Gay marriage and the law

It's called contract law. In contract law there is an offer, and an acceptance. It should be clear that an animal or plant has a potentially insurmountable barrier in that it is not able to make an offer, or give indication of its acceptance of the offer.Now, this isn't complete - there are various complications that vary around the world as to when a person can be said to have entered into a contract. For example, the person may not have the capacity to form a contract (too young, drunk, poor, insane) or perhaps they were forced into the contract under duress. Also, certain relationships may be said to result in undue influence which can affect a contract: especially where there is an inbalance of power (adult/child for example). Denying a benefit to the people must be done for some reason, surely? If the state offers protection to some types of families (such as the right to make medical decisions for an incapacitated loved one), but not to others - that seems to be somewhat unequal ot me. From what I can tell there is an obligation for their protection to be equal. Seriously, if you can get an orange to agree to marry you, sign a piece of paper in front of witnesses along with a verbal acceptance of the contract...then I have no problems with you marrying an orange. Hopefully the orange won't clean your bank account out, and you can live happily together for a few weeks until such time as the orange rots away. What the hell is a definitional right? Marriage is what we make it; it is a human invention. The state gets involved because marriage is recognized as a way to conjoin families and families have certain rights recognized by the state (and there is a certain priority of rights for varying members of a familial hierarchy). And gay marriage will never be straight marriage for the sole fact that gay is not straight. Like women's and men's tennis are both still tennis... Nobody is asking anybody to change definitions to suit an agenda. You can call whatever you like whatever you like. You can steadfastly refuse to acknowledge a gay union as a marriage and nobody will stop you. The most important thing is getting the same protections and benefits. Since the contracts are the same, they should have the same name - the government shouldn't go around having one word for a contract made by black parties and one for white parties. There are religious ceremonies and rites that are associated with marriage, but there are also political and social ties to the event as well as legal ones. Marriage is more than just a religious ceremony, to deny that would be to undermine your argument against redefining words to suit an agenda. You are perfectly entitled to choose not to recognize any marriage by anyone to anyone else. Your church likewise. God is likewise entitled to honour whatever he chooses, be it a secular marriage, a pagan marriage, an arranged marriage, a politial marriage, a christian marriage or a gay marriage.I have no reliable information on what God will decide (or has decided) to honour, but I think it is important that we get our own affairs in order and decide what we will honour and what we will not and why.So far, I can see no reason to deny protections to families of a structure that a religious group finds distasteful or harmful.

This makes no sense. Torturing an animal is nothing to do with contract law. If we required a contract exist between parties to opt out of implied permission to torture, you'd have a point. But we don't, so that goes nowhere. If she is your wife then she has made a contract to you, and that contract prevents her from marrying someone else. If the marital contract allows for multiple marriages, then you would have entered into it knowing this to be the case and would have no recourse to complain. However, if your wife met another man - and wanted to marry him it would be terrible of you to prevent her doing that out of a sense of ownership to her. She is free to marry who she wishes, the only avenue of complaint is if her actions have significant financial impacts on you. Hopefully there would be a amicable splitting of assets and the parting of ways. No - it is not the sole qualifier, but that is not relevant to the issue at hand; it is a factor in contract law (more specifically the capacity to accept a contractual offer which is what I actually said) which is germane to the topic at hand. That there be both an offer and an acceptance where both parties are legally able. A civil union where the parties legally conjoin two families is going to be called a marriage, you can choose not to call it that if you want. What it ends up being called will be a function of general usage, not by some conscious effort. Civil Union is just too much of a mouthful and everybody will know that civil union means marriage, so they'll just end up using the latter. Maybe they won't, I might be wrong. What does it matter what we call such unions? It is just a word, the only issue is when people describe one group's union in a different manner as another's (a wetback legal union versus a proper marriage). That can be a discriminatory act, and it doesn't generally lead to good things.Claiming a word is all well and good, but it is not going to be easy. They have a habit of slipping away from you and evolving every which way Sure, if you want to redefine a word so that it has no correlation to usage you're free to do so. However, I wasn't talking about redefining a word. I was talking about entering into a legal contract with a citrus fruit. If you can pull it off, I have no objection.You ask who cares? I care. And if you want to give a fruit the power to make medical decisions on your behalf, I'm happy for you to do so (insert joke referencing the topic title here). If there is no good reason to prevent a proposed marriage, then we shouldn't prevent it. It seems like a perfectly reasonable start to me. You can't define rights via the meanings of words as understood by person or group or persons X. Rights are rights. All that matters is if someone has the right or not. You think that the right is (basically) 'to marry someone of the opposite gender who love', whereas I think the right is actually (basically) 'to marry the person you love,' with the intention of the right differing. You think that at least an element of a marriage is a holy matrimony of some kind. I think that it doesn't need to include the holy part, but importantly it should be there to help families function with maximum happiness and security. More accurately, words change through time as people come to use them differently. See: factoid for example.Either way, this isn't about the meanings of words but of rights, and more in line with the topic - what the law actually says about them. Being a human invention then it is for human purposes. The origins are irrelevant to how we want to deal with it now, their current intent and purpose is the relevant issue.If it is a God invented idea then we have no way of divining the purpose. It could be anything and any idea can be nothing more than imaginative guesswork. That being the case, the wise course would be to treat it as if it were a human invention, designed for what purposes we judge to be best. I consider it best to provide security for families, rather than to guess at what God might have in mind. The same difference there is between Hitball Over-Net Within Area and Tennis. None, and they can be used interchangeably. However, it would be silly if we said that if women play we'll call it Hitball Over-Net Within Area and when men play it's called Tennis. There is an implied discrimination, with a further insinuation that men play Real Tennis and women play but a facsimile. That's no "fair compromise.", but absurdity. It is, if that's how we use the words. It isn't if we don't. Period. You don't get veto powers on word usage. The ritual of men and women conjoining in the eyes of God will remain if a ritual of men and men conjoining in the eyes of the law (or some other God) exists. No eradication and no infringement into that ritual will take place. Actually now we have a much more complex society due to size and technology. This has brought us to a place where people can have sizeable inheritances which will be taxed by the state. Married couples need protection under law to ensure they will receive their rightful inheritance. Also, over time, complex law has evolved in dealing with the more common medical decisions (since more people live after bad accidents or severe illness), and who gets what rights needs to be explicitly set out. It is nothing to do with honour it is to do with experience. Certain injustices are brought to light and the law is changed or created to try and right that injustice (it doesn't always work, or work like this of course). Women don't have the vote? Is this because men have honour and will represent the interests of their women or is it because historically women haven't been given the vote because of an assumed inferiority?A terrible way to think is 'but democracy was founded on the idea that the governed male citizens would be allowed to have a voice and to vote on law, let's not eradicate these time-honoured traditions!' Yes, the world was much better when women were underprivileged, homosexuals were persecuted, slaves were traded in vast numbers, and massive international religious tension and the desire for more freedom was still gnawing at the heels of European monarchy.But yes, it was a golden age of honour, so we can be sure that if a man said he was married to a dead woman with a large inheritance we could trust him, nobody would dream of abusing that honour and no injustices would result. There would certainly never be marriages under duress, 'shotgun weddings' since men always did the honourable thing Paedophilia has been addressed. Children are not able to enter into a contract, so the line is obviously drawn somewhere before we get there. We must also consider another element of marriage, which is that of sex. Clearly it would be a mistake to legally sanction a sexual relationship which is illegal. Which then draws the line before incest which is also illegal. Repetition wouldn't be necessary if you addressed the actual points raised. I appreciate that you may find that some responses you get don't really address your point, but this is not always the case - and when they do address your points you reply with a tangential issue rather than discussing them. I consider that the points I raised about contract law are vital to advancing the debate, you essentially ignored them when you talked about torturing dogs with the strange idea that I was talking about consent being the only issue to consider in morality and justice.