No, I want to destroy traditional marriage. Same sex marriage does not. I am not representative of the same sex marriage supporter, although I happen to be one, kinda. I’m not trying to convince anyone, in this thread, that SSM is a good idea; it’s completely apolitical to me at the moment.
I also don’t think my plan has a rat’s chance at a terrier show of actually being implemented, but since y’all are a captive audience, I thought I’d share it anyhow.
Actually, unless a couple manages to have a child within fiver years of their marriage, I think it needs to be nullified. Because we all know that the purpose of marriage is procreation.
I keed, I keed.
The only issue I take with this is that there are SO many issues involved that I think people might get blindsided by things they hadn’t thought of. This is complicated by having states with different laws - what happens if California will let anyone visit me in a hospital, but Oregon requires some kind of legal permission? If I get married in CA, it might not occur to me that I need a hospital-visitation clause in my marriage contract. Then I get hit by a truck in OR, and what then? Now, hospital visitation is just one of the more well-known, but there have got to be hundreds of relatively minor laws that would need to be taken into account, and I feel like people are gonna miss some, and it’ll bite them in the ass.
Also, there’s the issue of how to treat people who don’t define specific rights. For example, deciding whether to pull the plug in case of a coma (is that the same as power of attorney, or am I just confused?). Say our three party marriage - what if they haven’t defined this? Who chooses? Do they take it to court? That’s hardly an ideal solution.
Well, presumably *someone *has a list of the 1000+ rights that have been talked about recently. Make 'em into a Mad Libs style document and let the lawyers have a field day. Offer it for people to download in .pdf and file independently if they don’t want to pay a lawyer. I’d LIKE to make it harder to get legally married, to be honest. Right now we’re offering a goldmine of legal goodies to people just for…what? Throwing a party after going to church? They want legal benefits, let 'em apply for them. More importantly, let them at least have the opportunity to understand what they’re getting into.
People have to fill out more detailed paperwork listing their rights and responsibilities to adopt a kitten or buy a car than they do to get married. That seems weird to me.
People who love each other, or don’t, or don’t know each other, should be able to call their relationship, or lack thereof, whatever the hell they want.
The government, IMHO, should have nothing to do with marriage as it’s current used in society (in the most general sense).
And we have ways to deal with fraudulent heterosexual marriages for immigration purposes, without outlawing all heterosexual marriage.
Are there many instances of an opposite-sex couple getting married simply so they can go into business together? Are there many instances of opposite sex couples getting married for tax purposes? If there aren’t, why would a man not be willing to marry a woman he wasn’t attracted to for those reasons, but would be willing to marry a man he wasn’t attracted to? I’d think it would be the other way around for a lot of men, since there’s still a stigma attached to appearing to be gay.
I’d be for polygamous marriage if and only if the following conditions were placed on it:
Polyandry, polygyny, and group marriage are all treated the same. I’d be against allowing polygyny but not polyandry (or vice versa), because I think allowing one but not the other would diminish the status of one gender.
Another person can be added into the marriage only with the express consent of all parties already in the marriage. If my husband could bring home another wife without getting my permission first- no way, Jose.
I think at least some other SSSM’s have similar views on polygamy. That might make things interesting if there were a real movement to get polygamy legalized, because you’d have people supporting two very different things under the same name. You’d have people like me, who basically say “let consenting adults do what they want to do, if you don’t want a polygamous marriage don’t have one”, and you’d have people who would want to legalize polygamy as envisioned in some religious traditions. Those generally do discriminate between polyandry and polygyny. AIUI, some of them would also allow a husband to take a second wife without the first wife’s permission.
If I call myself the King of Prussia, does that make it so? Again, you are all walking right into the hands of anti-SSM supporters who say that you are out to destroy marriage.
If you let two 18 year old high school seniors get married on a lark for their social studies project, then I can’t say I disagree with them…
So…what’s stopping them from doing this? Who’s playing marriage police now, with opposite-sex marriage? Eighteen is past the age of consent to marry in most states…if two opposite-sex high school seniors went and got married for their social studies project, how is that not legal and legit? Do the county clerks who issue marriage licenses ask if the two are doing this for their ss class? If they did and the couple answered in the affirmative, would that be any legal grounds for not issuing the license anyway?
Because the institution of marriage is understood in society to be a solemn and sacred one. Even though there are divorces and the like, young people look forward to the day of their marriage because it is such a special event filled with love and a lifetime commitment.
If you make it legal for three 80-year old bridge partners marry each other for shared social security benefits, and a couples (triples) discount at the local Steak 'n Shake, can’t you see how it takes the meaning away from both the word and the institution?
No one is saying that the kids can’t have a big ceremony and party to commemorate signing the contract if they wish. We just want to open the legal consequences and priviledges associated with that contract to a wider group.
And no, I do not see where insurance benefit assignment and the right to file income taxes jointly takes any “meaning away from both the word and the institution.”
Why should the government be concerned whether anything “solemn and sacred” has been done (and are you suggesting we deny marriage to anyone who does not pass a solemnity test)? The governmen’t only concern should be that the forms are filled correctly and that the partners understand what they are committing to in terms of longevity of the contract and difficulty of dissolving it.
You’re apparently not understanding my point. I’m saying that this is happening NOW (minus the menage a truss (hey, they’re 80 years old!) you brought up). As in, right this minute and for really as long as most people’s memories go, the actual motivation for a particular couple to marry has not been the government’s concern. The government which guarantees the marriage contract doesn’t really give a damn if you’re marrying for love, marrying for money, marrying for security, marrying for discounts, marrying for a place to live, marrying because you’re drunk, marrying because you’re in Vegas and just won $30,000 at blackjack, marrying because you’re lonely, or marrying because you need a date for your high school reunion. As long as it’s two adults of opposite sexes who are eligible to effect a contract, they can marry. The ONLY instances I can think of where the government gives half a damn about the motivations are in the case of a marriage enacted in order to immigrate, and a marriage enacted when a prior marriage is already existent.
Basically, straight people can marry for pretty much any silly reason they can come up with, and, if we’re being totally honest, for no reason at all. But somehow we queer folk have to prove that we’re not only deeply in love, but that our being able to effect the same contract that straight people can effect with a total stranger if they want to won’t somehow “diminish” those straight strangers’ marriage.
I am against non standard weddings that involve more than 2 people due to it being complex enough to unravel a normal, 2 person marriage(M&W or SSM). If there were 37 husbands and wives in some weird commune marriage, a divorce would be… messy.
Though I am for them to a certain extent, since a household with 37 adults in it would have no issues with child rearing or continuity of home for the kids. One member getting laid off would be a minor setback rather than a major catastrophe it is in a 2 wage earner household. Economies of scale would also come into play, resulting in a household run considerably more efficiently than the standard nuclear household.
So… Marriages of any sort, all for it. If Jay and Silent Bob want to make their Hetero Life-mate status official, good for them for finding such a good best friend. They should be able to get legal protection for that relationship if they wish to. If someone were to come up with a method of making marriages with more than 2 people in it workable from a legal standpoint, I would also be all for that.
I submit that, to some extent, civil and religious marriage are already separated. Having a wedding ceremony in a church only makes you married in the eyes of the church; everybody has to get a marriage license to have the full legal privileges contained therein. Since the state’s interest in promoting marriage has to do with stable relationships, not procreating (else infertile/non-interfertile/old couples would be denied licenses), and the stability of a relationship has to do with the characters of the people involved, nothing else, it is rational to allow two people of the same sex to obtain marriage licenses.
Well, we are talking about different things again.
Are we talking about same-sex couples in love with each other or are we talking about abolishing marriage and replacing it with any type of pseudo-sexual (or not) relationship where two or more people want to join for financial benefit?
The problem is that for everyone who advocates SSM, there are people like WhyNot (not to single her out) who want to eliminate state involvement in marriage.
And people aren’t stupid. No one advocated getting rid of state involvement in marriage until SSM marriage became popular. It is not unreasonable to equate the two beliefs…
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. You may not have been paying attention to such, but it’s been said before I was born. I was saying it in college in the early 90’s, when homosexual sex was still a crime in many states. It’s *convenient *to bring it up as long as we’re talking about changing marriage anyhow, but Heinlein was writing about it in the 40’s, and he certainly wasn’t the first.
Having a state sponsored default marriage contract entered into without being enumerated is blindingly new, in fact. What do you think suitors’ fathers spent all their time talking to the brides’ fathers about? They were hammering out the details of their specific wedding contract, which contained rights and responsibilities the bride and the groom and their families all had to one another, both during the marriage and in the event of widow(er)hood or divorce.