Same-sex marriage in Iowa

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Premonitions

oh well in that case, then we need to just allow gay folks to get the liscense, my bad I thought there was something special about the religious ceremony and the government validated it not the other way around, as from a governmental standpoint I did'nt understand the POINT of marriage at all "You two REALLY dig each other, he're's some special legal privileges" this actually brings to mind the question of the necessity for any sort of marriage procedure at all as far as government is concerned, anything I can do in regards to marriage from a legal standpoint I could just as easily do with a series of contracts, or just one big one, with another individual. Marriage just seems like a combo pack of financial and legal benifits..... hmmm....

There's stuff that marriage covers that civil unions and other alternatives don't, if I recall correctly. You could probably eventually get the full effect by alternative means, but those means are often ignored. Take, for example, living wills/advance health care directives and such, which often are outright lost or blatantly ignored. If you're married, your spouse is pretty much the go-to person for whether they should pull the plug on you. Unless you establish your life partner specifically as your Power of Attorney, there's jack squat they can do to influence your condition. And even then, there's a chance of legal battles if your parents want to mix it up out of spite. Or if your parents get there first and decide to pull the plug before your life partner can say otherwise, they can sue all they want, but it won't bring you back.

Hell, looking at the Terry Schaivo case, even marriage isn't enough sometimes.

In short, marriage as an institution covers a lot of financial, medical, and other legal areas in one fell swoop, where building a semblance of it from scratch is probably more difficult and expensive than is fair.

[Marelo]

What blues said reflects a little bit what I was trying to say. You can call something separate but equal all you want, that doesn't make it true or right in practice.

[Premmy]

Okay I was obviously misunderstood, or misworded whayt I was trying to say there was I don't see why the government CREATED the statute of marriage in the first place, outside of religious tradition. I wasnt saying civil unions, which I disagree with for the same reasons as previously stated, are an alternative or anything else of that nature, just some minor pondering.

[Archbio]

Okay I was obviously misunderstood, or misworded whayt I was trying to say there was I don't see why the government CREATED the statute of marriage in the first place, outside of religious tradition.

The idea that marriage would be the exclusive domain of religion if not for modern state institutions isn't quite that justified.

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Archbio

The idea that marriage would be the exclusive domain of religion if not for modern state institutions isn't quite that justified.

Well, you have to remember that Europe, and by extension North America, has strong roots in religious rule via the Divine Right of the royalty to rule. The founders of America were all from a society that expected Christianity to be the norm and was more than willing to change it if it wasn't and enforce it once it had a handhold, so a lot of Christian ideas got into the government. The same can largely be said for Mexico and Canada. Marriage has been around since forever as a religious institution worldwide, and in most cases is/was a tool to promote and/or direct result of the domination of the world by men. The main point was essentially to assign a man a mate who was to cater to his every whim. Naturally, somewhere in the development of government worldwide, it was decided that the law should protect what in most cases amounted to property rights, thereby cementing marriage as a social and governmental institution as well.

In short, while marriage now seems to be relatively equal in what we consider the civilized world, we need only take a look at places like Africa and the Middle East to realize that it has roots that could be considered crude and barbaric in the promotion of male dominance. Government only serves to preserve it as the status quo, and we Westerners weren't quite so different only a hundred years or so ago, when the only way a woman could own basically anything was if she was a widow and didn't re-marry.

[Archbio]

Marriage has been around since forever as a religious institution worldwide[...]

That's the part that doesn't quit gel. You're mixing 'marriage as it exists now hasn't existed long', which can't be denied, with 'marriage as an insitution that isn't fundamentally religious is a brand new thing', which is rather false, if useful for a certain political agenda. Unless 'forever' represents a short view of history.

That was my only point. Western countries are currently moving away from marriage as an insitution that was coopted for a long time by religion, but secular marriage isn't new.

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Archbio

That's the part that doesn't quit gel. You're mixing 'marriage as it exists now hasn't existed long', which can't be denied, with 'marriage as an insitution that isn't fundamentally religious is a brand new thing', which is rather false, if useful for a certain political agenda. Unless 'forever' represents a short view of history.

That was my only point. Western countries are currently moving away from marriage as an insitution that was coopted for a long time by religion, but secular marriage isn't new.

Maybe I didn't express it well enough, but my point is that since time immemorial, men have been claiming women, in some way, as "theirs." Usually, this happened through religious rites, since government evolved as our populations grew and condensed and people no longer lived in fragmented family groups. When government DID evolve, chances were that religion was already there and it just reinforced the rites that were in place. In most cases, especially earlier ones, rule was based on the idea that a higher power granted someone the right to it, so in terms of laws, it's nice to keep up that pretense by incorporating the religious rules set forth by the higher power you're claiming is behind you. Looking back into where we were not all too long ago, monarchy was the preferred form of government in the world. In fact, we still have them in some places. Democracy, while it took hold in Athens centuries ago, has not seen success until the last few hundred years, starting with America (and to a rockier extent, France). Secular rule on a grand scale IS a relatively new development, and it's safe to disregard small scales like tribal examples because the peoples involved generally have compatible beliefs and therefore very little religious conflict that would force secular recognition of a bond between a man and his wife.

The truth is that secular recognition of marriage is a hazard of maintaining the rites of religion and that secular marriage has only really developed in the last hundred years or so, as a progression of increasing secularism in government as more systems of belief are added to the mix and it becomes harder to favor one or a few without drawing ire from those excluded. Atheists are now allowed all the rights of marriage that people of religion are because of the legal ramifications of a formerly religious institution which were granted during times when only one or a few religious beliefs were the norm and were granted the favor of the ruling government to keep things friendly.

My use of the term "forever" was hyperbole, but deliberate, in that religious rites predate most recognizable government, be it monarchical, democratic, or theocratic, by safely thousands of years, because religions were around long before complex societies and in many cases probably helped create them in a progression from family groups to tribal groups and larger until such time someone has amassed enough power to unify it all into a semblance of regional government.

If you can provide examples predating the late 1700s (when the French and American Revolutions took place) of secular marriage, by all means, do so. I might well be wrong, as my knowledge of Asian history is nowhere near as good as Western history and China might well have developed it before Europe in its extra 5000 years or so of history at the time.

[Archbio]

If you can provide examples predating the late 1700s (when the French and American Revolutions took place) of secular marriage, by all means, do so

Marriage in Ancient Rome. Well, that was hard. The same seems to be more or less true for almost anything with Ancient in front of it. You're confusing things. An ancient civilization with a government indistinguishable from religion may have viewed marriage as less of a religious affair than the European civilization at the dawn of the modern age.

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Archbio

Marriage in Ancient Rome. Well, that was hard. The same seems to be more or less true for almost anything with Ancient in front of it. You're confusing things. An ancient civilization with a government indistinguishable from religion may have viewed marriage as less of a religious affair than the European civilization at the dawn of the modern age.

Actually, I was going to post an edit addressing that, but I decided that excluding it because of its minimal influence on modern times due to its utter collapse and society needing to start from the bottom again would just sound dickish. Really, though, they're a very good example of exactly my point, so let's break that down, instead.

You have:
- A massive, sprawling empire.
- Many different peoples absorbed.
- A multitude of different religions that are impossible to consolidate.
- Enhanced travel due to the Roman road system.

With travel introducing many systems of belief together, you have conditions very similar to those produced by America's melting pot (on a scale that's scarily comparable). In terms of the Roman take on things, their conquests were all about amassing more money, so as long as people sat quiet and paid their taxes, everything was fine. In terms of the religious ceremonies of marriage, very few were not left intact, minus the Celts. In terms of Roman record-keeping, having some way of keeping track of these unions was necessary for the books back home, so a secular form of recognition was in order. Whether that translated into purely secular marriages, I honestly don't know, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me, since it wouldn't interfere with taxes, and if I recall correctly, there was a marriage tax on top of it.


In short, while Rome had very little influence on the modern world due to the loss of pretty much all their progress for thousands of years, it does provide a good parallel to modern views on secular marriage.

[Archbio]

Ancient Egypt didn't have:

- A massive, sprawling empire.
- Many different peoples absorbed.
- A multitude of different religions that are impossible to consolidate.

Yet,

"Marriage in ancient Egypt was a totally private affair in which the state took no interest and of which the state kept no record. There is no evidence for any legal or religious ceremony establishing the marriage, although there was probably a party."

So, I'll take your explanation with a grain of salt.

Note that it's probable that other such examples can be dug up with minimal effort, but my original (modest) point is already well backed up: it's not new. You seem to insist that it was always deviation in some way but I don't think that's been shown, not with the Romans or in general, to be true.