Gay Marriage and World Peace
Its time for a simple title.
I’ven’t gotten my news reading cycle yet. (I read news about once every three or four days, because I read such a large variety of sources it takes me 1-2 hours to get through it all usually.) But, I have caught wind of the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling instructing the legislature to legalize gay marriage within 180 days. With clockwork precision both the Governor of Massachusetts and our illustrious President denounced the ruling, wow that was surprising. Bill O’Reilly of course took on the issue; he has some interesting things to say.
First, it is my understanding that the ruling at hand only affects governmental actions regarding marriage, it does not affect religious institutions directly in any way. As private entities they reserve the right to discriminate, as it should be. Unfortunately many people believe that we should force private institutions to be nondiscriminatory even when they are not accepting governmental money. The right of any group to choose who they associate with must be protected. I will be one of the first to support the right of groups to choose their association. (Well behind the religious righters who are already lining up to fight a nonexistent fight.) I support the Boy Scouts right to prevent gay people from being allowing gay scouts to serve in leadership positions. I don’t like it, but I feel that is their lawful right. We live in a democracy with freedoms. (Just like the people of Iraq to paraphrase a recent line, just forget the US troops occupying and enforcing order.)
Next up, there is this little matter of “preserving the institution of marriage.” I want to get married some day, I’m just working on finding the right man. I am disturbed though that by the time I’m ready it might not mean anything. I’ve written before on a personal case of marriage not being taken seriously. I personally know of a few cases where the divorces almost preceded the wedding. But unfortunately people do not put enough stock in marriage. I honestly believe we do need to educate about marriage, and bash into people’s heads that they are entering into a commitment that supersedes their individuality. (For those of familiar with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine marriage is like a Trill who has chosen to be joined, its not a light decision and it cannot be reversed easily.)
A quick note about divorce statistics. I have a not so sneaking suspicion that the figure’s we’ve been seeing aren’t lying but the liars have figured them to support their argument. I went looking and found that the government no longer collects detailed marriage and divorce information but I found reasonable set of statistics. At first glance its easy to assume that most marriages last about 7.2 years, but if you look farther you’ll note the “Average length of first marriages which end in divorce” is 11 years. I surmise from this that while there are a good number of divorces, a significant amount of them are from shorter marriages. I’ve got a librarian out finding a frequency chart for length of marriages that end in divorce/death, she needed more time to find it.
Addendum: While I was working on this my librarian came back with a few answers. While I’ve not fully combed through all of them there was one page with an interesting chart. Given that it is from a site named biblenews1.com I trust the statistics are not overly liberal. What shocked me at first was that the divorce and marriage rates have similar shaped lines. The important shift came during 1975 to 1980, where the divorce per marriage rate gained a higher ratio, but since then the percentage of people getting married has been reasonably matched with the percentage of people getting divorces. Wow, where is the crisis?
Good now that nasty statistical matter is generally over.
Marriage has grown to an unmanageable tarball. There are 1,000 rights and responsibilities at the federal level that come with marriage. This figure surprises me and I would expect it to surprise many married couples, who haven’t looked into the issue. Quite simply this is like the cable or telephone company deciding that everyone must buy their top of the line over $100 package, instead of offering several choices that allows you to get the best fit. There are several broad categories of rights and benefits my (incomplete list) includes:
- Parental rights (including foster care and adoption)
- Fiscal rights (bank accounts, employer benefits, life insurance, social security, student loans, governmental loans)
- Medical rights (you gain the ability to make decisions regarding your spouse if they are incapacitated, right to be at someone’s bedside)
- Judicial Protections (including right not to testify against spouse, immigration rights)
- Religious rights/responsibilites (varies by religions)
- Social recognition of peers
I’ve deliberately chosen different categories than the GAO. The first four categories are rights generally given by the government, the other two are non-governmental and as such I won’t examine them.
I believe that instead of getting the “whole package” you should be able to pick which responsibilities and rights you want. Either of the first three could be entered into independently or jointly. Entering into the judicial protections should require you to have executed either the fiscal or parental rights clause. (To prevent people who are under criminal investigation and single from getting them as a legal shield.) Religious rights and responsibilities of course would be the responsibility of each religion to determine, and they could require entering into the other agreements. Social recognition is just something that will and has come about.
A word about parental rights, they should not be a given. The rights of the child should always come before that of the parents. I will defer to William Irvine’s books, Doing Right by Children and The Politics of Parenting. They are both excellent and accessible philosophical works concerning the history and philosophical responsibilities of parenting.
Finally you could terminate any one of these agreements via legal proceedings, as you currently can do.
But why divide marriage up? I think the best reason is that it makes people aware of what they are getting, and in addition untangles and should clarify the issue, and could reduce divorces. You may love her and want to raise kids and have her make decisions for you, but you want nothing to do with her finances. You could just get medical privileges because your past child bearing age and your finances are set.
Concerning the predictions that the world is going to depopulate because people have said that:
Marriage is not a lifestyle choice, but a “public commodity,” critical for the survival of the human race, he said, adding that it deserves special supports and incentives.
“If there is no next generation, we are gone, we are dead,” he said.
Honestly he doesn’t understand that nature has made sex pleasur
able, there will always be a next generation, regardless of the state of marriage.
Okay to wrap up my wandering diatribe on marriage I would like to credit Google for being invaluable in finding information, David Lauri’s blog which got me started, and the digraph “th” which occurs the most of any digraph in this entry. (See for yourself)
But, I’ve neglected the two most important features of any marriage: love and commitment. Every marriage should have these, even if the government doesn’t recognize them.
I’m stopping here. I believe I’ve attempted to bite off more than I can chew, so next time I’m going to attack an easier subject like world peace. Or I could sum that up too, “All you need is love”