I'm going to answer both of your posts together, if you don't mind.
Well, actually, preserve is still the right word, for a little while longer. The genie is trying hard to get out of the bottle, but isn't out yet
Not that genie. I meant not that same-sex marriages were extant but that but that the traditional sense of marriage had crossed the line where the critical mass is outside the bottle.
I spoke of this yesterday. Sex and childbearing go on quite independent of marriage. People who are not married often do both. People who are married often do neither. The correlation is weak, at best. Couples choose to be married or not based on religion, tradition, or financial considerations. Sometimes the overwhelming consideration is the last. Nothing traditional about that. Genie, bottle, out.
That leaves society offering benefits and penalties based on something that doesn't correlate well with what they're trying to support, which is the successful raising of children. The law offers benefits based on something that is much less valid as a measure than it was when those bennies were established. The Adarand decision has been in the news again lately. Marriage correlates with child rearing no more than minority ownership correlates with disadvantaged businesses, and the courts say that's not good enough. Genie, bottle, out.
Society has recognized that the biological imperative of every living species is the continuation of the species, and that in our case that is best done by a one father-one mother marital unit.
We discussed this earlier, too. That notion has long since outlived its usefulness. We're in no danger of going extinct from low birthrate. Rather we need to do a better job of keeping our biological imperatives in in our pants. Yes, the most promising way to raise kids is still an intact family, probably an extended one, but since kids don't correlate with marriage, that point isn't really relevant. Having sex really doesn't correlate with having children all that much anymore.
The only thing lost here would be the pretense of traditional marriage. I can see how society may be sentimentally attached to it. I can also see that as a reason for keeping up the pretense. If you want to argue the value of the pretense, I can go along with that. But it's still just a pretense.
Karen |
