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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (28429)	2/8/2004 12:37:31 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793841

Apparently it is only the pressure group minority and their supporters who are allowed to decide such things. I'm not suggesting that there is any "right" to marry for anyone. What I'm saying is that there is a right to equal treatment under law. Pressure group minorities aren't deciding anything. What they are doing is raising a red flag where the law may be in conflict with the right to equal treatment. Judges decide whether or not that's the case. It's their job. Pressure groups and courts are part of how law is made in this country. It's part of our system of checks and balances. That's how it's supposed to work. Legislatures often create inequities, intentionally or otherwise. Sometimes, as cultures evolve, codified traditions that seemed appropriate at the time of passage are belatedly recognized as inequities. Over time, people may become more enlightened, more tolerant, more free. Lots of things that were traditional seem laughable now. Are you old enough to remember when women wore skirts and men wore pants? My college enforced that quaint tradition. Remember when it was illegal to marry across racial lines? Another charming tradition, one that was codified. It seems really backwards now even though it was only recently overturned. Obviously, these awakenings don't occur across the population simultaniously so some begin to see inequity before others who instead cling to their traditions. I understand the hostility of those who resist the change. There's a lot of change going on that I don't consider to be for the better--the Super Bowl half time a case in point. But when there are inequities in law in a country where people have the right to equal treatment under law, hey, the laws need to be changed. States have the right to regulate where the state has a valid interest in differentiating. Tradition in and of itself isn't a good enough reason. And fussing at the courts, which are just doing their jobs, is not constructive. If there is some good enough reason for states to regulate marriage in the first place, and for them to specify the gender of the participants in the second place, then make the case for that. That's what it's about. People have the right to equal treatment under law. States have the right to regulate in the best interest of the state. Is there a good enough reason here to draw that line in the sand or not? Are you a speciesist? It is absurd. People often haul out the old slippery slope argument rather than defining just why the line they are drawing is the exact right place to draw the line. I have not yet heard any reason from you why this particular line has to be drawn in this particular place rather than two inches one way or the other. I asked why I should be able to pass my pension along to a man in a sham marriage and not to a woman. That's legal now. Why are sham marriages for financial gain legal while some loving couples with children cannot legally marry? Just how does drawing the line between them defend marriage? Back to the top. <<Institutions should evolve based on the individual choices of free peoples.>> Apparently it is only the pressure group minority and their supporters who are allowed to decide such things. I spoke of institutions. Your reply was about law. Institutions and law are not the same thing. In this case we have created law around the institution of marriage and muddied things up quite a bit. Marriage existed before we had law about it. It was governed by faith institutions. If it were still governed by faith institutions without having been co-opted by the state, we wouldn't be having this discussion. There would be no issue of equal treatment under law. There would be no violations of tradition. There would be no problem. What effect has the state's interference in marriage had on the institution? Best I can tell, nothing favorable, at least not any more. People can get married by the state. People can get married by faith institutions and by the state jointly. And some people get married by the faith institution but not the state where their marriage isn't allowed by regulation and they can find a willing faith institution. Whether they are married in the eyes of their faith institution matters to people to the extent that they care about such things. Whether people are legally married matters primarily for financial reasons--either the disposition of their property or their status as beneficiaries of this or that. The decision to be legally married has degenerated into a financial decision--is it more advantageous to be married or not. For some, legal marriage is an advantage, for others, not. If it's a disadvantage, most just shack up given that there are no longer any practical problems associated with shacking up. A few legally marry anyway I suppose for reasons of tradition and then bitch about the long arm of the state. How does any of this benefit the "institution" of marriage? Beats me. And what are the people who are defending it actually defending? Not what they think they're defending, methinks. IMO, family is important, something worth defending. Marriage and childbirth are the traditional ways to form families. Adoption is also a mechanism. But why in this day and age do we not have other mechanisms for people to form families. Family is not just about sex and child rearing. It's like that old saw about having only a hammer so every problem looks like a nail. We have people wanting families and the only tools available are marriage and adoption so they use those tools in ways other than intended. The best way to preserve traditional marriage, IMO, is to give them an alternate tool. Our population is increasingly made up of siblingless people. Our population is increasingly elderly. It's healthy for people to have family, with or without sex and children. IMO, there should be ways to form legal families independent of sex and children. There are plenty of sexless marriages now. If two families wanted to merge, traditionally, a son from one would marry a daughter from another, usually without much enthusiasm from the principals. That's legal, yet a couple of elderly spinsters cannot legally form a family for mutual support in their dotage. It seems to me that, if we have to have the government in the marriage business at all, what we need is a legal construct for a family partnership instead of or in addition to the legal construct for marriage. Marriage assumes sex, even though that is often not the case. That causes discomfort when we extend marriage to other than young, virile, heterosexual couples. In a family partnership, if the principles want to have sex, they can, just as they can without formal sanction. Or the family members can treat each other as siblings. Sex or no sex, we have people committed to each other as a family with all the legal obligations and benefits. Let the marriage traditionalists have their traditional marriages. And let the rest of us, gays included, have legal families, too.