Re:Bezos pledges $2.6M to support same sex marriage
by true_religion on Friday July 27, 2012 @01:08PM
(#4302402)
There are laws on the books full of references to "men" or occassionally "White men". The Americans, "re-wrote" all that by adding a few lines to the constitution saying that women and other races had equal rights as white men, and could not be discriminated against.
Thus the old laws applied to everyone,without a need for someone to go at them with eraser and ink.
Re:Bezos pledges $2.6M to support same sex marriage
by rayiner on Friday July 27, 2012 @01:26PM
(#4302506)
I'm operating under the assumption that the "civil union" would be a separate legal construct, distinct from marriage, that defined its own rights for managing property, etc. Sure, it would be trivial to just say "gays can go down to the court house and get a civil union, and all civil unions should be treated exactly like marriages for the purpose of the law." But then civil unions are exactly the same thing as marriages.
Re:Bezos pledges $2.6M to support same sex marriage
by true_religion on Friday July 27, 2012 @01:29PM
(#4302519)
> " But then civil unions are exactly the same thing as marriages.
That's right. Proponents of civil union say that everyone (including heterosexuals) should be granted civil union, and somewhere in the anals of law it should say "civil union is legally equivalent to marriage".
Re:Bezos pledges $2.6M to support same sex marriage
by danielweber on Friday July 27, 2012 @01:20PM
(#4302468)
Do you want to go back and rewrite all of that?
You know that's pretty easy to fix, right?
There may be other problems with his proposed solution, but it's trivial for a legislature to say "where we said BAR in the past, we also mean BAZ."
We have such a contract. It's called marriage. If you look at the law of marriage, there is nothing in there that's predicated on there being a woman and a man, and there is nothing in there that is specific to religion. In the United States, which never had ecclesiastic courts, marriage has always been a strictly civil, contractual legal construct.
The problem with a civil union contract is that the law is full of references to marriage. E.g. in the law of evidence there is the principle of marital immunity, which is that spouses can't be forced to testify against each other in criminal trials. Do you want to go back and rewrite all of that?