Posted on 12/09/2002 5:13:47 AM PST by SJackson
In modern journalism, radical change is often announced by a yawn-inducing headline. For instance, "Legal Group Urges States to Update Their Family Law" (New York Times, November 29). The headline, one step up from "Don't Bother to Read This," refers to a ponderous 1,200-page commentary and set of recommendations by the American Law Institute, a group of prominent judges and lawyers. The proposals, "Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution," may seem like dry, technical suggestions about custody, alimony, and property distribution. But what this "update" really amounts to is a devastating legal assault on marriage.
The institute report says that in many important ways, domestic partnerships should be legally treated like marriage. It defines domestic partners as "two persons of the same or opposite sex, not married to one another, who for a significant period of time share a primary residence and a life together as a couple." When breaking up, the report says, cohabitants are entitled to a division of property and alimonylike payments, just like married people who divorce. And after a relationship ends, the cohabiting partner of a legal parent may share custody and decision-making responsibility for the legal parent's child.
The report validates homosexual relationships and gives them a status comparable to that of marriage. If accepted, this idea would lead immediately to the next legal argument: If gay and straight commitments have the same status in state law, isn't it picky and discriminatory to withhold the word marriage from the gay version? Heterosexual couples who live together would also get the same status as husbands and wives, blurring or eliminating another line between marriage and serial affairs.
War on tradition. The most drastic notion embedded in the suggestions is that marriage is just one arrangement among many. Marriage is being deconstructed here, downgraded and privatized. It is no longer the crucial building block of the social order and makes no special contribution to civil society that justifies any distinctive honor or status. This report, says Lynn Wardle, professor of law at Brigham Young University, "continues the war on the traditional family and traditional sexual morality that has been waged for over three decades."
Wardle has a point. Marriage is in trouble for a lot of reasons, but surely one important factor is the relentless hostility unleashed by the 1960s counterculture, which portrayed marriage as oppressive, patriarchal, outmoded, and destructive to children. The attitudes of today's elites reflect that never-ending campaign. Now we have lots of "marriage" counselors who never use the word marriage and textbooks on families bristling with hostility to the nuclear family. As I wrote in this space several years ago, "One of the problems in trying to shore up the institution of marriage is that so many of the professionals who teach and write about it-counselors, therapists, academics, and popular authors-really don't support marriage at all."
What they do tend to support is known as "close relationship theory," the idea that sexual and emotional satisfaction comes from intense, fragile, and often short-term relationships that aren't necessarily going anywhere. One advocate calls them "microwave relationships," cooked up fast, served, and consumed, presumably with other similar meals to come. It all seems like the dream world of a randy adolescent chasing cheerleaders. Marriage is knocked off its pedestal, and the family itself fades away. Children tend to fade away, too, in close-relationship theory, as emphasis comes down hard on adult fulfillment.
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(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Actually, the proposed NRST tax rebates are a simple "per-person, per-household" rebate of roughly $200 per-each, per-month (I'm in the ballpark, don't have the exact figures).
Generally speaking, an un-remarried widow who was caring for her two children would receive the same $200 per-person as a married couple with one child, or three college guys renting a place together (whether they were a perverse "unitarian gay tri-union" or just frat brothers).
And our hypothetical widow with two kids should not receive any less than the Married couple with one kid, IMHO. The State's concern should simply be with dispensing the rebate equally... there's no need for "marriage subsidies" of any sort, IMO.
As one familiar with God's law, I guess you understand that he made us Male and Female and that he ordained also that conjugal relations between the male and female be fruitful.
Softening up the heteros with the Birth Control most Christian couples these days consider their "right" as part of Planning their families, the State has for generations been obscuring the apparent differences between sex partners desirous (or not) of children and the Father and Mother -- Husband and Wife -- who not only form but obligate themselves to a family.
Why?
For all the useful idiot rant of the Libertarians and others, the fact is that the basic human condition is as Family, not the rabid individualism that informs our culture ... particularly our shrinks and sex therapists.
It is the family (as patterned after the Trinity) on which are based not only our most enduring bonds as human beings but also our sense of equal dignity despite the separate persons and different roles of family members and the notions of nationhood, much less community.
In destroying the family -- particularly the eradication of patriarchal authority in exchange for a Democratized Collective of individuals -- the State accomplishes two things:
(1) they weaken us absolutely, causing most citizens -- single mothers, impoverished, insane, failing, elderly who need Medicare, etc. -- to rely on the State instead of their families in the name of "independence"
(2) they usurp both Family and Faith as the source of all rights and justice. As arbiter and creator of our rights (to housing, to abortion, to assisted suicide, to all manner of perversion and even for-profit Free Speech porn featuring children ... so long as it's faked), they supplant and render meaningless and "private" the notion of the Creator as recognized in our Declaration as the source and guarantor of our human dignity and liberty.
It infuriates me, really, that so many folks get caught up in the sound and fury of gay rights, corporate benefits and taxation and fail to recognize that it's the marriage license which limited the State's ability to redefine marriage.
By restricting the marriage license to only those unions essentially (if not actually) capable of forming families, the integrity and meaning of marriage was preserved.
Marriage is not just a license for sex, self-fulfillment and economic benefit for the parties. It is also about the children born of that relationship. As an institution protected from the State's interference by the parameters of marriage license restrictions -- marriage offered some measure of justice for and recognization of the children naturally a part of the Family born of conjugal union.
Justice must needs be premised on reality ... on True and Enduring things.
-- like "faked" child cyber sex, the manufacture and sales of Designer Children, the harvesting of "Excess" human lives for destructive research and the right to abort the "clump of cells" in one's womb (unless a car accident en route to the Clinic causes one to reconsider and perhaps collect on the pain and suffering which truly accompanies the loss of one's unborn child) --... work to the State's interest. Their interest in opening up marriage to homosexuals, serial polygamists and other pairs and/or groups of purposefully sterile sex partners does as well.
None of their arguments hold up:
Recognition of Everyone's "Right" to the Marriage Union.
Homosexuality is an aberrant perversion of the unitive and procreative sexual union which sustains mankind. There is nothing particularly natural or genetic about it. It is not for the State to proclaim it's the "same" as heterosexual sex just to make gays feel better.
Recognition of Everyone's "Right" to Family Benefits.
Likewise, it's not for the State to decide for the Employer what Extras that employer will provide his employees as part of the State's "Corporate Governance" tack.
Just as I see no reason to pretend that working mothers deliver the same quality (and quantity) of labor and effort as working fathers who support their wives such that their children receive the undivided attention of their Mother, I see no reason to believe that homosexuals contribute to -- and perpetuate and civilize -- society in the same fashion that families do.
(Again, absent the State's specifically granting them the same "right" as infertile couples to "procreate", no amount of anal sex or cunnilingus conceives a child.)
Homosexuals, unlike heterosexuals, do not take the chance in any way shape or form that their union may prove fruitful. Therefore, they do not obligate themselves either to their children or to society in the rearing, civilizing, educating and support of those children.
In fact, regardless how much "love" they have to give a child, they are absolutely intolerant and discriminatory in that they enslave their children to their lifestyle ... their children have no chance to be conceived, born and reared by their natural parents or even to know their natural parents. A "Butch-Femme" relationship -- however satisfactory in the bedroom -- is not at all the same as having a Mother and a Father.
But who cares ... surely the pricetag on the Birth says it all where the Selflessness of Choosing Parenthood is concerned.
(Again, the beauty here being that -- just as with the artificial conception allegedly sanctioned to help out poor infertile couples amid the population explosion crisis -- stupid heteros have paved the way to this Artificial Reality.
They no longer have procreative sex thanks to birth controlThey've adopted the homosexual lifestyle (much less aesthetic) and put off marriage until it's so late and Money's So Important that it's critical they overcome nature's disinclination and ensure a Perfect Baby as is their "right" to do.
They no longer rear, educate, civilize or obligate themselves to their children ... they abort them and usually turn over their care to another anyway so that both parents may work.
The State Taxes Marrieds and Singles Differently
First of all, I see no reason for the grand State scheme of income redistribution in the first place but even if it were constitutional, I would still have no problems taxing Families (even potential families) differently than atomistic singles.
Perhaps if this homosexual marriage thing goes through, I'm hopeful the State will strike while the iron's hot and tax Homosexual Marriages through the roof as they should given the excess of Disposable Income that funds their Lifestyle ... the decor, the refurbished grand homes, the antiques, the drugs, the dinner parties, the coordinated clothing, the hair gel, the White Outfits, the Southern Decadence rig, airfare to Abisa etc. etc. etc.
As gays see fit to obligate themselves to some urchin either purchased from a Breeder or obtained in a more clinical fashion -- like a pedigree dog -- from a Company and incubated for them by some Third Party, then maybe the State could ease up a little in recognition of their actually having obligated themselves on a par with Real Marriages.
Folks like your average hetero couple who can conceive and birth kids without electricity, even, much less a slew of contracts, State Legislation and a phalanx of third, fourth and fifth parties between whom the storks carry bundles of cold, hard cash.
GSA(P)
That would noly be true in states that recognize common law marriage. Most do not. Some recognize common law marriages if they occurred in another state that recognizes them.
you are in need of some serious therapy....
it is much more likely that men will go after women .....I know many, many more women who make tons more than their husbands or boyfriends....blame that on the loss of industrial jobs or whatever...its the truth..
I don't like the way our country and the world are going one bit....but the least I fear is that men will some how get the shaft.......women have always suffered when traditional marriage vows are not kept, and when traditional male/female roles are not enforced...
now we have a society of women who work, often bringing home more money than the boyfriend of husband, who also primarily raise the children and keep the house....not in every case, but more often than not......
I know a couple of guys who are pretty sure they have that right now, if by bestial you mean married to a b!tch.
That is called an argumentum ad hominem. It is the weakest of all responses. It is a personal attack, as opposed to a comment about anything I said. In theory I could push the abuse button on you, but I try not to interfere with people who foul up their own posts.
As an old salesman friend of mine used to say, "You bought it; it's yours."
Really. On what basis?
Interesting. Are you saying it has been, or it should be, or something else? Jesus said no marriage in heaven. Does the same apply to a perfect world?
Prehistorical and historical evidence suggests that people first lived in kin groups (for 200K years), then extended families within tribes(neolithic structures had room for cousins and uncles but also separate sleeping quarters), then (in parts of the world) nuclear families. The Individual fits the trend. Tribal cultures today, who have no separate word for cousin and brother, would scoff at our nuclear families.
Just out of curiousity...
Unless one abdicates, to the State, the Right to define Marriage in the first place -- how exactly does the Marriage License "limit" the State's power to re-define Marriage??
Your argument amounts to a claim that "charter schools limit the State's ability to redefine education". That may be true enough in its case (that is, until the homosexual lobby secures enough votes to require new mandates for the Charters, to continue the analogy)... but only if you have already whored out the Right of Education to the State in the first place.
I mean, sure, if you are going to begin the conversation by assuming that the State has the Right to "define" Marriage, I can see how it could be argued that Marriage Licenses would "limit" the State's power to "re-define" marriage.
But, m'dear.... Why on earth should Christians "render unto Caesar" the Right to "define" Marriage in the first place?!?!
Revenge of the Begged Question.
Since this country is far better off if we remain 'good' and the only way to remain good is to hold to our founding ideals (Christian Ideals) then we had better defend our culture better than we have defended our borders
GSA(P)
We seem to be discussing two separate definitions of marriage.
The first is the cultural definition. Which Christians and other moral people define as one man joined with one woman for life. The perverts define it as me and whoever/whatever I feel like screwing for as long as I feel like screwing them/it.
The second is the legal definition.
In order to defend our culture and the values that culture is founded upon we use the government to legally define marriage as one man joined to one woman. Unfortunately we've been delinquent in our defense and let them cross out the 'for life' part. No fault divorce was a huge mistake.
Using the Gov to defend/support what is in the nation's best interest is a constitutionally valid use of government.
While the legal definition will never usurp the real (Christian) definition it is a good tool to use to defend our culture and values.
Everything boils down to the fact that as a nation we are better off if we limit unions to 'one man joined with one woman'.
GSA(P)
Good grief, man, that's like asking the Government "to defend our values and culture" by establishing a legal definition of "Christianity".
It is morally wrong thing to do such a thing in the first place (that is, to invite the State into that which is Biblically reserved to the Church), and it is guaranteed to fail and damage that which it tries to "defend".
Which is, of course, exactly what we are seeing right now with Marriage, isn't it??
Since the State is doing such a good job "defending our values and culture" by establishing a Legal Definition of Marriage, why don't we also ask them to "defend our values and culture" by establishing a Legal Definition of Christianity??
Don't worry... they're from the Government, they're here to help.
One purpose of Government is to provide for the general welfare of the people of this nation. Our general welfare is best served when families exist of one man joined to one woman with the resultant children. Therefore the gov subsidizes this healthy family structure. That is where the gov marriage license comes in.
In this day and age any two people can shack up without a marriage being involved. So why do the perverts try to redefine these shack ups as 'marriage'? Solely for the tax (and other legal) advantages.
While the two of you argue against gov involvement in what should be a private arrangement, the rest of us realize that the marriage subsidy is one of the few good things that gov does and should be maintained.
If we do not defend the concept of marriage legally we will never be able to defend it culturally. Therefore we must defend it legally. The only way to do that is by law defining marriage as being one man joined to one woman enforced through marriage licenses or some other gov arrangement.
We will never stop the perverts from forming their sexual unions of convenience but we don't have to subsidize their abberrant behavior.
GSA(P)
While the two of you argue against gov involvement in what should be a private arrangement, the rest of us realize that the marriage subsidy is one of the few good things that gov does and should be maintained.
If we do not defend the concept of marriage legally we will never be able to defend it culturally. Therefore we must defend it legally. The only way to do that is by law defining marriage as being one man joined to one woman enforced through marriage licenses or some other gov arrangement.
There are Liars, there are Damn Liars... and then there are those who try to "justify" the usurpations of the God-State.
Since the State is doing such a great job "defending our values and culture" by establishing a Legal Definition of Marriage, why don't we also ask them to "defend our values and culture" by establishing a Legal Definition of Christianity??
Don't worry... they're from the Government, they're here to help.
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