TLDR Version - The US Supreme Court has struck down a law that bans recognition of gay marriage. They say that the law would violate the state’s rights to define and regulate marriage.
Greenman’s .02 - I wonder–what exactly ARE the state’s rights? John Roberts apparently thinks states don’t have the right to decide how to offer healthcare to their constituents, but they should have the right to decide who can get married. Seems somewhat inconsistent.
In an opinion that might appall my libertarian brethren, I actually believe that the regulation of marriage should be granted to the Federal government. This is a “general welfare” thing that should equally apply to all citizens. A couple should not have to move to another state to get married.
Higgmond’s $0.02 - all governments should get out of the “marriage” industry. For legal purposes, couples should be joined in a civil union, nothing else. If you want to get “married” by a priest/reverend/deacon/whatever your church calls the guy or gal who administers the servce and that person is also licensed by the state, fine, but as far as the state is concerned you have entered into a civil union just the same as the couple who went to the courthouse.
I agree. People should be able to indulge in beastiality without the afterthought of any repercussions at all. Of course, beastiality is a generic term to describe marriage with pigs and fecking horses. Unlike CA, I propose some bareback action, too.
FWIW, I agree with Higgs here. When I meant “marriage”, I wasn’t meaning to refer to the religious sacrament, but rather to the civil rights/responsibilities that are bestowed upon spouses in a legally binding contract. Call it marriage, call it a civil union, I don’t really care. But whatever it is, it should be a federal thing.
This is a sharp contrast to my usual opinion of “it should lie with the lowest feasible level of government”. I don’t think that any lower than the Federal government would give this due course.
EDIT - @Aether - I can’t tell if you’re being serious or sarcastic.
This is the usual argument against gay marriage. Once same sex couples are able to marry, people will marry their potted plants. And since sex with a broccolli is offensive to everyone, clearly it’s dangerous to go in that direction.
What is missed here is that non-human species have no way to consent to contracts, so it’s really a non-starter.
I guess the only question that gets around the consent issue is whether gay marriage is a stepping stone to legalized incest or pedophilia, but if straight marriage hasn’t opened the way in opposite-sex cases, there’s no reason to believe that same-sex marriage is going to do that now.
While I fully support same sex civil unions, I don’t think states should be forced to “offer” them if that’s not what the voters of that state want. States should be required to recognize the status of couples joined in other states though. Although not perfectly comparable, I look to adoption laws as an example. It’s much easier to adopt in Arizona than it is in New Jersey, so a lot of NJ couples arrange for an adoption in AZ and then bring the kid back to NJ with them and NJ recognizes that kid as their child eventhough the adoption would not have been legal if it had been conducted in NJ.
WRT people entering into a civil union with an animal, I have no problem with that as long as both parties have reached the legal age of consent (in people years) and both parties can offer their consent in a recognized human language, including sign language.
This gay marriage stuff is about the economic benefits of survivorship and joint tax rates. All this stuff about “recognition” of gay people is just PR - who cares if you can get married if there are no community benefits? Nothing in the law prohibits gay people from having sex or from having relationships with one another. What the law does define is how assets are shared in a marriage partnership.
Along these lines, if we permit incestual marriage and polygamy, the tax code would have to change to accomodate looser marriage constraints. For instance, when I am on my death bed, I could marry my daughter or non gay son, thereby avoiding estate taxes. Or perhaps I could have several spouses, and they could continually marry younger people to ensure that there is always a surviving spouse in the family. This makes polygamy or incest more complicated than gay marriage.
I’m pretty sure it matters a great deal to the gay community. Generally when you tell somone they don’t have the same rights as another person, they get upset.
Note–my intent on starting this thread wasn’t to debate the merits or demerits of gay marriage. We’ve already beaten that dead horse. Rather, it was to muse on the “State’s Rights” part of it, and whether one state should be forced to follow the other state’s lead on gay marriage.
In other words, if I enter into a gay marriage/civil union in Massachusetts, then move to Utah, my marriage/civil union is not valid there. Should the states be “forced” to recognize marriages from other states? If not, why not? If so, then what’s preventing me and my gay lover from taking a vacation to Massachusetts, getting married, then coming back to Utah?
I agree marriage in the “official” sense is just a contract. legally betting someone half your stuff on a statistically less than 5% chance of you’ll be truly happy for the rest of your life. not including alimony, child support payments, and marked with divorce.
If 1 guy marries N-1 wives, are there only N-1 marriage contracts in this union (between the guy and each wife separately)? The fact that a consenting wife accepts the presence of other wives being married to her husband, but doesn’t have a separate marriage contract with the other wives makes this union weaker than the union between two consenting adults. I’d say a polygamous marriage among N adults is equivalent in “strength” to a monogamous marriage between 2 consenting adults if and only if there are N*(N-1)/2 distinct marriage contracts executed among all group members.