No Fault Divorce, Marriage's True Enemy

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/rescuing_marriage_from_no_fault_divorce

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/the-logical-fallacy-gay-marriage-opponents-depend-upon/251486/

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2010/sep/10092104

http://blogs.fayobserver.com/myronpitts/April-2012

It’s a common position of social conservatives, especially in the media, that gay marriage is a threat to marriage and will destroy the family and society as we know it vicariously. But no-fault divorce, established in America as early as the 70s and finalized in all states in 1985, has had more demonstrable and probably correlative and causative effects on marriage and divorce rates in the last few “generations” than gay marriage has in the last 10 years since it was first legalized in the Netherlands. The most obvious reason why it has infested and corrupted marriage and the family is because people don’t have the basic restrictions on divorce law that existed prior: where you had to find some fault with the partner in order to separate. When people don’t take marriage seriously and can legally marry someone and then separate in less than 24 hours for a mere caprice, it’s no surprise fewer people give the institution the respect it deserves and are basically lying through their teeth at their vows or don’t realize that marriage is more than just shared property and some tax breaks, it’s a commitment for a lifetime that should not be taken lightly. There are at least two perspectives from which divorce is criticized, though not always to the same extent. But no-fault divorce goes too far and I think both sides that could find fault with divorce to one extent or another would see this law as repugnant even to the mere secular purpose of marriage: maintaining kinship and intimacy between family and couple respectively and encouraging the values of fidelity and monogamy for all those in and planning for marriage.

Religiously, divorce is only permitted in a few circumstances, if we consider the Christian perspective, which is fairly common in America. If a spouse is unfaithful and caught in the act, dies, or willingly leaves the spouse because they do not believe in God anymore, then the divorce is considered valid and justified, roughly speaking. And the only time someone can remarry is if their spouse dies. There are issues in Jewish divorce law, since it appears traditionally a woman can’t initiate a divorce and a man can refuse to out of spite. In Islam, divorce is permitted by both men and women with waiting periods or court proceedings respectively, though it is considered the most hateful thing that is also lawful, for similar reasons that Jews would try to maintain civil harmony in their marriage, even if they don’t think they can maintain it for personal reasons of one form or another. There’s always the admonition from Jesus in the gospels, particularly Matthew 19:6, “So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." The Catholic Church takes it so seriously than even an annulment, which makes the man and woman not obligated to live together, does not separate them in the eyes of God. As mentioned before, the only way remarriage is acceptable by Catholic standards in particular is if one of the spouses dies. Infidelity does not break the bond of marriage, though it is grounds for separation. Many other Christian denominations will permit divorce, though they could consider it problematic to remarry. A lot of it depends on interpretations of both Jesus and Paul’s thoughts on marriage, since Paul is noted to have said that it is better not to be married unless you cannot resist temptations of the flesh and the like. Being bound to a woman is almost seen as a distraction from worshipping God. But the positions tend to range on a spectrum of condemnation of divorce in itself, condemnation not of divorce in the sense of annulment, but of divorce and remarriage and then permission of divorce and remarriage within limited constraints of infidelity or if an unbelieving spouse calls for separation and then permission of it under more general grounds and remarriage as well.

The more secular perspective on divorce is a bit limited, since the legal standards for it have changed. The original law in the U.S. appears to have been the form that required finding culpable fault in one of the partners, which was more than merely emotional distance or the like. Physical abuse, adultery, abandonment or other felonies fell under this standard. The legal opposition to this divorce law was on the grounds that there shouldn’t have to be such obfuscating or otherwise ad hoc justifications made to determine divorce proceedings. There is disagreement in that this just involves the government more in determining how marriages can end, but that’s not as pertinent to the topic at hand. There are alleged problems with no-fault divorce that come down to property and such. One partner can be left high and dry when the other leaves them because of prior arrangements, though a lot of this may be preventable by making more equitable contracts beforehand. The biggest issue that can be brought up for no-fault divorce being counterintuitive to marriage without invoking a bond made by God through a sacrament would be that this can create a habit of detachment that leads to separations that do not encourage communication between spouses. If one side decides to leave and doesn’t even have to prove fault, then the divorce leaves bad feelings behind because the other side may have wanted to go into marriage counseling. If you can’t resolve your feelings together, then the notion of commitment and loyalty to one another in the marital state seems to fall apart in society’s perspective at large. I would hope people deciding to get married have thought long and hard about it, gotten counseling or practice in some beforehand perhaps even cohabitated with limitations to see how they interact together. If that’s done, no fault divorce can be avoided from the start by encouraging good marriage habits.

In either case, no-fault divorce is either taking marriage to a level where commitment to the sacred nature of it is lost or even adhering to basic standards of marriage as something that binds people together for a lifetime is lacking. When you don’t have to even find fault with your spouse, but get tired of them, and the legal system supports you in that decision, society has gotten to a point where jokes about Britney Spears or Kim Kardashian being married for less than a week and getting divorced in at least one case within 24 hours aren’t funny anymore. Quite the contrary: in hindsight, they reflect badly on popular culture. Marriage isn’t even a commitment anymore to people; it’s an excuse to have sex in the eyes of one’s religious taboos against premarital relations. Beyond that, if you don’t want to be married anymore, if you just don’t feel it, you don’t need to communicate, you just have to get a divorce, no questions asked. I hate to sound like a ranting family values sort of right wing pundit, but this sort of thing is far more damaging in the ideas about marriage it establishes. Children aren’t even a concern here, families aren’t relevant. No one matters but whichever spouse decides they don’t want to be married anymore and goes through with the process. If that’s what love is perceived as by the next generation, I fear for society much more than if 5% of our population that happen to be attracted to the same sex are permitted to be called married and actually encourages monogamy or other values of marriage that can be discerned by observing couples in varying stages of wedded “bliss”. The real destruction to marriage comes not so much in changing the definition, but in making it obsolete. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Deepening Divorce In The Deep South

http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/08/25/divorce.bible.belt/index.html

http://pewsocialtrends.org/2009/10/15/marriages-and-divorce-a-50-state-tour/

You hear about divorces on occasion in any area of the country, but a new study by the U.S. Census Bureau suggests that the South may have a higher rate of divorces than many other areas, especially the Northeast. A few factors seem to be strong indicators of why this is the case. The first is the predominance of fundamentalist or conservative Christian values concerning premarital sex. The other is minimal or lacking education on dating and sex.

In terms of people’s disapproval towards premarital sex, the South is notorious. I myself can vouch for this position that you should abstain until you get married, since we had the “True Love Waits” group featured at the church I went to up until college. I don’t think we had people come to our school, but there were instances of teenage pregnancy, which was excused on the grounds that the students were either taking responsibility or giving the child up for adoption. This idea of social conformity is a subset of the moralistic pressure from Christian parents and community members. I chose not to have sex before a certain point, but I don’t think I ever completely bought into the notion that you should wait until you’re married to have sex. Even back then I was thinking, “What if the two people are responsible and willing to take whatever the results of their intercourse may be? If they’re willing to raise the child and get married eventually, isn’t it still better for the child?” Part of the problem with this line of thought, though, is thinking that marriage will somehow make you happy over the period of time you’re married. People rush into marriage because of unexpected pregnancies; the so called “shotgun weddings” stereotyped in the South so much. Virginity is valued in the South only to the extent that you’re already put into some clique. If you happen to lose your virginity, it’s almost just not talked about unless the intercourse leads to pregnancy, in which case, fervent pro lifers will push the child into marriage or adoption without letting them even contemplate other options. The pressuring into marriage seems self destructive, especially if the parents presume that just because you have sex with someone that you also must love them enough to marry them. It seems like the focus is more on keeping up appearances and not looking as if your child is flawed in any sense. But children make mistakes and just because they own up to them doesn’t mean they need to feel like they must get married or their child won’t be worth as much as a child born in wedlock. People spread that kind of garbage of a bastard child being somehow cursed or otherwise some sort of trouble to the parent. A child of rape is one thing, but a child of consensual sex that resulted in an unexpected pregnancy is hardly on the same level and any person who says otherwise is missing the forest for the trees big time. Marriage shouldn’t be about social propriety, it should be about mutual love and respect between two people, regardless of if the parents approve of the person in question or not. As long as the couple is happy, shouldn’t you give them your blessing?

Education is a more contentious subject, since one can bring up plenty of decent people that didn’t get beyond high school education, for instance. But education doesn’t always have to be limited to academics. Just having basic education about how you should date and choose your future partner is something that is, again, on the parent’s shoulders to an extent they commonly want to defer to the child or other sources. I can understand if you want your child to learn things the hard way, but if you’re morally opposed to divorce, it’s obligatory that you educate your children as parents do within particular contexts. In being a parent, educating your child at an appropriate age about dating and how they should approach it, is key if you want some modicum of security with your future in-laws and grandchildren. Dating a few different people, perhaps even cohabitating when you are old enough; these are things that can solidify your standards for what you look for in a mate. If you just marry the first person you’re infatuated with, 9 times out of 10 you’ll be miserable after 5 years or so.

Sex education is pertinent here as well, since parents who leave it up to the school to educate children about things of that nature entirely will be sorely disappointed as well, since teenagers are rarely so self controlled or disciplined that, when left to their own devices, they will behave with restraint in the area of sex (especially with hormones at their highest levels, practically). Many in the South tend to view sex-ed as either just right in the basic idea of “scaring” kids into abstinence with threats of STDs and pregnancy (through the use of simulation dolls to demonstrate childcare) or too excessive in teaching kids about the use of protection. I wasn’t taught that myself, so in that sense I found my sex education lacking. The tendency appears to be either kids getting married early, not knowing better about dating options or discernment of a partner in order to have sex without condemnation or they have sex prior to marriage and are forced into it afterwards due to accidental pregnancy. It boils down to both a lack of education and, too often, a willingness to cow to one’s community instead of making your own decisions.

Both of these problems could be solved by education of one form or another. Educating children about being individuals, but also part of the human community would be one thing. I’m not suggesting we tell kids to always rebel against their parents, even though they’ll probably do it anyway. It’s just that kids shouldn’t be told they have to conform and maintain some status quo to keep their parents’ reputation or even their community’s in good standing. If they make a mistake, they should take responsibility for it, but how they do it should not be stratified into the best choice and then every other choice being selfish or immoral. Teens and young adults should also be advised strongly about dating and how it should progress into marriage. There shouldn’t be this desire to marry the first person you feel like you’re in love with, not only because that’s commonly infatuation and not genuine affection, but that in youth you are more prone to impulsive and emotion based decisions, not thinking ahead at all. This may be the strongest factor in the South with people marrying earlier and thinking they can handle it and either getting incredibly lucky with their first choice or suffering after a decade and eventually crumbling to the choice of divorce because they’ve grown apart from their spouse. The worst part is that children are often involved, so the separation can affect them in one way or another. And proper sex education is a solution to the issues of pregnancy leading to shotgun weddings due to suggesting children born out of wedlock are worth less and premarital sex as a social taboo that negatively reinforces the idea that you cannot ever have sex before you’re married. If children learned both how to have safe sex and also be responsible in general with their sexual behavior, the problems wouldn’t occur nearly as much. I’m not saying they’d disappear, but with education, there could be a conceivably higher incidence of marriages lasting instead of breaking apart after hasty decisions. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

A Conservative Approach to Gay Marriage

http://www.newsweek.com/id/229957/page/1

I started my blog too late to lament the issues regarding the passing of Prop 8 in California in opposition to the legalization of gay marriage in that same state, but with a 3 month old article from Newsweek, I rediscovered what I thought was a well written and thorough argument for justifying the acceptance of gay marriage in a conservative political worldview. Of course, many conservatives would denounce the writer and have done so based on their own way of thinking that promotes what I view as less than fair minded and reasoned consideration of the Other in relation to what is allegedly a Judeo Christian mindset, where as I recall the Other is not to be excluded or marginalized, but welcomed and cared for to the benefit of a larger community. Admittedly this call is not always viewed in the same way, but when you start denying a certain minority group the same rights that you give the majority, it becomes alienating to those same people and they feel they must distinguish themselves in progressively more extreme ways.

The first point the writer puts forth is probably one many conservatives may not consider at first. If marriage is indeed a conservative value and supplants what is commonly a larger value of family and community, then the fact that gay and lesbian individuals want to get the status and appellation of marriage to their relationship would seem to suggest that conservative values are still demonstrably popular in this country. There are those that denounce the institution of marriage, but even in relation to my last post on how the institution of marriage has aged awkwardly, I would agree it has value as a form of social cohesion and uniting people to be concerned about things apart from a narrow group interest. No institution is perfect, and there will always be some room for improvement in order to make the principle of equality actualized in the practice of the institution itself.

In marriage’s case, one step towards further affirming what is in the Declaration of Independence, that all men [and humans by association] are created equal, would be to extend the institution of marriage to those that happen to be gay and lesbian. To try to argue otherwise about equality strikes me as what I observed with Mike Huckabee. Just because gays are not in the American “ideal” of families having kids, raising them to be straight and perpetuate the meme of marriage implying a connection to childrearing (when it doesn’t) does not mean they should be treated as less and given discriminatory terms to describe what their relationship is. Marriage in terms of etymology doesn’t even imply that it is strictly a male/female coupling, though it does seem to suggest that originally it was little more than an exchange of property and a giving of something to another. Equality doesn’t imply one has to agree with the practice of homosexuality or condone it or even see it as morally permissible according to alleged divine laws, but it does suggest that you should treat those people with the same respect you give to those within your own group. Even though they are strangers in your land, I recall in the Biblical narrative that the ancient Israelites were strangers in Egypt and then were made strangers in their promised land of Canaan. Therefore, the admonition to treat strangers with hospitality rings very true in regards to the alleged Judeo Christian origins of marriage (even though they may be much older than that). To ascribe less than equal treatment in relation to marriage seems to me unfair and to any fair analysis of the Constitution as against its principles of a group of otherwise different people uniting together for the purpose of creating a free and equal society where people are not treating unjustly because of things that are beyond their control or are intrinsically part of their identity in most cases (religion and sexual orientation both involving some amount of choice, though both can be a matter of compulsion as much as volition).

With marriage being both a civil bond on the one hand of secular considerations and a sacred unity on the other hand in religious considerations, this does create something of a difficulty. But this only comes about if you make the argument that all religious rites and services must be equally recognized in a civil or state context. No one recognizes a priest as a priest in regards to the state; they are only officiated and made so by the religious organizations themselves. And even if one chooses to have a marriage ceremony in your church, this should be no reason for the church in question to hold the final authority for what marriage is considered or whether the marriage itself is legal and binding under the civil and secular law, in principle considered apart from religious advocacy. Marriage’s traditional association with religious sacrament does not imply it should only be considered in that context. On the contrary, it should be considered as an all encompassing institution that crosses barriers that exist between people: religion, race, ethnicity, and even sexual orientation. It doesn’t affect my desire to get married if two gay men or women want to get married. Heck, it wouldn’t affect me if one man and 3 women wanted to get married. The principle I desire is equality and moderation of such a widespread institution, not whether it is convenient for the majority that doesn’t want a minority infringing on their supposed rights to solidarity in their age old tradition of man/woman only marriage.

The arguments against gay marriage are noted by the author to be quite mistaken. The argument from tradition doesn’t work by the same reason that the argument from authority doesn’t work. Just because it is a longstanding tradition to lynch African Americans, Jews, homosexuals and the like does not make it right or even justified to keep around. Tradition is a persistence of a cultural practice and only exists as long as there is a majority that agrees it is correct. In short, it is contingent upon popularity and when its popularity fades, so does its applicability. Not that popular opinion is universally applied except in a moderated fashion within the representative democracy system we use in voting. The majority does not get unquestioned dominance over the minority it was victorious over. In fact, in a sporting fashion, the victor is gracious and does not oppress the loser in any sense, and in fact congratulates them for their strong effort in competition.
The other two arguments can be lumped together under the suggestion that if gays get married it will negatively affect straight marriage and the associated values it has, such as family and procreation. Even from my own opinion alone, I see no reason to imply people are so superficial that they will stop getting married or be less motivated to have children just because two people of the same sex get together in the state of marriage (which I must emphasize does NOT imply having children or even having sex for that matter). I know I’d still love my future partner even if I knew gays and lesbians would also have the right to love their partners and share property along with the other associations that come with marriage as an act of sacrifice and unity in the same instance. Just because other people can own a car doesn’t reduce the value you place on your own, does it? Nor does other people being free and able to get the same job as you with the right credentials and experience reduce your enjoyment and merit you find in that same job. We’re told to share things as equally as possible as children and then when we grow up we start becoming attached to such abstract concepts as “traditional marriage” and the “sanctity of family” that we forget that marriage and family are evolving “traditions”. Do people really and sincerely think that a family has to be just a mommy and daddy and associated children? It can be two women or men that are sisters/brothers or lifelong friends, it can be grandparents, it can be uncles or aunts, and it can be the state foster child system even. With the idea of family being so diverse in even its very essence, let alone the accidental manifestations that can occur with tragic events like losing your parents in a plane crash or parents being incapable of raising you, it’s hard to suggest two males or females that love each other and want to raise a child cannot be considered a family just because they happen to have sex a different way or may very well not feel the need to have sex in some cases (as mentioned before). Not to mention I see no reason why I would be deterred from wanting children just because two people that cannot procreate happen to be married. Maybe it’s just the reasonable part of me realizing that marriage is a primarily unifying event and institution, not a free sex and/or children card. Sex can be done responsibly by cohabitating mature adults and children can be raised by otherwise unheard of people. Either of these instances does not reduce the importance of sex as a procreative act or a unifying act between people committed in marriage nor does it suggest children should not be adopted by couples that are either unwilling to have children or unable to in some cases. Differences do not make things incorrect; it is willful misuse to the detriment of others that creates things that are wrong and otherwise evil. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.

Mike Huckabee on GLBT

http://www.aolnews.com/story/huckabee-likens-gay-marriage-to-incest/984268?cid=10



Well, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard Mike Huckabee referring to gay marriage as equivalent to incest or polygamy, but now I have an article to tear apart piece by piece with every quote noted. And apparently he’s a potential candidate in people’s eyes for the GOP in 2012, out of 193%, I might add. (Yeah, apparently Fox News has special math skills)





But let’s focus on his rhetoric for why gay couples shouldn’t adopt and why we shouldn’t give fair and equal treatment on the great “tradition” of marriage. He replies to why gay couples shouldn’t adopt that “children aren’t puppies”. Well, I’m glad he knows the difference, but I fail to see what the point of such an obvious distinction is. He’s making more equivocations by the second; now all gay couples are like kids who want a pet and don’t realize the responsibilities. I can’t speak for any gay couples, but I seriously doubt they’re so immature that they’d just want a kid to fit in, though some might think that’s a reason these days. Though his quote might also indicate he thinks that gay couples would treat a child like a pet, which is equally silly. But I guess he’s mostly afraid they might “turn” the kid to *gasp* homosexuality. As if that’s more than a drop in the water in the long run.

He then proceeds to suggest that not every group’s interests should be accommodated. Initially this is something I might agree with until he qualifies this by saying that we should only accommodate groups that are in what he calls “the ideal”. Now I can’t imagine what he means by that, but I’d have to guess Protestant straight middle/upper class conservatives. But why would he want that? That sounds suspiciously elitist in that he just wants representation of only the groups that he thinks are worthy of it. But couples that just want to adopt kids but happen to be two men or two women in a committed relationship are not in his “ideal”. He only wants majorities, not any pesky minority he’d have to support. The bigger problem here is that he assumes accommodating someone equates to agreeing with them. I can accommodate the practice of praying before Congress meets and the Christian majority’s very existence (in the form of churches getting tax exempt status for instance) to an extent, but that does not mean I agree with them or am in line with them on many policy issues. Similarly, Huckabee doesn’t have to agree with gay marriage, but if he supports any conservative values, such as the limits on the government to not legislate morality for the country, then he will have to swallow his pride and accept that gays eventually will adopt, if only because less and less people are intolerant of them. Incest and polygamy are on a road I won’t discuss here, since my primary focus is on the man’s bigotry towards what is demonstrably a harmless group with few ill effects on society.

He asks an obviously rhetorical question about gay marriage in the vein of "Why do you get to choose that two men are OK but one man and three women aren't OK?" Well, first off, something being OK doesn’t mean it has to be the majority practice. Not everyone practices missionary position only, and just because there are people that are so sheltered they only perform one sex position doesn’t mean that they’re not OK; they’re just different. And likewise with gay and lesbian couples: they have sex in different ways (and like some straight couples, don’t even view sex as necessary to their relationship) but that doesn’t suggest they’re not ok; again, they’re just different.

He then shifts the burden of proof on gay marriage activists to prove gay marriage is successful, while apparently just begging the question from the start that it doesn’t matter, since they’re not the same as straight marriage. "I don't have to prove that marriage is a man and a woman in a relationship for life," he said. "They have to prove that two men can have an equally definable relationship called marriage, and somehow that that can mean the same thing.” There’s just 2 problems here: 1) Yes you do have to prove marriage is only a man and a woman in a relationship for life, because you make a positive claim requiring proof and clearly marriage wasn’t always the case even in so called Biblical times (the woman was for all intents and purposes property in the time of Abraham for instance) and 2) They could prove it if you stopped purposely sabotaging any attempt they have by automatically judging any deviance as failure from the start. Just because a gay couple is not as popular with people doesn’t mean it can’t work in both principle and practice. Continuing to perpetuate the idea that any abnormality justifies exclusion is only further alienating people that can’t always change what makes them abnormal in people’s eyes (including what sex they are aroused by). Sometimes people just have to look past the surface.

He notes that the country should not "legitimize immorality," although frankly legalizing rape or murder is hardly something any self respecting legislator would do. Gay marriage is hardly agreed to be immoral, thus it is not something that can be presumed to be such. If you interpret a sacred text to say otherwise about gay marriage or homosexual behavior, it does not give you the right to say the country should follow your group, even if it’s in the majority. Otherwise I’d probably be scared for my life since they’d have legislated some policy that suggests I’m less than human because I don’t have any belief in God or have abandoned my church and as an apostate deserve death or exile.

I don’t even need to quote him saying homosexuality is aberrant, unnatural and sinful since that already presumes too many things from the start about how psychology, biology and ethics work. The last thing he says that I’ll quote is suggesting that the government should isolate AIDS patients from the general public to quarantine "carriers of this plague." So then why don’t we just put away everyone that’s HIV positive too if you really don’t like AIDS and believe it’s some sort of “gay disease”? But he’d find out it’s not a gay only disease even if he got his wish to ostracize AIDS patients from the public. Not to mention AIDS isn’t even remotely like the plague. The plague was transmitted through fleas and is bacterial, while AIDS is transmitted through mainly bodily fluid contact and is viral. Please do a little research on immunology before you start suggesting that AIDS is going to kill the world, Huckabee, when it isn’t.

As frustrating as this is, it is something of a relief to find that fewer people seem to agree with Huckabee’s ideas in practice, even if they agree that homosexuality is somehow “bad” or “wrong”. The notion of seeing GLBT people as irreparably damaged or so deviant that they can’t be considered as equals of other individuals in society disgusts me. The fact that I spent time probably every day of the week with GLBT individuals in college made me realize that there is very little different about us in terms of humanity. To bring up the Aristotelian distinction, it is only in accident that we are different, not in essence. We both suffer loss, we both feel happiness and we both seek purpose, all part of the human nature. But I (to my knowledge) only get off on the opposite sex, and they either get off on the same sex or both sexes. And that difference doesn’t bother me, because of one obvious reason: it doesn’t affect my sexuality as to what theirs is. They want tolerance and understanding, not bigotry or willful ignorance, which is little different than stupidity. So if you have a Gay Straight Alliance or some similar group at your high school, college or in your community, go to a meeting. Just talk with them, no preconceptions, just talk with them as a fellow person. Maybe you’ll see things you didn’t think were there before. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.

How GLBT and Marriage Have Aged

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/wayoflife/03/17/gays.aging.problems/index.html?hpt=T2

While I have not had much personal experience with elderly GLBT people, I had no idea there was such a discrepancy in terms of dispensing such a thing as healthcare and spousal benefits. While a domestic partnership is supposed to be different only in degree from a marriage (or a supposed civil union) to my understanding (along with common law marriage), it would seem that it does not afford many benefits or general advantages that a marriage does. If one’s spouse dies in military action for instance, there is no providence within federal standards to give pensions to the bereaved. Similarly there is disparity within Social Security and Medicaid in terms of benefits for spousal care. I could point out the various inequalities in the overall economics of benefits given to heterosexual married couples over same-sex couples that are in domestic partnerships; but my primary issue within this blog entry is to consider how the issue of gay and lesbian elders suffering problems in healthcare, nursing homes and the like connects to the problems of the system of marriage itself today, to both straight and gay couples.
The issues with being either a gay/lesbian couple that is “married” in the loosest sense of the term or being a “straight” couple cohabitating for an extended period are identical with the present state of marriage as an institution. Not only is there the dual validation with marriage through a church (though I believe this is not the actual officiating ceremony or document) and through civil process (which officiates the process through the proper papers), but there are the aforementioned differences that come through various tragedies that can affect both gay/lesbian and opposite sex couples. A spouse can die in military service, a spouse can be stricken with a sudden crippling illness, or the couple can both pass away and issues of inheritance become a labyrinthine task to proceed through. As long as you are “married” and have that official title (which according to the majority of states and countries is only granted to a couple that is a man and a woman) you are given benefits that begin to appear more like discrimination and less like acts of compassion by the state (that in a socialist worldview has a responsibility to provide for the less fortunate those things they cannot provide for themselves).

This leads me to a general conclusion that it would be better for everyone involved in the institution of marriage if it was first and foremost changed so that only civil marriages were recognized in the U.S. This would only be a start to the issue, since even in a system where marriages are only legally recognized when performed by a civil servant and not a priest who is somehow considered the same (which is patently absurd), there would be arguments that push the ideology that marriage is only between a man and a woman. Without confronting this outdated notion of what marriage is, it would continue to be a system that denies benefits deserved by same sex couples that are instead given only to “traditional” couples. It is, unfortunately, still not possible to have same sex marriage in France, where the status of marriage has been altered where only civil weddings are recognized by the country in what is called laicite. It is still argued that the civil code only allows for marriages between a man and a woman to be recognized. Therefore, the primary issue is about the definition of marriage itself and preventing it from becoming a relic of archaic culture. Even if the U.S. by some stroke of fortune alters the status of marriage to exclude religious ceremonies as binding (which is highly unlikely in the state of America’s religiosity at present), one would still find the same problems cropping up as to how to define marriage. And contrary to the insistence from such groups as Focus on the Family, it has already changed drastically and will continue to do so. In so defining, we should be primarily concerned with the implementation of the law in principle and not be so legalistic to stick to exactly what the law says when it was commonly formulated in a time when there was little idea of minority civil rights or of women’s suffrage. If America is a country of liberty and justice for all, I don’t see why we should ignore that guiding principle in the Constitution and make liberty and justice apply only to the status quo. Socialist, anarchist or otherwise, I am not advocating that marriage as an institution should be eliminated. If anything, marriage should be defined in a more flexible fashion and more importantly, should reflect the will of the people that is commonly advocated and yet often ignored. Why shouldn’t the state follow the will of the governed in such an institution where the governed are the primary recipients of the benefits associated with the process itself? Or does the state know what is best for marriage itself, even though the state is hardly married to anything in the first place? Unless marriage is made a fluid term, likened to how it has become in many other countries in the world, we will no doubt fall behind, if only in terms of allowing for the pursuit of happiness for those under the Constitution.