At the Daily Report at Law.com, New Marriage Conversation signatory Leah Ward Sears writes today:
…much like David, I’ve witnessed the fallout from broken families in the past several decades, during which divorce and out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed, and unstable, serial cohabiting relationships have become the norm for raising children.
I’ve also long been concerned, particularly from my vantage point when I was a judge, that marriage in America today is fracturing along class lines, contributing to growing inequality and a more insecure middle class—a problem that has nothing to do with sexual orientation. More.
Categories: Marriage
The best way to strengthen marriage is to improve education. We need to INSIST (as a national priority) on 100% high school graduation rates (we are at 93%). We need to improve (from 66%) the number of people who go on to college.
More troubling than the 93% graduation rate is the way it not graduating is concentrated in some places and groups. So for some kids, they have much less than a 93% chance of making it and getting a job.
I’m less sure that we need to get everyone into college.
I think that along with helping kids finish school, we need to have jobs for them afterwards. Jobs with living wages and a future.
And to follow up on the Sommers debate, I think we need to look at the fact that boys are having a much harder time getting educated. Something needs to change there.
How on EARTH can you or anyone separate marriage from procreation responsibility? I’m floored that Justice Sears and David Blankenhorn are taking this stance. It (marriage) absolutely makes no sense what-so-ever without those qualifiers.
Justice Sears and David Blankenhorn, I’d like to know how you both square your new stance on marriage with “donor” conception (there is no such thing as a “donor” in relation to the child) and presumption of paternity. This is a HUGE empty void of a question that really needs to be addressed.
Karen, where do you get from her piece that she is separating marriage from procreation responsibility?
Quote:
“Whether a person is straight or gay, bisexual or transgender, we are saying, the challenge is to figure out how to strengthen marriage and our families for the broader benefit to society.”
So What is Marriage then and how do we define it or make laws about it, specifically regarding procreation/responsiblity and presumption of paternity/maternity?
I simply do not understand how the man/woman element can be removed or substituted with a gender neutral version. It simply does not make sense.
Does that mean the IAV will also be promoting all the legal changes Marilynn Huff has been advocating re: procreation/responsibility? Big brother watching, DNA tests for everyone, birth certificates that name both the legal and genetic/gestational parents. Industry regulation (reducing numbers, only open/identity disclosure), removing all profit motivations, “donations” handled the same way as adoption (with all the back ground, home, psychological, financial and marriage qualifiers) etc. etc. etc. ? Even then, I wouldn’t be on board because I know that none of those things have any real chance of happening. And even if they did (which is an impossibility, but just pretending that they did) , ethically, I still would support any of this.
type-o: Should read “I still would NOT support any of this”
Karen says, “I simply do not understand how the man/woman element can be removed or substituted with a gender neutral version. It simply does not make sense.”
If someone willfully refuses to understand something, they cannot blame David Blankenhorn and Judge Sears for their inability to grasp the reality of marriage as it has existed for more than a decade in many jurisdictions and will soon exist in many more.
Karen,
Would you like to come have dinner at my house one night? I’m not being snarky. It might help.
“I simply do not understand how the man/woman element can be removed or substituted with a gender neutral version. It simply does not make sense.”
and,
“In the article, we argue that as a moral reality, marriage is the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other of the type that is naturally fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together, and renewed by acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction.”
Karen, did you read the article that you linked to? I posted both your comment and the first sentence from the article you linked to.
Do you agree with this first sentence? Does it accurately reflect the real world?
1. If marriage is a permanent and exclusive commitment, how is it possible to get a divorce? How is it possible to remain married after adultery?
2. How can a couple who can’t have children get married?
3. Who calls “having sex,” “acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction,” for God’s sake?! It sure sounds like they’re separating sex from reproduction, to me; I thinks that’s a no-no in marriage discrimination land!
The article may make some great points, but they lose me in the first sentence. I suspect what follows is a bunch of pap that will make my skin crawl.
Karen what I would advocate for is much simpler than all that.
The basis of all law is that citizens must be held accountable for their own actions, and in return all citizens will have the right to rely upon others to act in compliance with those laws. Chiefly that they will not be held accountable for the actions of others nor will others be accountable for their actions.
Are we as a society ready to make all people equally accountable to and for their own offspring as parents responsible for the physical and financial support of their minor offspring or not?
If its a good idea for donors not to be held accountable to and for their offspring, why not everyone? Why the imbalance? Why don’t they have to take any responsibility for their reproductive actions when the rest of us do have to? Why are we looking to corporations as being responsible for a donor’s reproductive actions when they have 150 – 200 offspring? Are sperm banks buying people’s reproductive rights from them? It’s pretty clear that it is impossible to effectively hold a corporation accountable for the actions of a single individual because it is impossible to hold one individual fully accountable for another individual’s actions.
Karen we should just start by saying that I’m sorry America but every person with offspring is accountable to and for their own offspring and accountable to the government for being identified in association with their offspring as their parent, the origin of another individual whether they ultimately fulfill that obligation is another thing entirely but everyone should be equally obligated in that regard and there should be no exemptions. When you exempt some people from being accountable for their offspring then you have some offspring that don’t have a right to rely upon their bio parents for financial and physical support. Then the question is why not? Why do some minors not have the right to rely upon their bio parents while others do?
Forget for a moment how we will police the effort of holding people equally accountable and embrace the idea that it makes sense to obligate people equally to their offspring in order that their offspring will all be equally protected. In principal it is absolutely fair and not at all unreasonable. Such a law is not unfair to anyone. Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Nobody is responsible for the actions of people other than themselves and Society at large in turn has a right to rely upon those individuals to care for their own offspring.
If that was the law Doctors and sperm banks would not be entitled to keep private the records of people whose gametes were sold for reproduction because if they ultimately wind up with offspring they would be responsible as parents and to conceal their identities would be an obstruction of justice. It would be preventing minors from receiving what they are due from their parents. Gamete donor agreements would no longer be allowed to contain statements that the gamete donor does not wish to raise their offspring or will not be responsible for their offspring. Give up the gamete, fine, but not the child nor the legal parenthood of the child. Take away marital presumption entirely and simply replace it with sworn statements that to the best of their knowledge the child born is their genetic offspring and that they understand if the child is ever established not to be their offspring that they would cease to be a legally recognized parent of that child. We have provisions for granting parental authority to people over children that are not their own offspring and those laws should have to be followed by anyone wishing to be the legal parent of another person’s offspring.
I’m not crazy to think it is possible for this country to have laws that treat people fairly. That protect all minors equally. I believe that if you don’t ask for more than you deserve and don’t take more than you deserve ultimately people in this country that make the laws will have to listen to you. They will ultimately have to treat you fairly. They will ultimately have to give you the same rights to be legally recognized as kin to your own genetic family. They cannot keep withholding benefits of kinship to people who are related just because their birth records were falsified for the benefits of adults in power at the time of their birth. You will win equal rights Karen. You must believe that. This is a good country and we lead the world on issues of civil rights. It takes a while sometimes for a group to get equal rights I know but look back and you’ll see. Equal pay for equal work, the right to vote, an education for every child, freedom of the press, the end of segregation. There is no reason to have different laws for people whose parents did not raise them. It’s not their fault. I’m not nuts to think that ultimately if you ask for what you deserve you will get it.
Marriage does not make children. Marriage is what obligates step parents to care for their children because the obligation to support stems from the obligation to the spouse not the child. If the origin of the parenthood is marriage then parental obligation should not outlast the marriage. If the origin of the parental relationship is that one person is the reason the other person exists to require care in the first place then that parental relationship cannot be terminated ever by anyone. The obligation should be permanent and should be recorded so the entire family knows who not to date for pete sake.
We have to stop teaching children that they are only important to their bio parents when their bio parents are married to one another.
Cause shoot, if their bio parents are not married then their bio parents just give them up for adoption or simply make 200 offspring for other people to raise as gifts or for sale or they make a handful of offspring to give away for charitable purposes. People keep and raise the offspring of their spouses because those are THEIR CHILDREN the offspring they create with people they don’t love are garbage – they can be given to strangers without looking back sometimes without any background checks they can have their identities altered they can have falsified medical records who cares about them because their parents were not married to eachother.
Oh but wait you might be important to your unmarried bio parent if you pretend not to have another bio parent and forsake the other bio parent’s family. Or better pretend that one bio parents spouse is your other parent. They will keep you if they can pretend you are someone else, the child of their spouse. You’d be keepable if you were the child of a married couple so let’s just pretend you are someone you are not. Who you really are is worthless so lets pretend that you are the child of your step parent.
Your step parent won’t raise you unless they can pretend that your their child from their spouse.
How is this line of thinking that marriage is so very tied to procreation, how is this working out for people? It sends the message that some people are legitimate humans worthy of human rights while others are not legitimate humans and are unworthy of the same rights granted to persons whose parents are married to eachother. The UPA was suppose to equalize rights of children whose parents are unmarried but then they put that glaring contradiction in there where donors are not parents! Whose parents are more unmarried than donor offspring? You cannot get more unmarried than never having met the person you made a baby with. And what about adopted people and people whose mothers commit paternity fraud? Are they not also the children of unmarried parents deserving of the protections offered by the UPA?
We have to stop acting like marriage is what makes children worthy of equal rights. We must stop acting like people should have no obligation to their children born of non marital relationships. It must stop it must end or the baby factories will get bigger and bigger and children will just be bought and sold out in the open. There is no need for any child to be legally adopted if we continue on this path of recognizing contracts where custody and parental control is the topic and the object of the contract is a human being.
You have value to the world and your family even if your parents were not married to one another. You are legitimately the sister of your siblings regardless of your parents marital status that is who you are and it is a travesty of justice that you ever lived a day with that aspect of your identity concealed. It must stop.
Who is this judge who writes here? Can you do something? Can you change the law? I want to help someone change the law and I have not found anyone trying to do that yet.
Karen small correction I don’t want parents and gestational parents named on birth records – if I ever did I don’t anymore. Just the parents just the genetic parents. Anyone else would be to treat private contracts for human life as legitimate. No more. No more contracts to be parents.
Let’s talk about why we are not worried about telling people to wait until they are married to have children. We are not crying a river for every child those people never had. If we told donors they should wait until they get married to procreate and they did would we cry a river for all the children they never created to give away? Why would it be a bad thing to say that donors should also wait until they are married to procreate? And if they don’t wait, why would it be a bad idea to hold them accountable for the offspring they create? What is the big deal? So they would not be making a bunch of babies to be raised by strangers, so what?
The real problem here is that donorship exists to provide a steady supply of abandoned children to people who want them. Objects for sale.
OK one more after having read the article. I have some questions.
The term inequality conjurs up the idea that people are being treated unfairly, being denied rights because they are not married or because their parents are not married. If everyone were allowed to marry the partner of their choice there would still be those who never find a willing partner. Is that unfair to them and who owes them a spouse? Is that unfair to their children and do their parents owe it to them to get married? If you have children with someone should the law be that you are automatically considered married for life? If you have children with more than one person should it divorce you from spouse one and remarry you to spouse number 2? Cause we could say that. We could have a law that you are the legal spouse of whomever you have offspring with and that offspring born to others just divorces you from the first and remarries you to the second. People could still get married without any desire to have children or prior to having children if they wanted. People could still marry the gender of their choice, but they’d simply be automatically divorced if they had children with someone other than their spouses. Essentially you’d have a situation where thousands of married lesbians would be divorced when either one of them gives birth – because then, they’d be married to the father of their children. I suppose they could then file for divorce from him and remarry their original spouse and she’d be the child’s step parent. Which would be fine with me.
Let’s flip it. The presumption should be binding upon the adults and not their offspring so….the presumption is that you are the spouse of your offspring’s other parent, not that you are the parent of your spouse’s offspring. That way its the adults that get forced to live life as the spouse of the other person they made the child with rather than the offspring being forced to live life as the child of one parent’s spouse. That keeps marriage and procreation inexorably tied together for Karen and it keeps adults responsible for their own actions for my sake and the sake of millions of minors whose bio parents are unmarried. They just got married.
Just think 0 out of wedlock births. At worst you’d have married women abandoned by their husbands giving birth to legitimate children with estranged fathers. You could not get a divorce until you identified the father. You could not remarry until you got a divorce. Oh I’m having fun with this now. But you could not under any circumstances be the legal parent of a child that was not your own offspring. You’d have to be the adoptive or step parent. No pretending the genetic connection.
Modest proposal just for kicks. Now I shut up promise.
Marilynn writes:
“Who is this judge who writes here? Can you do something? Can you change the law? I want to help someone change the law and I have not found anyone trying to do that yet.”
Which is exactly the reason why I commented on this thread. What is going to be done about this if marriage is redefined. Specifically, presumption of paternity (and now thanks to the wonders of IVF and the new social climate, presumption of maternity).
This just cannot be swept under the rug anymore.
Justice Sears, this is Karen Clark. I had the honor of meeting you several years ago in NYC, can you help?
“Let’s flip it. The presumption should be binding upon the adults and not their offspring so….the presumption is that you are the spouse of your offspring’s other parent, not that you are the parent of your spouse’s offspring. That way its the adults that get forced to live life as the spouse of the other person they made the child with rather than the offspring being forced to live life as the child of one parent’s spouse.”
That’s essentially how we deal with unmarried procreation today, in the age of paternity tests and child support orders. We simply treat it as if the couple had been married and then divorced, so the child is considered legitimate and the father has support obligations equal to what he’d have in a divorce (except less because he doesn’t owe any alimony or give up half his property). So we haven’t really allowed unwed procreation so much as made all procreation wed procreation.
Rob, please do not insult Marilynn, there are MANY many gems in what she has to add.
Ralph writes:
“Would you like to come have dinner at my house one night? I’m not being snarky. It might help.”
I am already a part of an extended family that involves the identical arrangement as yours Ralph. A beautiful family. Absolutely lovely and amazing…
Inviting me to your house for dinner in the comments section on a public site involving political issues though, well…I have to say, thank you but I think it’s probably best that I decline.
But thank you for the offer and God bless
Karen,
You’re welcome. The invitation is genuine, though, as you say, making it in a public forum is….unorthodox.
You say that your extended family “involves the identical arrangement as yours.” Do you have a same-sex couple with kids in your extended family? Or were you just talking about the fact that you and my kids have a somewhat-related origin story? I couldn’t tell.
Ralph asks:
“Do you have a same-sex couple with kids in your extended family? ”
Yes, they conceived children via egg donor and surrogate. But that’s all I can share on this public forum.
Marilyn- an adoptive parent IS a legal parent.
Here’s some news that might be welcome, or not:
“Teen pregnancies are plummeting in New York City. The city’s health commissioner told the New York Daily News, that over the last decade, teen pregnancy rates have dropped by 27%. This drop likely has something to do with New York being one of only 21 states that allows minors to have access to contraceptive services. Also, the public school system started a program two years ago, to provide students in districts with high pregnancy rates with access to Plan B. And, the majority of parents in the New York City public school system approve of this expanded access to emergency contraceptives. In other words, rather than relying on abstinence education, which results in high teen pregnancy rates in Republican southern states, New York is confronting real world problems, with real world solutions.”
Family Scholars, what do you think about this? If true, is this good news for marriage and society? Is this a mixing of correlation with causation?
And, for the Catholics among us, or other faith beliefs that think the us of artificial contraception is wrong … what say you?
Manny:
This is some extremely tortured logic. The law does not treat children born out of wedlock as if their parents had been married. Rather, the law rightly recognizes that each child is worthy of the same rights (“legitimate”) regardless of how they were conceived. Every child is a legitimate child. The parents are not treated as having been married if they haven’t been.
You realize that this makes your own terms completely meaningless, right?
Yes, unmarried parents are treated as if they had been married and divorced, as far as their children are concerned. We got rid of the distinction and now treat children of unmarried parents equal to children of married parents who have divorced, with courts designating visitation and custody and inheritance exactly the same, with no more illegitimate/legitimate distinction. All children are considered legitimate now, which is the same thing as saying that their parents were married.
More to the point, every time a man has unmarried sex, he is held to the exact same obligations that he would be if he was married if a child is born. So it’s as if the state just says “you married her when you had sex with her” even if he didn’t. Of course that’s only if a child is born, if not he has no obligations.
If I remember correctly, Judge Sears was widely rumored to be on the short list for a Supreme Court appointment during President Obama’s first term. Because of her support for same-sex marriage, I hope that she is still on the list.
@Teresa,
I went to a NYC public high school in the late 90′s. Reality is that NYC high schools not only provide contraception (if the parent signs a waiver ahead of time), but also mandates a course in Human Sexuality.
There we learned about the changes in our bodies, how to find self-worth, how to withstand peer pressure (or pressure from “the one and only”), about the various forms of contraception, what – here’s a shocker for some – are alternatives to full intercourse, etc. The discussions were frank, but not gross or pornographic. There’s also a bio part of the course – secondary reproductive characteristics and ovulation – but I hadn’t learned there anything that I haven’t had heard in the Bio class. There was no mention of any deity.
(Once again I’m talking about my personal experience in a NYC high school in the late 90′s. I’m not claiming this is the situation now.)
No. It is the same thing as saying that it doesn’t matter whether their parents were married.
This is just silly, and I’m not going to respond to any more of these derails.
@Manny,
Your view relies on some very tortured logic. If we follow up on your suggestion, pretending that a couple had been married and has gotten divorced, then – surely – we’ll have to pretend that Arnold Schwarzenegger committed a crime of bigamy. I wonder how he got out of the pretend criminal prosecution
Legal reasoning does not like pitfalls of faulty logic. Hence the law simply removed this issue from factors for consideration. Nobody’s doing any pretending. The society has simply stopped asking that question and moved on.
@Manny,
“More to the point, every time a man has unmarried sex, he is held to the exact same obligations that he would be if he was married if a child is born.”
If that’s the case, the potential lady’s in luck, maybe the court will buy her argument that she has gotten used to a certain lifestyle (a dinner at a restaurant with wine and roses) and now the father should not only pay child support but spousal support as well.
@Victor and Chris – Manny actually acknowledged earlier on that you won’t have to pay alimony if you have a child outside of marriage. Just child support.
I think we’re getting bogged down in the details. The bottom line is that in the past, you didn’t have to support children born outside your marriage. Now you do.
This has a good side and a bad side. The good side – the children get the support they need.
The bad side – from a wife’s point of view, you might not want to share your money with some kid who is not related to you. (and in marriage, it’s not my money, your money.)
The reality is, I think children born outside of marriage don’t get as much support as children born in it. The law requires fathers to pay, but they’re not going to take everything. A man who is living with his wife is going to have more money for his kids and is likely to be more willing to spend it on them. And if the man already has kids either inside or outside of marriage, there’s a limit to how much more will be taken from him.
To get back to this blog, I think it’s great that this judge is calling people to look at the real problems marriage faces in our society. We can’t have two classes of people become ever less equal.
From her piece:
“In an op-ed published in The New York Times last summer, David Blankenhorn wrote: “Once we accept gay marriage, might we also agree that marrying before having children is a vital cultural value that all of us should do more to embrace? … Can we agree that, for all lovers who want their love to last, marriage is preferable to cohabitation?”
So can we agree that marrying before having children is a vital cultural value?
And that if you want your love to last, marriage is preferable to cohabitation?
Manny, the law does not treat unmarried parents the same as formerly married parents. Unmarried parents are recognized by the law to only have obligations to their child (or children), not to their partner (or former partner, as the case may be). Married people who get a divorce are recognized as having obligations to one another, separate and apart from any children they may have had. So, formerly married persons are recognized as having joint property and/or property claims on one another. Unmarried persons are not—they only have obligations to their children.
“No. It is the same thing as saying that it doesn’t matter whether their parents were married.”
There used to be two different standards, one for legitimate and one for illegitimate births. They didn’t average the two standards into a middle ground, legitimate children didn’t give up any benefits of legitimacy. They just eliminated illegitimacy and now treat every birth as if it was legitimate, meaning they now treat every birth as if the couple had been married and is now divorced.
I think we could say Arnold also committed a crime of bigamy in addition to adultery, because now, unlike 35 years ago, before the Supreme Court got rid of the legitimate/illegitimate distinction for inheritance on equal protection grounds, he now has an additional heir by the other woman, which used to require bigamous marriage to achieve (the second marriage would have been annulled but the child would still have been considered legitimate and an heir I think.) In the old days, the issue of his adultery would have been illegitimate and not cost his first family anything.
So, your beef is that men should still be able to father as many children as they want to outside of marriage, with no responsibility? You are upset that man are now held responsible to all the children they have fathered?
@Diane,
I was trying to make a point to Manny that if we start pretending, there could be legal consequences. And if we pretend that a non-married couple was married and then divorced (as a consequence of having that child), we’ll have to keep pretending very far. That’s why the law did not go that way.
I don’t consider the issue of (il)legitimacy really worth discussing and arguing about. However, I know that Manny keeps a number of notions that are quite erroneous from the legal perspective. I simply was trying to dispel one of them.
@Manny,
Adultery is not a crime. (You can believe it’s a sin, and it could be used as a reason for divorce, but it is simply not a crime.)
So, why is Arnold free? Shouldn’t he (and every other man or woman who has a child not from their spouse) be in prison?
I can’t agree to that. I think “shotgun marriages” are generally inadvisable. It has been my observation and experience that most of the people who have had children and not gotten married have good reasons for not doing so.
Right now, we don’t consider it a “vital cultural value” to pay people a living wage; to have pensions; to have plentiful affordable housing; to have a mix of daycare, preschool, flextime, and paid parental leave so families can find their own best mix for balancing childcare and occupation; have functional schools with hours that are a closer match to the typical workday; to have unpolluted air, land and water (seriously, fracking is scary!); to have safe neighborhoods; to have healthy food available in every neighborhood (instead of just fast food and package liquor stores); to have economically thriving communities instead of the economically devastated ones more common to the rust belt…..seeing a pattern here?
Because all of those things require investments of money, time and effort. It’s easier to destroy a community that it is to rebuild one. Communities are primarily composed of people, not buildings and roads—it will take generational efforts to rebuild abandoned communities. But heaping scorn on single parents (let’s be honest here—most of that scorn is going towards single mothers….a few threads ago when I was out doing my usual Sunday stuff: church, having lunch with friends, running errands, seeing a movie, I guess I ended up busier than I thought I was ‘cuz somehow I ended up an “enemy of the state” as well. Although I prefer the old-school term “Public Enemy Number One”) is really easy….no money, time, or real effort is involved. Just the usual amount of sneering and condescension. That’s pretty appealing to those who like most of the status quo, just not the fact that patriarchy and authoritarianism have a lot less mass appeal.
(on that last note: I saw a letter to the editor today from a woman who mentioned how alienating it was for her to continue to be a Catholic, since she is used to voting and having leadership and a voice elsewhere; how she can’t reconcile having to take a backseat in spirituality—unlike men. Just….I’m not the only person saying this.)
No La Luba, I think it’s better to hold men responsible for all their children and use paternity tests and child support, it’s better now that unmarried people are considered married and divorced and all children legitimate.
And remember that in the old days, it was a crime to create illegitimate children and commit adultery (it is still a crime in most places, Victor, and should be). It was a crime to have sex before marriage (and fornication is still a crime in Massachusetts and should be) because It is still not a right to have sex before marriage and people should not do it, and it is not a right to procreate without being married to the other parent. The current solution of paternity tests and child support does not make it acceptable, that is intended to help victims of fornication and adultery, not deny that there are victims or deny marriage’s right to reproduce.
I think the idea is to not get pregnant until you are married. So no shotgun marriages, because there’d be no child. People should not have children where there is no right to have children, and there is only a right to have children in marriage.
I do not know why you persist in saying this, when it is simply untrue. Unmarried people do not have property claims on one another. Married people do. It’s the whole point of marriage—they have legal and financial responsibilities and obligations that the unmarried do not.
Adultery was very socially acceptable and very popular “in the old days”. It was expected that married men would cheat, either by visiting prostitutes or having mistresses. It was also considered the morally upstanding thing to do to deny parentage and abandon any children fathered outside of marriage.
Actually, it is. If you want to advocate for it being a crime, be my guest. Just remember that to have meaningful enforcement of that “crime”, around 95% of the population would have to be prosecuted. There would quite literally be too few non-”criminals” left to do the work of prosecution. The reality is that there is more popular consensus that sex prior to marriage is not a crime than there is on most other social questions. Deal with it.
As it relates to their children, we now hold parents to the same obligations as if they had married and divorced. There is no such thing as unwed childbearing now because we retroactively enforce the obligations to the child that marriage would have created. And child support is almost the same as alimony, since it is paid to the parent based on maintaining the standard of living in the household, and divorces these days often don’t result in alimony or property division. How about that, we treat them as if they had an egalitarian marriage and divorced with no obligations to each other, which I assume is how egalitarian marriages divorce, right?
It was expected that married men would cheat, either by visiting prostitutes or having mistresses.
It was a crime and a major sin and was never expected or accepted. I’ll grant that it happened and men were able to get away with it almost openly, lots of women were exploited and illegitimate children suffered, but men could also probably murder people back then and get away with it, so I’m not sure what point you are trying to make. It was wrong and illegal and most people did not do it, most people were more afraid of sinning and going to hell.
Actually, it is.
No it isn’t. Not even Eisenstadt declared a right to have sex before marriage. Look at the coverage at the time, no one reported that the decision invalidated fornication laws, because it didn’t. Even Lawrence affirmed that marriage is about the right to have sex.
I’m not saying we need to arrest people for it, but we should keep it illegal so that people don’t think it is OK. People need to be reminded that there is no right to have sex with someone you are not married to, and only married couples have a right to have sex. That respects marriage and married couples, it is super disrespectful to say that I have as much right to have sex with my neighbor’s wife as my neighbor does.
And again, Manny, I note that you seem to be upset that men no longer receive the type of social support for child abandonment that they once did—only being responsible for children fathered within a marriage, while free to father as many children outside of marriage as they liked. Unmarried couples with children only have responsibilities to their children; not to each other. Married couples have responsibilities to each other as well as their children.
You also appear to be upset that the law does not enforce religious edicts. All your talk about sin and hell? That’s not a public-sphere issue; that’s a private-sphere issue, for churches to handle—-their realm is the private sphere.
The fact remains that two consenting adults do have the right to have sex with one another if they so choose—the same way they have a right to associate with one another in any other way. More to the point, most people are unwilling to marry someone with whom they have not previously had sex. People are not willing to see sex between two consenting adults as a crime because there is no harm—crimes require harm. Also, that harm has to be of a level or type that is likely to affect the public at large. So…if you and your neighbor’s wife have consensual sex, your neighbor will not be pleased with either of you, but neither of you are a threat to the public at large. Meanwhile, your neighbor has a ready remedy in the form of divorce.
It’s amazing that you think I have a right to have sex with another man’s wife. No, the only person she has a right to have sex with is her husband, and he’s the only person who has a right to have sex with her. You don’t appreciate the positive affirmation of a right, the value of having a right. You think I’m talking about crime and punishing people for having sex, when I am talking about preserving and respecting the positive right, the approval and affirmation that marriage has always bestowed and should always bestow. That is meaningful and important, it should not be denied that all marriages have a right to have sex. Diane M. did the same thing, saying that she doesn’t think marriage and the right to procreate are the same thing. You disrespect married couples by saying anyone has an equal right to have sex with a man’s wife, and that married couples had the same right to have sex before they got married. Marriages deserve that respect. Just because people usually have sex before marriage and we don’t arrest them doesn’t mean it is a right, it is not! We are still expected to be discreet and careful and furtive and respectful of marriage, and even abstain from intercourse and from getting pregnant.
Sorry, John Howard, but that’s exactly what a right means in this country. If the law cannot punish someone for taking an action, then they have a right to that action. It is meaningless to say that people don’t have the right to do something, but if they do we won’t punish them for it anyway.
Seriously many on this blog want to reduce the number of out of wedlock births, well then why not simply state that every child is born to married parents by default? If the state is wrong about the presumption of paternity it creates falsified medical records and a person’s identity is falsified and looses half their family in law at least forever. If the state is wrong about a presumption of marriage at least the couple who was forced to divorce their spouse and marry the other parent of their child can get a divorce and remarry their former spouse if they want.
once again i can’t believe you and i all come from the same world. it was never considerwd remotely acceptable in my fathers and grandfathers society to visit prostitutes .
chris there are legal rights that are still wrong on an ethical level