As these provisions make clear, redefining marriage redefines other core values our legal tradition has traditionally inscribed in marriage law:
Under a long-awaited bill allowing same-sex couples to marry, only infidelity between people of opposite genders would count as adultery in divorce cases.
It means that people in a same-sex marriages who discover that their spouse is unfaithful to them would not be able to divorce for adultery – unless it was with someone of the opposite sex.
Equally, it makes clear that straight people cannot accuse their partner of adultery if they discover they had a secret lover of the same sex.
It comes after Government legal experts failed to agree what constitutes “sex” between same-sex couples.
The bill also makes clear that gay couples would not be able to have their marriage annulled on grounds of non-consummation for the same reason.
Lawyers and MPs said the distinction over adultery created inequality between heterosexual and homosexual couples in the divorce courts and would lead to confusion.
They said it made it likely that adultery would simply be abolished as a grounds for divorce – either through Parliament or the courts. (UK Telegraph)
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The sexual basis for marriage is extrinsic to the SSM idea.
That sexual basis is for the marital presumption of paternity, consummation, annulment, adultery/divorse/injury, and so on.
Whatever SSM advocates think is the possible sexual basis for their gay emphasis, it turns out that it is not the sexual basis for SSM law. Kinda pulls the rug out from under the SSM campaign's big complaint about marriage law.
The SSMer is perched on the outer fringes of a limb on a big tree He is using saw, axe, and much rhetorical double-dealing as he cuts, hacks, and disparages the big old tree. Ut he is chopping at the limb he sits on. And the big old tree's deep roots and canopy of foilage stand resilient even as the SSMer fells himself and lands on his head upside down and muttering about how unfair it all is.
So much fir the freedomof conscience and liberty NOM is always touting. God forbid a party official should flout the party doctrine.
SSMers are trying to convince us that same-sex and opposite-sex couples are identical and that nothing has to be changed or reconsidered in order to admit same-sex couples into marriage law; that to preserve marriage for opposite sex couples is totally irrational. But as the people of the UK are debating the issue, it's now becoming clear that same-sex couples are incompatible with marriage, and that to include them in the institution is wholly irrational. They could never be married in any sense, unless marriage is reduced for all to a domestic partnership.
Some commenters on the various news articles discussing this topic favor abolishing the concepts of adultery and consummation. They realize that by keeping those concepts, different laws would have to apply to same-sex and opposite sex couples, even if all three relationship types are titled as “marriage” in the law; thus society will persist in viewing such relationships differently. There will be marriage and “marriage,” or marriage and gay marriage.
These commenters also want to abolish those concepts because they claim that the sexual aspect of marriage is not the public's business any way. But these pro-ssm commenters run the risk of giving fodder to the claim that ssm redefines marriage for everyone. And like Chairm said, they cut off the branch that they, themselves, are perched on. For if marriage isn't sexual, what claim of injustice do gay people have to demand this change? Why would the government arbitrarily recognize certain types of friendships and exclude others? Why does the government have an interest in the permanence and exclusivity of friendships?
Some SSMers in the UK are misled into believing that abolishing the concept of consummation and adultery would settle the issue. But such a move would not eliminate the problems of applying the presumption of paternity to same-sex couples.
Sally Goldfarb discussed this in a 2007 issue of the journal Rutgers Law Review. In her article "Granting Same-Sex Couples the ‘Full Rights and Benefits of Marriage’: Easier Said Than Done", she notes: “In New Jersey, as in most other states, the law has not merely required that the two people entering into marriage be of different sexes; it has also expected them to have sex, and the kind of sex expected of them is, very clearly, heterosexual intercourse… regardless of how we think this dilemma should be resolved, the fact remains that it will not be resolved simply by saying that same-sex couples should be treated the same as different-sex couples.” She continues: “Similar problems arise with New Jersey's laws on parentage…[which] are explicitly not gender-neutral. They reflect biological differences between men and women as well as longstanding attitudes that treat maternity as fixed and paternity as contingent... For couples consisting of two women, it is possible to treat the partner of the woman who becomes pregnant the same way that the existing rules treat a husband…The difficulty of applying parentage rules to same-sex couples becomes much more pronounced when one considers the situation of a couple consisting of two men.”
Funny that none of these issues come up when discussing interracial marriage. I guess the ssm and interracial marriage are not the same after all.
It is curious that SSM advocates often criticize divorce and adultery and deadbeat dads as "failures" of heterosexual marriage and parenting, as if that is a rationale for samesex marriages. There is an amazing blindness to the sexual realities of male-female relationships in the SSM movement and in its proponents vision of a sex-neutral society.
Ash I think the following from your comment is well worth highlighting:
"For if marriage isn't sexual, what claim of injustice do gay people have to demand this change? Why would the government arbitrarily recognize certain types of friendships and exclude others? Why does the government have an interest in the permanence and exclusivity of friendships?"
This query is more than rhetorical. It is a query that takes the SSM idea, on its own terms and on terms that the SSM advocates have insisted upon, and forthrightly expects a fulsome answer.
Yet the silence is, as they say, deafening.