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Canuckistan Legalized SSM 10 Years Ago. Here’s What the US Should Expect Next
Laws will have to be re-written, for one thing; words like “husband” and “wife” have to be removed, along with the phrase “natural parent.” But there’s much more…
Because this process will have to be repeated in all 50 states and Washington D.C., there are likely lots and lots and lots of lawyers popping champagne corks today.
Published in General, Marriage
That’s the fight we’ll win, and handily. This decision was about state recognition of same sex marriage, not the religious practice of marriage. The state can meddle all it wants in its own definition of civil marriage.
The State cannot alter the sacraments of The Church. A lot of Democratic voters are Catholic, and they will not tolerate such a direct attack upon basic Church doctrine. But, Catholics aside, it is a basic Christian (and all abrahamic religions fit here) premise that marriage is a religious affair. The state has attached some cruft to the institution, and they can include or exclude persons from inheritance and property rights, or the like, but they cannot change marriage as a religious institution.
We won in Hobby Lobby, and we’ll win in the next religious liberty case that comes down the pipe.
There is that.
Given who heads the Catholic Church, this is indeed a reassuring thought.
That was sarcasm.
This article says it’s for cost saving and because it all got too complicated.
The only laugh I have had all week, if we have nothing else at least we still have gallows humor. h/t Mr. Wiegand.
But the source must have been governmental, and who believes a governmental source? Especially when they say they are saving taxpayers money?
If you squint hard enough a flag looks like a bra, word which contains 3 letters from the word burqa. Therefore, if you think about it the way a Black Robed Fortune Cookie Hogwarts Supreme Court Injustice thinks about it, its really an act of sexual self expression and freedom. Its a veritable emanating penumbra all on its own.
I have you now Obi-Wan.
You do wonder if maybe they don’t want to know, or want you to know, what happens to marriage in Canada.
It’s a fair cop.
I just might have to mention this to my Conservative MP. $250,000 barely qualifies as a rounding error where government spending is concerned.
The attack is not coming against sacraments or doctrine.
The attack is coming against teaching.
Christian schools will be required to incorporate diversity curriculum materials that will be promulgated by anti-Christians and will directly contradict traditional Christian moral teachings. Schools that do not comply will lose their accreditation and their tax-exempt status.
Yes.
I went to a speech by one of the lawyers who was suing South Dakota to impose gay marriage on them.
He said that Catholic schools could only avoid being sued for discrimination against gay teachers in open homosexual lifestyles if the school also fired everyone who violated other Church teachings.
So, if the Church had a teacher who was pregnant out of wedlock, fire them so you can demonstrate a consistent pattern of fidelity to doctrine. Divorced teacher-same thing.
In other words, the Church could never practice mercy if it wanted to reserve the right to fire/not hire an active homosexual to teach.
This was a year before today’s decision. Clearly, they have thought through the next steps.
Everyone needs to read this article.
There is absolutely nothing to stop this trampling of free speech rights in the United States.
What’s really unnerving is how easily this shutting up of people can be applied in other areas. Once people are terrified, they will be silenced about everything–if they have families and jobs.
The general public doesn’t handle this sort of thing too well anyway.
A friend of mine, the superintendent of schools for our school district, asked me to help him with a referendum to pass a school budget increase. He was not allowed by law to get involved in politics. So he was avoiding dealing with the public about the budget increase. I said, “Mike, it’s perfectly okay for you to release the budget figures. Where else would they come from?” He always replied, “No, I can’t. It’s against the law for me to be involved.”
He really couldn’t understand the distinction.
And dealing with the public as much as I have, very few people understand these things either.
The result will be squelched speech and increased fear.
I am also worried, with good reason, that the activists group, now with time on their hands, will punish people who spoke out against gay marriage before the Supreme Court decision.
A reign of terror.
But don’t forget all those slippery slope items that they said was simply ridiculous. Gay rights and SSM would never lead to those things.
Polyamory here we come…
Since our Supreme Court provided no guidance, I’m curious how Canada handles the very practical problems associated with same-sex marriage. For example, when a married couple comprised of two men or two women goes to family court for a divorce, how does the family court assign blame? Surely, in a marriage with two men, they can’t both be reflexively assigned onerous alimony.
Seriously, everyone worried about same-sex marriage slept through the main battle. No-fault divorce was the beginning of the end of marriage—what other contracts can be unilaterally dissolved by a single party?—and same-sex marriage might only be the end of the end, in other words, the final, insidious redefinition. I’d be all for same-sex marriage if same-sex marriage brought a return to divorce only for causes like infidelity, domestic violence, or constructive abandonment. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the point is to strengthen the family.
No-fault divorce was the beginning of the end of marriage—what other contracts can be unilaterally dissolved by a single party?—and same-sex marriage might only be the end of the end, in other words, the final, insidious redefinition. I’d be all for same-sex marriage if same-sex marriage brought a return to divorce only for causes like infidelity, domestic violence, or constructive abandonment. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the point is to strengthen the family.
No, but it could be. In other words, there are conversations that could be had, and arguments to be made (even won) that we might even have some new allies for? Gay and lesbian couples valued marriage highly enough to fight for it even as it was being trashed by straight people who took its benefits and protections for granted.
Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire or The Bachelorettes, Hugh Heffner and his mansion-ful O’ bunnies, the ’60’s-era James Bond whose raised eyebrow was sufficient to bring the beauties in for their deflowering (they generally died afterward—that was a more moral time, wasn’t it?)
All these have been aimed at the base instincts of a majority, not at the higher aspirations of a tiny minority. They are, and have been, much more destructive IMHO than a couple of ladies in flannel shirts and granny-glasses tying the knot.
And: being squirrelly about Fathers Day isn’t a result of lesbians fussing, it’s because so many kids “don’t have dads,” and I’m not talking about orphans, here. Single, heterosexual mothers far outnumber Heather’s Two Mommies and they’re the ones whose children are anxiously drawing family portraits of “me, Mommy, Mommy’s new boyfriend, the new boyfriend’s teenaged son, a half-sister who lives with her dad but comes over every other weekend, Mommy’s old boyfriend’s dad, whom I still call grampa, and Mom’s ex-husband who is actually my father but he lives in Oklahoma…” This is as true in Texas as it is everywhere else. Should Texas secede, new Texans will find there’s still plenty to worry about when it comes to kids and families. If this is really about kids and families, that is.
Marriage was instituted to structure procreation. Using the fact that it was not perfectly observed in every situation to say it must be redefined to a new purpose is deeply flawed reasoning. It’s giving bad-behaving heterosexuals veto power over whether there even is an institution to structure procreation.
How about giving weight to the millions of heterosexual couples who did marry because they should and bore and raised children together and stayed together because they should who now understand there is no should and the procreative meaning of their marriage is not recognized by their country?
How about giving weight to the millions of couples who will absorb the meaning of marriage as an optional commitment unrelated to their procreative potential and not marry? The woman may be uncomfortable but when the man says it’s optional and just not his thing he will have the force of his society and the Supreme Court behind him.
“If this is really about kids and families, that is.”
Nice insinuation there, Kate.
“And in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish: because they receive not the love of the truth that they might be saved. Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe a lie.”
2 Thessalonians 2:10
Ver. 10. God shall send them the operation of error.
That is, says St. Chrysostom and St. Cyril, he will permit them to be led away with illusions, by signs, and lying prodigies, which the devil shall work by antichrist, &c. (Witham) — God shall suffer them to be deceived by lying wonders, and false miracles, in punishment of their not entertaining the love of truth. (Challoner) — The end God proposes is the judgment and condemnation of such as reject the proffered light. This is the march of sin, according to St. Thomas Aquinas on this place. In the first place a man, in consequence of his first sin, is deprived of grace, he then falls into further sins, and ends with being eternally punished. Hence it happens that his new sins are a punishment of his former transgressions; because God will permit the devil to do these things. Deus mittet, quia Deus Diabolum facere ista permittet. (St. Augustine, lib. xx. de Civ. Dei. chap. 19.)
–Haydock Commentary
I’m not saying that because heterosexuals screw up marriage occasionally, often or always that we might as well re-define it. I’m saying that, once the furor about SSM dies down, there are plenty of definitional issues that I think are as large and as important (if not larger and more important).
As you’ll probably guess, JoJo, I don’t think that procreation is the meaning of marriage—it’s one meaning, and an important one, but it isn’t the only one. I am (as I know you are!) one those people who married with the understanding that procreation was part of the package, and stuck with it (clumsily, perhaps, but stubbornly!) until we were parted by death. I married the second time with the understanding that procreation was not part of the package, though the care of our existing children and aging parents certainly was.
I married, because I believed (still do) that commitment and family-formation are defining features of an adult life; that the married relationship is the base camp that supports both spouses (and their children, if any) as they do their work and service in the world. So I see the disintegration of the (statistically-far-more-significant) heterosexual marriage as a real and serious problem. Messes are being made that are expensive in terms of money and pain (especially the pain of children).
In all the SSM threads on Ricochet this spring, I’ve seen a lot of passion and a lot of great, and potentially very fruitful discussion arise not just between gay and straight Ricochetti, or pro-SSM and anti-SSM, but between the long-wedded and the still-single, the happily married, the disconsolately divorced, the free-at-last and the sadly solitary… this (the discussion) is good. Marriage is not simple or easy, as any reading of the Bible or history could show us, but it is (perhaps therefore) precious and important. That whole conversation could easily stop now, or be reduced to resentful grumblings on one side and “get over it” on the other. That would be too bad: SSM may be a Big Deal, but marriage itself is bigger.
Yes, thank you for that, Basil. I noticed it too.
Kate, pardon my presumption but your remarriage was at least partly about procreation. I imagine you wanted to set an example, for your community and your children, of how men and women properly relate to each other. You know it’s too nuanced to explain to your children that you two aren’t marrying because you don’t plan to have children, but when they live with someone they should marry. You led by example, and in conformance to a healthy social norm.
Thank you, Basil!
It’s not presumption, it’s knowledge—we’ve discussed this, haven’t we? Happily! Anyway, as I say—yes, marriage is about procreation often and at least partly, just not always and wholly. There are other reasons—good reasons—to marry, among which might be to set a good example to my family, children, nieces and nephews, congregants, students etc. about what “relationship” and “family” actually look like. Given that most of these (95 % at least, right?) are going to be heterosexual, with any luck I’ll be offering a good example of what a heterosexual relationship can be. You’ve done this for me just in the way you speak of Mr. JoJo, so it’s not just one way, but maybe round-and-round?
One of the things marriage is about—though we don’t like to talk about this—is death. To be married is to choose the person who will bury you. “You never know what might happen!” a bright young bride-to-be will bravely chirp when I point this out, and I say “no, actually, we know what’s going to happen. We just don’t know when, or in what form it will take. But it will come.” Marriage is about widowhood.
Having just gotten off the phone with my (first) sister-in-law, having discussed with her our plans for helping my (first) aging mother-in-law, I have confirmed for myself that marriage is about forming bonds that outlast the loss of the original marriage, bonds that help us survive loss and keep loving. (Dare I bring up Ruth and Naomi…again?)
I hope that you don’t believe that single people can’t have a useful and worthwhile adult life. Not everyone can find a mate.
How do you propose repairing heterosexual marriage? To my mind, defining it away from procreation and toward a sort of prom-date-for-life paradigm is about the worst first step imaginable.
Well, if you bring up Ruth and Naomi again I will be forced to bring up the fact that my family and my husband’s never spoke and never will, and I am not sure if my mother in law is alive or dead. So if marriage is not about procreation because some people don’t have children, it surely is not about extended family ties.
An anecdote, not from Canada but California where we are also engaging in this experiment, a friend of mine went this route. Based on her experience it appears to me that fault/alimony is decided based purely on which of the two parties has a higher gross income.
This is a good question—how to repair it. Prom-date-for-life is exactly what it’s getting defined as by what one wag called the Bridal Industrial Complex; it’s one long romance. Which, of course, tends to bang pretty sharply into reality, and before you know it, the disappointed are getting divorced even before they’ve paid off the loan they took out to pay for the Dream Wedding.
As an officiant, I do my part by having heavy, sonorous conversations like the one I described above, and by refusing to perform marriages that I think are a bad idea. And by counseling the already-married, in the hope of helping them stay that way. Which often means saying “yup. snapping at each other when the baby has kept you up all night is normal. doesn’t mean the marriage is over.” Prom Date for Life indeed!
I’m sorry to hear that, JoJo—there is always a lot of pain behind a paragraph like that one, and I know it wasn’t anything you or your husband deserved. (People are crazy! They squander people that should be husband and guarded like gold!)
h But as you pointed out earlier about the childless marriage or the dysfunctional heterosexual marriage, just because it isn’t true in every case, doesn’t mean extended family ties aren’t one of the functions and meanings of marriage in general. It would be strange, come to think of it, if marriage didn’t have multiple meanings and functions, some more apparent at some times in life, or in some situations, others coming to the fore when the circumstances change. That is part of its robustness, the reason it tends to persevere in human life.