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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Johannes Pilch who wrote (133077)	3/23/2001 1:20:44 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

It appears you speak of social conservatives as if they do a bad thing in lobbying to maintain the marriage tradition and protect its meaning. Not a "bad" thing. Not at all. I'm totally in favor of people honoring their contracts. Rather, I think lobbying for traditional marriage is a strategy doomed to failure. They're howling at the moon. Those social conservatives who would rather fix things than go down in a blaze of glory need to recognize that holding the line is not possible and they'd better start thinking outside the box. IMO. I think they find it difficult to fathom how civil marriage can be reformed into anything but a charade without the stipulation of utter faithfulness and devotion. I make no claims about knowing the answer. I've only just started thinking about this myself. A couple of vague ideas have been mentioned on this thread. Someone, I don't recall who, mentioned abandoning civil marriage in favor of religious marriages. Little Joe, I think, offered a notion about childbirth triggering automatic marriage. I mentioned an possibility regarding turning birth certificates into contracts. Maybe none of those ideas would lead to anything suitable for implementation, but I think they would be worth discussing. Civil marriage is a charade now. I don't see any harm in considering alternatives. Speaking personally, serial monogamy strikes my sensibilities as little more than what dogs and horses experience. And apparently unlike the brute beasts, human children suffer terribly from it. As someone who has practiced serial monogamy, I can assure you that it's not at all brutish, at least in the mid-term format, and can be quite rich and rewarding. But I didn't have any children. I agree that serial monogamy and child rearing are not compatible in most cases. IMO, society has to find a way to steer those who want children into the kind of marriage you're talking about and those who don't have the temperament or are disinclined toward permanent marriages into not having children. Karen