(no subject)

[dcseain]

In another forum, happylion said:

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.

Comments

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

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.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

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?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

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.)