bencip19 asks:
quote:
I'm not trying to accuse; just to point out something that surprised me and made me confused. You're one of the most straightforward, clear, logical posters I've read here, so I'm really interested to understand your thought on this. 50% expects I'm thinking wrong, and 50% doesn't know what to expect.
Because there is a difference between societal expectations and legal expectations as well as historical and current legal status.
That is, marriage is historically about having children but the fact that you do not have children or cannot have children is not an impediment in the current law to getting married. Sterile people can get married. While it was the case that Henry VIII decided to create a brand new religion in order to allow him to get divorced simply for the reason that he kept on not having a son, our current laws do not allow failure to produce issue to be a justification for annulment.
That is, our laws state that if you make promises that you can have children and it turns out you know that you can't, then a case can be made for fraud and the marriage dissolved, but that require active deception upon someone's part. If you don't know that you're sterile and you get married, that isn't fraud.
When it comes to children, non-issue is not grounds for annulment. Instead, non-consumation is. Note the difference, however: Annulment means the marriage never existed. Divorce is a dissolution of the marriage contract and all of the things that go along with that (activation of pre-nup agreements, division of property, etc.) But legal annulment means the marriage never existed in the first place and none of those things come into play.
Not having a child isn't enough to have the marriage not considered a sham. Not having sex, on the other hand, is.
Therefore, given our current legal contract of marriage, while children are definitely considered in the arrangement, they are not the goal. That is, you're only supposed to have children while married, but having children is not the main purpose of marriage anymore.
There is no difference between a same-sex marriage and any other childless, mixed-sex marriage. Since we don't penalize mixed-sex couples for being unwilling or unable to produce children, why would we punish same-sex couples for it?
Rrhain
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