What's to prevent a blanket application to gay marriages?
Divorce never existed under the Common Law, it is purely a creature of statute. Thus, the statutes must be strictly construed. As you say, the language is gender neutral, so, being strictly construed would apply equally to gay marriage qua marriage and divorce.
One thing I have read some proponents of gay marriage suggest is that because gay relationships are different from heterosexual relationships, gay marriages should be different, as well. I don't believe I see that coming from Sullivan.
However, I would certainly expect to see that argument if society accepted the concept of regulating gay relationships as well as heterosexual relationships. The justification for alimony, historically, is that divorced women were used goods, not valuable in the marketplace for spouses, so the husband had a duty to compensate her if he was the one at fault. And then when no fault divorce became the norm, it shifted to compensating women for devoting time to the family rather than working outside the home, which put her at a disadvantage in the job market. This has been enlarged to include stay-at-home husbands and fathers, who are actually almost non-existent in real life. Now there is the concept of rehabilitative alimony, supporting the spouse, male or female, as she or he rehabilitates into the job market through college, or training, or working at low wages.
Rehabilitative alimony has been the law in many states for years, but in Virginia, it did not exist until recently. I don't know the law of all 50 states, just know as a general principle that one's divorce is governed by the statutes of the state where one is living at the time one files.
In Virginia it is still the law that a provision in a prenuptial foregoing alimony can be set aside on the grounds that it is unconscionable. For example, it would be almost automatically set aside if the person who gave up alimony was dying of a terminal disease like AIDS. |
