Setanta wrote:Nonsense--the one is a legal codification of contractual rights and obligations. There other is alleged to be a "sacrament." Apples to oranges--the state very properly restricts itself to the contract aspect.
From the way you say that, it almost seems as if you disagree with me. My first argument against your position is that under English law before the Declaration of independence, marriage was indeed a contract, but the regulation of who was entitled to engage in it was subject to Anglican canon law -- as can be read up in the Blackstone's chapter on "husband and wife". In America, those colonies who did not have established churches basically copied and pasted from Anglican canon law into state statutes -- as can be read up in Tucker's 1803 Commentaries on Blackstone, which in general described how the individuals rights and wrongs described in Blackstone were handled by the new constitution(s) and the new statutes. Hence, your contention that regulations of religious origin have no place in American law is inconsistent with American legal history.
But my objection to your argument goes deeper than this. Even if I did grant you that yours was an accurate description of American law, purely contractual, and about property rights, I would still contend that contracts, property and law is not what this is really about. The gay community says it is in order to keep a low profile -- kind of like the phony sunset clauses that gave Bush's 2003 tax cuts the semblance of legality and fiscal responsibility.
Take last year for example, when San Francisco issued marriage certificates to gay couples for some period of time. CNN showed the happy faces of the newlywed on the steps of San Francisco city hall every evening, and I'm sure you've seen them too. To you, did those faces look like the faces of people who just signed a contract, such as businessmen might? Did they look like people who had their material affairs regulated, as they might have if they'd just signed their testaments or made an inheritance? They certainly didn't look this way to me. To me, they looked like people who had just announced to the world that they had passed one of the most important milestones in their life, and like people who were extremely emotional and happy about doing so. Contracts and property had nothing to do with the emotions and the happiness -- just as they wouldn't have if the couples had been straight. To reduce this matter to an issue of contract law may be expedient for tactical reasons, but it misses about 80% of the point, and I find it quite disingenious on both sides. We wouldn't be having a 100+ page discussion about marriage if it was nothing but a contract.
georgeob1 wrote: That government has the interest, the right and ability to make distinctions among people who enter into contracts, and concerning their treatment of their children is obvious and beyond dispute. A government distinction between homosexual unions and unions between men and women is based on natural fact and likely social consequence. There is no basic right violated by such distinctions (unless perhaps one is also prepared to argue against affirmative action, the graduated income tax, and many other basic elements of our society.)
I note that I have indeed argued against all those things in other threads, but on the basis that they are bad ideas, not on the basis that they are unconstitutional (well, I did mention it in the case of Affirmative Action
sometimes, but it was never the main thrust of my argument). Which is exactly analogous to my argument about proscribing same sex marriage.
