The future of marriage

1) Sheep do not have the intellectual capacity to enter into the legally binding contract that constitutes marriage. Furthermore, sheep are not capable of meeting the legal obligations of marriage, to wit:2) Sheep cannot mount a legal challenge if the parents of the deceased human partner decide to take and raise the children for themselves, nor is a sheep capable of raising human children according to accepted standards if she could mount such a challenge; and3) Sheep cannot make important legal and medical decisions for an incapacitated spouse.This is pretty much why you cannot marry comatose people, corpses, young children, and sailboats either. I thought crashfrog, Dan Carroll, and Jaderis already explained all this to you. Are you going to ignore this post as well?Edited by Chiroptera, : Another typo.Edited by Chiroptera, : Damn, I thought I already corrected that typo!

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

Sure, I agree. This whole argument has convinced me that marriage is, fundamentally, a religious institution, and the civil state should not in any way be entangled in such religious institutions.The word marriage should be expunged from the law books and replaced with civil union or similar language. Furthermore, there should no longer be either the requirement nor the option of having the civil union solemnized by a religious authority; the civil union becomes valid when and only when the "Certificate of Civil Union" -- not "Marriage Liscense" -- is signed and appropriate oaths taken in the presence of the legally authorized state official responsible to oversee the signing.And, if the couple feels they need an additional "solemnizing ceremony", they can go on their own to find a religious (or other) authority who will recognize their union. But this would be legally unnecessary: the union would be valid the moment they signed the Certificate in the presence of the state official.But in the meantime, same-sex couples are barred from entering into the legally binding contractual relationship, with its obligations and privileges, that is open to different-sex couples. What's more, there is no movement whatsoever to remove the word marriage from the law books, so we have to do what we can in the meantime to allow everyone the same right to designate that one, special person of their choosing to be the one who has certain rights on, privileges, and obligations to the other. And attempts to allow same-sex couples the same legal protections and obligations as marriage but under a different term are barred from doing so by the very same people who are against gay marriages.This "protection of marriage" has nothing to do with protecting "traditional marriage". This has everything to do with attempting to marginalize "untraditional" behavior.Added by edit:
I should also add that it would be problematic to have two different civilly recognized unions side-by-side, namely marriage and civil union. Despite the good intentions of some of the "separate-but-equal" folks, having two separate institutions will make it easy to make and maintain significant differences in the two so that they would not be equal in fact. In fact, I believe that in most jurisdictions that have civil union, it does have significant differences from marriage. By having just one recognized institution, it will make it harder to maintain an unequal difference based on who the couples are.Edited by Chiroptera, : No reason given.Edited by Chiroptera, : Clarification in third paragraph.Edited by Chiroptera, : Ha ha ha. "Separate-gut-equal." Ha ha.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

It may be that I have misread your post. Jaderis was describing how a couple could consummate a marriage other than by penis-vagina intercourse. Are you simply adding the possibility of a couple, of any combination of sexes, using a sheep? If so, that would add more methods of consummation beyond heterosexual penis-vagina sex.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

I'm sorry.I meant to ask you what the meaning of marriage is, according to you.So, Hoot Mon, what is the meaning of marriage, according to you?

Good points. I'll agree that it has very little to do with marriage, per se, if it were not legally binding. I've come around to thinking that "marriage" between any two or more humans shlould be performed in a non-legally binding ceremony, say in a church, per NosyNed's proposal. The entire issue can be solved using the principle of civil unions, where the govenment should actually be involved. Then everybody will feel equal and have the greatest number of choices. Everybody wins and nobody loses.And if you hear any straight chickens still cackling about losing the "real" value of marriage, tell them to go to church and take that matter up with the clergy who decide who and what gets "married." We probably can forget about consummation and the body parts, too; men should be allowed to stick it anywhere they like. Once I heard of a prostitute named Sylvia who had a glass eye. Her motto was " I'm keeping an eye out for you, stud." Consummation can be anything and everything you want it to be.”Hoot Edited by Hoot Mon, : No reason given.

nator, I'll let my last post speak to that.

Now that there is a bit of agreement by some representatives of both sides of the argument maybe we can consider the next step.That is implementation. In the real world to do what seems simple; change or override all laws so "marriage" really means "civil union" in all legal contexts and then remove some restrictions on CUs isn't so simple.One can bet that it would take the passage of individual bills by at least each state or at least a long process of getting the issue to the supreme court.In the meantime, the anti's would be going beserk. The other choice we were discussing preserves the old meanings of marriage and adds a bit too it. The word "marriage" is still protected by legal definitions; just not as tightly as some want it to be.Now we have decided to remove any over all meaning to the word marriage. Couples wanting to "civil unite" would do that for legal protection of each other and children. Then they would, if they choose, go for a xxxxx-marriage. You would always have to add a hypenated modifier in front. It might be a roman catholic-marriage, a pentacostal-marriage, an anglican-reform-marriage or an anglican-oldstyle-marriage (those last after the schism is complete in the Anglican church). It might also be a church of san francisco-marriage (which only allows same-sex marriages) or any number of other xxxxx-marriages.This would, I'm guessing, NOT be acceptable to the anti-same-sexers who are not as open minded as Hoot Mon is and represent somewhere just over 99.3% of all of them I would think.Here in Canada, we just changed some federal law (it seems the definition of marriage is federal here) and that was it. It was done. No changing of wording in any statues of the provinces which do control some aspects of the process of getting married.We've had, we think, the last look at the issue last fall and our most conservative party seems to have done enough to look like they kept a promise to the more right wing voters and has now declared the issue settled. There is, I'm pretty sure, zero chance of changing it back.My guess is that what the US would call the "religious right" is, in Canada becoming more noisy and less influential as time goes on. It appears that some fraction of the noise is generated by US religious groups injecting their noses into our business. In this way they do generate a bit of noise and attention and also generate more backlash against their ideas by the moderate majority of Canadians.(excuse me if I'm feeling a big smug here and, dare I say? "holier" than thou )

You and I are in complele agreement. It took me awhile to come around. I had to ask all of my "bigoted" questions and a few more to get there, because I felt that "marriage" was something worth preserving as a family tradition, especially for the children. But what is tradition worth if it is shown to be discriminatory? In that respect "marriage" should be redefined, and the government should stay the hell out of it. Nosy's civil-union proposal lets the churches decide what "marriage" means. Issue resolved”civil unions for everybody who can write their own names.But in America the issue will not be so easily resoloved. Bigots abound here like nowhere else. (But whatsa "bogot," anyway? If Socrates had been a modern American he would have been accused of bigotry, too.) The anti-same-sex-marriage crowd will ask every persnickety question I've asked, and more. I feel the answers I got on this and other threads were pretty good over all, even if some of them were a little barbed and bitchy. In my opinion the discussion was enlightening; indeed it was enlightening enough to change my view on same-sex civil unions.”Hoot Mon Edited by Hoot Mon, : No reason given.

Farm animals can be kept around for a lot of good reasons, but consummating same-sex marriages is not one them. I would prefer to let the churches decide what is "marriage" and what is "consummation." If they think farm animals should be involved with that, then I say let 'em. Personally, I see the churches doing a lot worse when they terrorize little children with sin-and-death admonitions issued before life-size statues of Jesus, hanging wounded and suffereing on his cross, bleeding and dying with the full horrific effect to frighten the children into believing their holy dogma.”Hoot Mon

Was he lying when he said that he felt that the deterioration of marriage was worse then terrorism, or is he lying now? Either way, he's latched onto a way he thinks the gays can be kept out of marriage, and that's the important thing.Oh, and homosexuals are the same as animals. And as always, he is not a bigot.

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"I know some of you are going to say 'I did look it up, and that's not true.' That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut."
-Stephen Colbert

Thank you. I was wondering when you would admit that. Oh, but wait, you say you don't like Nosy's proposal? Well, who's the bigoted one now?”Hoot

Yep. I think that tearing down the whole institution, just so the fags can't play, is a shitty solution. It's cutting off the nose to spite the face. You. Duh.

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"I know some of you are going to say 'I did look it up, and that's not true.' That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut."
-Stephen Colbert

No it's not. It's changing the meaning of marriage to preserve the future of marriage. Just how do you accomplish same-sex marriage without changing the meaning of marriage?

Eliminating all government recognition of marriage is not tearing down the institution? You two guys? You two girls? You can go ahead and get married.You've heard this idea a few times. You keep ignoring it, for some strange reason. Probably because of the part where homosexuals are allowed to get married.

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"I know some of you are going to say 'I did look it up, and that's not true.' That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut."
-Stephen Colbert

quote:

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It's changing the meaning of marriage to preserve the future of marriage.

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I thought you just agreed with me that the meaning of marriage has already drastically change, and the gay marriage would be comparatively insignificant?

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely