Friday, September 19, 2014
Marriage defined in the real world
"Defenders" of "traditional marriage values" like to cite religious scripture to say that marriage is a "union of one man, and one woman."
Funny thing is, in the real world, marriage is just contract law. No, really, end of discussion.
How do I know?
Well, in the real world one man and one woman can form a union, and raise children, and do everything together without ever filing legal contract law paperwork.
In the real world, one man - or one woman -can sign marriage contracts with multiple partners, as long as they only do it sequentially and not concurrently, since the contracts are exclusionary.
In the real world, said contract law provides binding legal rights and privileges to the partners, which are independent of any union the two might have. The contracted couple could even live wholly separate lives and never contact each other, and still have binding legal privilege over each other.
in the real world, people look at said same holy scripture and ask "How many wives did that Solomon guy have, exactly?"
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Just to emphasize my own point that marriage is contract law, and not about God, here is a nice story about a lovely group of people - with a reality television show, no less - busted for engaging in binding contracts with multiple people, and the lawsuit involved.
ReplyDeletehttp://news.msn.com/us/utah-to-appeal-ruling-in-sister-wives-case
Here's the key phrase - "Waddoups' ruling decriminalized polygamy, but bigamy — holding marriage licenses with multiple partners — is still illegal."
Now, why being "spiritually married" to multiple partners is illegal, I'm not sure. That just sounds like people trying to legislate morality. You know, like trying to legislate that marriage is "one man, one woman, because anything else is immoral."