dcseain | (no subject)

In another forum,

Traditionally, Jewish law says that marriage is about procreation. Therefore, the Pentateuch prohibits a woman from marrying a man whose testes have been damaged or removed. Also, if a couple do not succeed in having children for ten years, they are forcibly divorced and remarried (this happened to distant cousins of mine; they both had children in their second marriage).

American law does not follow the Jewish tradition. Therefore, an American marriage is not simply about procreation, and any arguments based on procreation are meaningless.

in response to this letter to the editor in Monday's Washington Post, page A14:

Richard Cohen made a good point in his column on the question of same- sex marriage ["To Have and to Hold Wrongly," op-ed, July 11]. He stated correctly that the right to "the pursuit of happiness" is a fundamental American one.

However, he failed to mention that our Founding Fathers also clearly stated in that same document -- the Declaration of Independence -- that "all men . . . are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights," not by a court or even by a unanimous vote of American society. Therefore these rights are not absolute but curtailed by the laws of nature of that Creator, who clearly designed his creatures to procreate heterosexually, not homosexually. (It just doesn't work any other way.) And the legal recognition and protection of marriage by the state is not about protecting each person's right to find affection but to bring children into the world and to give them a stable unit in which to develop.

Therefore, the state has no need or interest in protecting gays who want to live together and seek happiness. Let them, if they choose to, but do not call it something it can never be: marriage.

LISA M. COYNE

Washington

Discuss.

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And the legal recognition and protection of marriage by the state is not about protecting each person's right to find affection but to bring children into the world and to give them a stable unit in which to develop.

This statement is the problem with that entire arguement, because it is just plain false. There is a lot of marriage law related to children, but if that were the purpose of the institution, most gay couples wouldn't care about getting married.

Civil marriage is an economic institution, not a procreative one. The purpose of civil marriage is to legally recognize the members of a committed union as a single legal and economic unit.

You don't need a marriage license to have sex with your partner, bear children, and raise them in a stable environment. You don't need a marriage license to be recognized as a single social unit by your family, friends, and church.

You *do* need a marriage license to file joint taxes, visit them in the hospital without paperwork, share health insurance, and so on.

Look at history, and you will see that traditional marriage is primarily about money and property, and only secondarily about children, mostly because of their economic implications. Modern marriage is turning into something that's about family, and that's great. Now the bigots like Lisa just need to learn to cope with the fact that that includes families that are different.

I concur. But isn't divorce law more related tochildren, rather than marriage law, except insofar as divorce is considered under marriage, which may be the case in your state?

But isn't divorce law more related to children?

I don't see why it would be. Divorce is mostly about equitably dividing up common property and ensuring that one party isn't unfairly depriving the other of income.

Child support, custody, and visitation rights are concepts that apply whenever the parents are separated, whether they were married or not. They're a part of the divorce proceedings, but only because it's a transition to a state where the default arrangement cannot be assumed and new arrangements need to be negotiated.

Moreover (as best I can tell), you can't be denied a divorce on the grounds that you have children. There's plenty of social pressure to "stay together for the children", but no legal requirement. (And that's not even getting into research that shows children with happily-divorced parents do better than children with unhappily-married ones.)

why do people insist on believing and arguing based on this fiction?
"won't somebody think of THE CHILDREN!" is an excellent rallying
cry for religious conservatives, but even a cursory examination of the
history of civil marriage shows it for the lie it is. civil marriage laws
traditionally regulate and refer to property rights; control, possession,
and inheritance. children (and, until a century or so ago, wives) were
included in the tally of a man's property, but their protection and welfare has only been of state concern for the last 3-4 generations, primarily as a result of the post-WWII sentimentalization of children and childhood.

i won't even bother to address the other logical fallacies of her
argument (nature's law notwithstanding, many homosexual couples do have
children, and many heterosexual couples can't).

I take your word for it that the forced divorce for sterility has happened, bt I suspect it's a rare variant of Judaism. I've never heard of it before and a fast googling doesn't turn up much. It's so outrageous by modern standards that I'd expect to see more on it if it were common.

Do you know what sort of Judaism your distant relatives were involved in?

Most of his family are Orthodox, and i imagine some of them are Hasidim.

Thanks. As for your main point, not being able to marry does interfere with homosexual couples' pursuit of happiness, both from the sense of injustice and because of financial costs and practical difficulties.

Actually, there's an interesting point buried here.

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the institution of marriage did have a traditional and intentionally designed purpose of Making The Children Safe.

So what?

That's still in no way an argument against gay marriage.

You have a group that wants to expand the definition of a social institution to include them, because it would make their lives better. This expansion has basically no impact on our hypothesized purpose. (And it would, in fact, help some kids who have gay parents.) So... why not?

It's not like we aren't allowed to change social institutions when we find that doing so makes our society better. Isn't that what happened with women's suffrage?

Let's suppose that marriage is currently all about procreation, not happiness or whatever else. How would adding a new purpose to it, one not at odds with the procreation aspect, be harmful?

Aside from that, many family courts have been perfectly happy with gay parents (there was something ni washpost's outlook section a month or two ago, but i have to get out to work) because, essentially, "hey, redundancy! cool. We like two parents better than one parent, and we don't much care about the gender"

You might enjoy these (http://melted-snowball.livejournal.com/145392.html) two (http://melted-snowball.livejournal.com/145427.html) posts (particularly the second one), which was probably the last time I got really pissed off about that.

Oh, and of course, one might note that the Declaration of Independence is full of stirring rhetoric about a lot of things, but that the Constitution, which matters legally talks about securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. If we really want to claim that the point is to protect the children, this feels to me like it wants to protect them all.

[And, finally, we haven't had a great societal collapse here yet, four years into this same-sex marriage experiment. In fact, it seems to have become banal. Which is, to be frank, really great.]

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i wrote a response to this on a mailing i subscribe to:

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