Bryan outlines why the private-contract concept is invalid. Marriage is a socially-recognized contract … it is, first and foremost, a covenant between two parties, the marrying couple, but secondly, the contract thus entered into is recognized by society in ways ranging from the durable health care power of attorney down to little Becky’s telling the substitute mailman, “That’s Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s house.”
Yeah, I thought about it some more after posting. Marriage in practice isn’t a contract two people have with each other, but one they both have with the state. It’s all well and good to pontificate on how the state shouldn’t be involved, but that defeats the purpose of legal marriage.
Actaully, I’m getting kinda suspicious of the whole “get the state out of marriage” stance. It’s starting to sound like a compromise one offers in an effort to sound reasonable, while knowing that there is no chance in hell it would ever be accepted because it destroys the very thing the other side wants.
Well, either that or it shows a lack of understanding of the legal implications and privileges of marriage.
And if ever enacted or even proposed seriously, it would play right into the hands of the “gays want to destroy marriage” line of thinking.
Why are they required to recognize or comply with the terms of ya power of attroney?
Because it’s part of the conditions of their employment. Simple as that. There’s no difference.
Not sure what point you are making here. It seems to have no relevance to what I posted.
Do you understand why it is completely invalid in a debate to stretch an analogy way past it intent.
The intent of the analogy was to show that 20 page legal contrasts don’t have to take weeks to prepare once they have become standardised, as you contended. For you to now try to extend that analogy to tax returns seems a little disingenuous.
Where necessary, the same language that permits these things in a marriage contract. I don’t know why you believe that it is impossible to get the government to honour such contracts, when you are simultaneously pointing out that they honour tens of millions of such contracts right now.
So, no different to any other partnership. I’m a partner in a company, and that is also a a legal status which, once obtained, third parties (including the government) must recognize. Nonetheless the contract was drawn up by a lawyer to my specifications.
You seem to be implying that this is a good thing. To me (and many others) this one-size-fits all approach is one of the biggest reasons for abolishing marriage. You only need to look at the number of pre-nuptial contracts signed to see how many people disagree with it. The idea that two people can’t make their own decisions on what rights and privileges come with marriage is abhorrent. The state saying “either you take what we allow or you get nothing” is totalitarian nonsense.
I like to think so, but you didn’t address the point.
As anyone who has ever divorced knows, marriage is not simple, it is hideously complex, and largely because nobody gets to decide what rights, responsibilities and privileges get bundled in together. This is why so many people draw up pre-nuptial agreements, to add or remove some of those rights and reponsibilties.
Saying that marriage is simple because it doesn’t allow citizens any freedom, and that it is desirable because it doesn’t allow citizens any freedom is just… bizarre.
Perhaps I misunderstood what you were posing.
It sounded to me like you were suggesting that people may be worried about SSM because in the future they could find hetero marriage a marginalized institution. Akin to American Indians having their way of life largey smashed and overwhelmed and subsumed by the Europeans who came to North America.
Well, if 1% engage in SSM I am not seeing how hetero marriage is marginalized to a quaint thing practiced by some very few people.
Also, even if it was marginalized then what of it? If society decided that SSM marriage was the norm and hetero marriage is weird then, well, that is where it goes. To argue otherwise would be akin to arguing rock & roll should never have been invented as a music form because it made classical music become marginalized. Never mind what the people want, they will get classical music and like it!
Still, I think it is absurd to suppose that SSM would ever edge out hetero marriage unless the vast majority of people born are born as homosexuals.
So this argument is really rather silly as opposition to SSM.
No - remember - it is other people who are being insulting. Raindog is sweetness and light.
My head is hurting on this way too much. It was a purely academic exercise, as I will rest comfortable with the slightly less dogmatic point that every single argument I have heard advanced against SSM distills down, in the final analysis, to homophobia.
Whether it is possible to create one that doesn’t isn’t really relevant to the real world, you are right, because that’s not what the opposition does. And not what was happening here.
But you only added “power of attorney” into the mix after I pointed out the flaws in your original position, which was:
A power-of-attorney is a state sanction. If it’s not being respected, one can seek an injunction. Without this, and to satisfy your new stance, every employer would have to spell out that as a “condition of employment”, the employees must observe “power of attorney” contracts. Trouble is, there are different kinds of powers of attorney and they can be limited to various functions - the person I empower to sell a house I own on my behalf won’t necessarily be the one who decides whether or not I stay on a ventilator, for example. By your description, the people entering into the purely-civil marriage contract will be free to make it as complicated and specialized as they like (though in practice, many people will simply opt for an existing form). Do we transfer the burden to the nurse or her employer to plow though somebody else’s contract to find out if the bearer indeed has the right to make these decisions?
Of course, we could simplify it - the marriage contract “power of attorney” is the most generalized and durable form, no (or limited) exceptions.
Or just simplify it further and get married.
That standardization is only thing keeping marriage managable across the hundreds of transactions with third parties a married couple might have to make, be it buying property, arranging for the education of their children, getting employer health benefits… by making marriage endlessly customizable, everbody in America will have to get a law degree just to handle the extra paperwork. Just getting a mortgage will become ten times as complicated, with the banks having to figure out who is liable for what. And forget about foreign travel (even moving from one state to another might be problematic), unless you take your contract with you and adjust it to local conditions. “I’m his wife!” is a fairly compelling and understandable position, easily grasped by a hospital administrator in New Dehli. “According to section three, paragraph four, subparagraph one, I am authorized to…” is somewhat less so.
My point is that it doesn’t matter if existing marriage laws took “millenia” to evolve, of if the entire idea was formulated just last month. Invoking millenia hints that tradition alone justifies refusing to change and I disagree.
And it won’t take years to create a legal framework for homosexual marriage. What takes years is the slow grinding process of getting legal recognition, not hammering out the details. At the end, ideally, a homosexual marriage will be legally idential to a hetero one. What might take years is trying to come up with some kind of faux-compromise civil union angle which is close enough to marriage to satisfy the queers but not so close that it scares the homophobes. That’s a futile time-wasting effort.
I understand that your original intent was a completely invalid and wholly inadequate solution to the perceived problem.
I thought standardization and “one-size-fits-all” was a bad thing. So instead of one flavour of marriage, you get, say, five basic contracts that’ll cover 95% of the population (most of who will go for whatever option is cheapest and easiest), leaving 5% to draw up with their own contracts which could be two-paragraph monuments to brevity or hundred-page vistas of complexity. Looks like a lot of trouble to go to, and for what?
Marriage is not “such” a contract as you describe, though.
And this may be the method by which three or more people form a group marriage someday, but adding so much complexity to two-person marriage that a lawyer is needed is definitely not an improvement.
As far as I know, pre-nups spell out how property will be divided in the case of divorce. I don’t know offhand of pre-nups that redefine the rights and priviliges of the marriage while it is still intact. Heck, one hears occasionally of marriage “contracts” a husband wants that describe how the wife will perform certain sexual acts on a fixed schedule, call him “Master”, etc. I’ve no idea of the legal strength of such documents.
There is some flexibility in choosing the type of marriage, if you live in a state that recognizes “covenant marriages.” For the most part, though, you’re just gonna have to accept the government package, though you and your spouse can privately agree to whatever extra twists you like. This is no more “totalitarian” than mandating that red lights mean “stop”, while green means “go” (even if an individual thinks green is pretty and people should stop to look at it). The standardization prevents chaos.
Example, please. I’m not familar enough with prenups to know of cases where a responsibility and privilege got modified, i.e. a prenup that says (and is legally binding) the wife has no right to make medical decisions about the children. As far as I know, prenups describe the conditions under which one party can end the marriage, and what to do during the divorce process.
Who said that?