Posted on 10/14/2012 3:13:06 PM PDT by MegaSilver
His Grace apologises for this post, but it is as unavoidable as the decline and fall of the Coalition. What two grown men or two grown women get up behind closed doors in the privacy of their own homes is not, of course, a matter for the Conservatively-inclined. But, thanks to the Government’s intention to legislate for same-sex marriage, it will, at some point very soon, be a very public matter for the courts to consider and the media to pore over in salacious detail. His Grace is merely prematurely jumping on a future bandwagon hereby foreseen and foretold with 100 per cent certainty.
Historically, a marriage has not been considered a binding contract until and unless it has been consummated. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 defines the grounds for nullity and annulment of a marriage. The distinction is crucial, especially as far as the Established Church is concerned, for by Act of Parliament it is decreed that ‘so many as are coupled together otherwise than God's Word doth allow are not joined together by God; neither is their Matrimony lawful’. And God’s Word doth say not an awful lot about same-sex unions. Indeed, it celebrates only complementarity throughout its pages: the Song of Songs of Solomon is an explicit celebration of maleness and femaleness, of courtship and consummation, of husband and wife becoming one flesh. And it is devoid of all religion and any mention of God; only allegorically becoming analogous to God’s relationship with Israel or that of Christ with the Church. It is a cosmic song of secular eroticism, in which the sexual man and woman are united in ecstasy, and this Song is the superlative song of marriage union.
Ah, but the Government is not proposing to interfere with ‘religious marriage’, you say. And all this Bible mumbo-jumbo is archaic and otiose: we need to move on. But even as we try, we hit not only a can of worms but a knot of vipers in the consideration of same-sex ‘civil marriage’.
If a marriage be null and void, no valid marriage ever existed; if a marriage be voidable and annulled, it is valid and recognised at law until such time as it is ended by decree. The relevant clauses of the 1973 Matrimonial Causes Act are:
11 Grounds on which the marriage is voidThroughout ecclesial and secular history and hitherto in law, both spiritual and temporal, consummation has required sexual intercourse which is ‘ordinary and complete’; that is, the penetration of a vagina by a penis.
...
(c) that the parties are not respectively male and female;
12 Grounds on which the marriage is voidable
...
(a) that the marriage has not been consummated owing to the incapacity of either party to consummate it;
Dissolution, divorce and annulment:Don’t you just love ‘Case law may need to develop’? May need?
2.16 Specifically, non-consummation and adultery are currently concepts that are defined in case law and apply only to marriage law, not civil partnership law. However, with the removal of the ban on same-sex couples having a civil marriage, these concepts will apply equally to same-sex and opposite-sex couples and case law may need to develop, over time, a definition as to what constitutes same-sex consummation and same-sex adultery.
Phew!
Can his position be distilled into PLAIN English??
Can his position be distilled into PLAIN English??
Johny Cochran summed it up thusly: if it don’t fit, you must acquit.
In the entire past of church and political history, a definition of a valid marriage would include “consummation.” Of course, that meant - normal heterosexual sex.
Now that we supposedly have “gay marriage” - how does one define “consummation” with a gay couple?
This is yet further proof that the whole issue of gay marriage is going to affect all of society, we can’t escape it. It’s not a question of leaving gays alone, it’s far beyond that.
What are “things that make you go ‘Unnngh!’”, Your Grace?
I’ve brought up this very point about consummation on here before. Same-sex marriage proponents will also have to redefine that from the dictionary definition, I guess, “The action of making a marriage or relationship complete by having sexual intercourse.”
I’ve also brought up how no one’s even talking about the impact this will have on raising children and on basic school functions. Every child will have to be taught they can either marry a “boy” or a “girl” when they grow up. As we saw recently in New England, “father/daughter” functions were banned by law as being sexist. Absolutely anything in schools that either teaches about traditional marriage or encourages male/female relationships at a dance or whatever will also soon be banned if same-sex marriage is instituted. It would necessarily create a fundamental and massive reordering of society and culture, with consequences every bit as far-reaching as any of Obama’s economic and health care proposals.
Well, about time someone put this whole “gay marriage” issue into legalize. Love it. Will have to remember this argument sometime when I am challenged about gay marriage.
They will define it by whatever godless sodomy they wish. My question is, has there ever been in the short history of gay marriage—and it’s a very short history since gay marriage evolved out of the leftist sixties cultural morass—a single case of a gay couple who waited until after marriage to “consummate” their marriage by any definition they may advance? I doubt if one instance has ever occurred.
Now consummation could include a “wet willie” per the author...and that’s a good point since there is no end to the quest of libs for acceptance of homo deviancy. There is enough sin in the world without approving of more.
So, Joseph took Mary as his wife but they weren’t really “married” until after Jesus birth when he actually had sexual relations with her?
(Or, if you are Catholic, they were presumably NEVER married.)
(Or, if you are Catholic, they were presumably NEVER married.)
As they say, good sir, it is the exception that proves the rule.
What St. Joseph had with the Virgin Mary has been fittingly termed a "Josephite Marriage," one in which there was no consummation but in which it was understood from the start that this would be the case. Yet it was still a union between one man and one woman, it involved the subordination of the female party to the male and it was centered around the rearing of a child.
It is true that non-consummation does not make a marriage void ab initio, but only if one party files suit to claim it. (Incest, on the other hand, makes a marriage null regardless of the will of either party.) Nevertheless, in civil law (and even in ecclesiastical law, though this latter also includes provisions specifically befitting a Christian home), *all* potential grounds for annulling a marriage have to do with the integrity of the family structure in terms of rearing and building patrimonial worth for the next generation, and of the good faith of both parties in building this up.
The availability of divorce and contraceptives has obscured the essential structure of marriage but not changed it per se. Equality of the spouses has been a more ominous change, since it is a step away from the melding of two persons into one household. "Gay marriage" will destroy the essence altogether: while adoption is hypothetically possible for gay couples, one cannot underestimate the symbolic reproductive importance of the male/female union and potential consummative act. Marriage will once and for all cease to be a high-level mating ritual and become at long last an arrangement for shacking up.
For now, I won't speak of the negative effects on man, masculinity and responsibility. I'll only say that if feminists think that situation is less degrading to a woman than subordination to a father or husband, I've got a bridge in London to sell them.
That's a pretty neat invention. But it is just that - an invention. It cannot be found anywhere in Scripture.
Mary bore Joseph several sons according to scripture, having sexual relations with her UNTIL after the Son of God was born. There was no prohibition given to Joseph in his angelic dream to abstain permanently. So, even this invention doesn't apply to its namesake.
“Historically, a marriage has not been considered a binding contract until and unless it has been consummated.”
With the state involved, the definition it uses to recognize the institution is simply whatever judges, pols or the majority thinks it is at any one time. And that’s it, and that’s all it will ever be. Combine that with the fact many have been conditioned to think marriage comes from and is defined by the state and you have what we have today. It was always a danger. Pope Leo XIII warned about it 130 years ago.
Freegards
Agreed.
(Or, if you are Catholic, they were presumably NEVER married.)
As they say, good sir, it is the exception that proves the rule.
What St. Joseph had with the Virgin Mary has been fittingly termed a "Josephite Marriage," one in which there was no consummation but in which it was understood from the start that this would be the case. Yet it was still a union between one man and one woman, it involved the subordination of the female party to the male and it was centered around the rearing of a child.
It is true that non-consummation does not make a marriage void ab initio, but only if one party files suit to claim it. (Incest, on the other hand, makes a marriage null regardless of the will of either party.) Nevertheless, in civil law (and even in ecclesiastical law, though this latter also includes provisions specifically befitting a Christian home), *all* potential grounds for annulling a marriage have to do with the integrity of the family structure in terms of rearing and building patrimonial worth for the next generation, and of the good faith of both parties in building this up.
The availability of divorce and contraceptives has obscured the essential structure of marriage but not changed it per se. Equality of the spouses has been a more ominous change, since it is a step away from the melding of two persons into one household. "Gay marriage" will destroy the essence altogether: while adoption is hypothetically possible for gay couples, one cannot underestimate the symbolic reproductive importance of the male/female union and potential consummative act. Marriage will once and for all cease to be a high-level mating ritual and become at long last an arrangement for shacking up.
For now, I won't speak of the negative effects on man, masculinity and responsibility. I'll only say that if feminists think that situation is less degrading to a woman than subordination to a father or husband, I've got a bridge in London to sell them.
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