But the research is statistically and methodologically weak and insufficient to meet the ordinary burden of proof for establishing an equal-protection claim. Yes, Jon, the state must regulate marriage; churches or private contracts cannot do it. But the reason the state needs to regulate marriage has nothing to do with same-sex couples. It is all about the natural family. Glen Lavy is senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal alliance of Christian attorneys and like-minded organizations dedicated to protecting religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage and the family.
ADF and Lavy have been involved in same-sex marriage across the country, including the recent decision from the California Supreme Court. More turn to abortion pills by mail, with legality uncertain. Why quitting coal is so hard. Nations strike climate deal with coal compromise. All Sections. About Us.
B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. Davidson Civil marriage and religious marriage serve different purposes in our democratic society. In Scotland state registration of marriage was not introduced till , while civil partnerships were legally established in Britain only in There would be outrage — or perhaps incredulity — if the government put forward a scheme for people to register their sexual partners, so why do most people so willingly go along to register their life partners with the state?
One reason why people do this is because the government discriminates in favour of those in a marriage or civil partnership in the tax system. But it should not be doing this. After all, in the Equality Act the UK government itself forbade its citizens from discriminating against those married or in a civil partnership , and surely this prohibition should go both ways and apply to the state as well as its citizens. Another reason is to do with inheritance. At the moment, a surviving spouse or civil partner stands to inherit automatically if their partner dies without having made a will , but the partner not in a marriage or civil partnership could be left with nothing.
Again, this seems to be unjust discrimination. In other areas of law the state treats surviving partners that were not married or in a civil partnership equally with those that were, so why can they not be treated equally when it comes to inheritance? I propose that the government stop registering and regulating marriages and civil partnerships and instead let its citizens decide how they want to organise their private lives in the way they think best.
At issue is whether policy will coerce and compel others to recognize and affirm same-sex relationships as marriages. All Americans have the freedom to live as they choose, but they do not have the right to redefine marriage for everyone else. Every law makes distinctions. Equality before the law protects citizens from arbitrary distinctions, from laws that treat them differently for no good reason.
To know whether a law makes the right distinctions—whether the lines it draws are justified—one has to know the public purpose of the law and the nature of the good being advanced or protected. If the law recognized same-sex couples as spouses, would some argue that it fails to respect the equality of citizens in multiple-partner relationships?
This is not hypothetical. In , Newsweek reported that there were over , polyamorous households in America. If sexual complementarity is eliminated as an essential characteristic of marriage, then no principle limits civil marriage to monogamous couples. Supporters of redefinition use the following analogy: Laws defining marriage as a union of a man and a woman are unjust—fail to treat people equally—exactly like laws that prevented interracial marriage.
Yet such appeals beg the question of what is essential to marriage. They assume exactly what is in dispute: that gender is as irrelevant as race in state recognition of marriage. However, race has nothing to with marriage, and racist laws kept the races apart.
Marriage has everything to do with men and women, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers and children, and that is why principle-based policy has defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Marriage must be color-blind, but it cannot be gender-blind. However, the sexual difference between a man and a woman is central to what marriage is. Men and women regardless of their race can unite in marriage, and children regardless of their race need moms and dads.
To acknowledge such facts requires an understanding of what, at an essential level, makes a marriage. The state has an interest in marriage and marital norms because they serve the public good by protecting child well-being, civil society, and limited government.
Marriage laws work by embodying and promoting a true vision of marriage, which makes sense of those norms as a coherent whole. What does the work are the social reality of marriage and the intelligibility of its norms. These help to channel behavior. Law affects culture. Culture affects beliefs.
0コメント