is speculation; I don’t know that any one group is behind any more than one of those issues.
Well, there is my answer. I hope it helped you reason things out.
Hospitals should base visitation policies on probable harm done to the patient. If there is no harm they are aware of, they should allow any and all visitors. But this is a change in hospital visitation policies that is needed, not a restructuring of marriage. Many hospitals allow you to register who your visitors should be; and I have heard that some give bracelets you can wear detailing your wishes. If hospitals are truly anti-gay we need to address hospitals, not marriage.
We have a tendency in this country to embrace privacy, and restrict government from peering into our reproduction to not make it a requirement to prove you are going to have children before creating a marriage. Childless couples who want children are given much encouragement even when the odds are slim or even nil according to a doctor. But post-menopausal women have conceived before doctors in nearly every conceivable situation have been wrong about the ability of a particular couple to conceive. Government prying into this area is completely unacceptable. On the other hand, no prying is necessary to know that gays are not going to be suddenly suffering financial hardship when the unexpected miracle child arrives.
On the face of it, gays cannot reproduce. On the face of it, heterosexual couples can reproduce. Privacy concerns bar us from further inquiry.
Anyone who argues not all heterosexuals have children is wrong to make the assumption that marriage is therefore not primarily all about encouraging child rearing.
They should try it as a serious proposal, banning all non reproductive unions, and see how far they get!
No one can say for sure a straight couple of any sort except the most extreme (all reproductive organs missing) isn’t going to have a child. Even when it looks bad we wish them good luck if thats what they want.
See how foolish you feel wishing gays good luck even though you know for a fact the organs are missing by definition, on the face of it, no questions asked. Tell me you have a serious hope they will conceive a child.
Mine too! … uh… is that you? DEAR?
I am answering this without reading the replies thus far, making a decision based on logic, not emotion.
Marriage - is a loaded word (didn’t use to be, until all the special interest groups tried to change the meaning of the word. But I digress)
Your mom, if she’s the rule following catholic it seems to be, is following the rules. So, if you want a divorce AND PAY FOR IT, GOD somehow relieves you of sin. You can do this as many times as you need to, as long as you follow the rules and meet the definition.
Definition is easy enough. Man and woman of proper age exchange vows to live together for the rest of their life. Sounds simple to me.
Why the gay/lesbian folks haven’t let this one go is beyond me. You’ve WON. You just can’t be married. you can be in a civil union, which is being married without the word marriage in it. Big deal. You can still get married, divorced, pay alimony and do everything that us lucky straight people can do. But you have to look at the bigger picture. If the definition of Marriage includes gays, what else can it include? Seems to me the floors open. So if farmer ted has a crush on a sheep, and makes it his one and only. Is that normal? To him it is, but not to me.
This analogy does not work for me unless you consider a gay person to be equivalent to a barnyard animal.