Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (6821)	7/17/2003 4:30:54 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7720

Responsible churches do premarital counseling for precisely this reason, so marriage works for that in many situations. You are making my point for me. It isn't marriage that works, it's the pre-reproductive counseling. The marriage is the umbrella under which the counseling takes place since churches tie marriage and children together. You're attributing the good result to the marriage, which isn't the salient factor. We could have pre-reproductive counseling independent of the marriage and even in the absence of marriage and you would get much of the benefit. Yes, there's synergy among marriage and counseling and church that may make the counseling more effective in that context than independently, but my point is that the marriage contract, per se, isn't key, it's the pre-planning of the family, the knowledge of what parenting entails and the thoughtful acceptance of the responsibilities involved. Reality is that marriage and reproduction are not one and the same. In certain sub-cultures they are, but that is far from universal. Not all people who marry have kids for various reasons--because they find they can't or never wanted to or are seventy when they marry or they married for social convenience or money or whatever. It would be interesting to see statistics on how many marriages produce children. I'll bet it's not more than half. Likewise, many children are produced without benefit of marriage. Seems to me we're up around half now. There's nothing to stop that happening. So, my point is that focusing on the marriage thing rather than the reproduction thing distorts the issue. Unless we can once again tie marriage and reproduction irrevocably, and we can't, it's simply not useful to focus this thing on marriage. Everything I just said would apply equally to civil partnerships and marriage partnerships. They both tie two adults together. Neither speaks directly to the kids. Neither is more than marginally useful when it comes to protecting the kids. IMO, focusing too much on marriage distracts us from the real issue. And what would be different about this contract than now exists in statutes that require the parent to support and care for the child? If the statutes aren't working, why would a contract work? It wouldn't have to be different. We could use just what we have now, if we wanted, with minor modifications. The difference would not necessarily be in what responsibilities a parent had and what treatment a child was entitled to but in the conscious undertaking of that responsibility by the parent. When the child is conceived or when it is born, whatever reproductive counseling may have occurred on the occasion of the marriage may be long forgotten or out of focus. The contract with the child needs to be a conscious commitment made sometime before or during the pregnancy, not something vaguely acknowledged years earlier in a different context, if at all. I would like to see, at a minimum, some document that commits parents to follow the current law regarding child support that both parents are counseled on and sign before they take the kid home from the hospital and the certificate of which needs to be presented when kids are enrolled in school. Screw the marriage license. That's irrelevant from a public policy perspective. The commitment needs to be part of the reproductive process, not the partnership process. Two different but related things. To the extent that the current laws don't work, it may be because they are out of focus and their timing is off. The laws don't do anything to cause people to think first and reproduce later. About the only contribution that marriage laws make to reproduction is that they give pause to cousins wanting to marry. Still doesn't stop them from having kids together, though.