When you refer to intent (“it is only meant as”), are you talking about the intent of people who made changes to legislation, or made court rulings that overturned previous common law and created new precedents? Such changes take time, so we are reaching back into history, and I have to admit complete ignorance of the history of the kind of civil marriage that you are talking about.
Could you please identify some sources of information on that history? I am interested in particular in the history of the social and political movements that influenced legislators, judges, and the general public.
I meant legislatively. I was referring specifically to United States law, where child support, tax benefits, and post-separation visitation of children are all rights/privileges extended to parents
regardless of current or former marital status. In fact, the only distinctions that marriage provides are:
a) financial benefits in the case of a partner who holds down a home while the other has a much larger salary, in order to provide for a family
regardless of children or, if they do have children, regardless of whether they procreate or adopt. This includes inheritance rights, estate tax exclusions, alimony benefits in the case of separation, and tax return benefits, among other things.
b) legal rights so that they may partake in the other’s best interest in cases of emergency, whether financial, medical, or otherwise. This includes hospital visitation rights, power-of-attorney rights, and medical authority rights, among other things.
Notice how none of these benefits benefit
children, only the partners in the marriage. United States marriage law only intends to benefit the spouses, not the children. In fact, most states do not even require consummation of a marriage for it to be valid. Most states in the United States recognize celibate marriages (whether same-sex or heterosexual) to be valid.
A gay man and a lesbian woman can have a partnership. If there is not necessarily any sexual aspect to their commitment to each other, then they can have a different-sex civil marriage.
What most Catholics seem to forget when they go down this path of reason, is that one’s sexual orientation does not define simply the
physical interest but the
emotional aspect as well. Due to our complex “pheromonal” (for they are not truly pheromones) response, our ability to connect on an interpersonal level with someone is also dependent on our sexual orientation. Sure, we can be close friends with anyone, but it is extremely difficult for one to imagine having the ultimate trust and caretaking one can have with a partner they are attracted to. This is primarily the reason most gays and lesbians (but certainly not all; I’ve heard of many gays/lesbians who married the opposite sex even so) scoff at the idea that they can achieve the same closeness in a heterosexual marriage.
Notice that none of this is dependent on sex, and neither is civil marriage (though religious marriage, defined as the original Hebrew word written in the Old Testament to describe the semi-permanent bond between man and woman, certainly is). Hence why the religious are also badly losing the civil debate over the issue.
Similarly, if there is not necessarily any sexual aspect to marriage, then we could imagine a heterosexual Wilbur Wright and a heterosexual Orville Wright having a marriage. They certainly pursued their hobby of trying to achieve heavier-than-air flight together. Both members of the partnership happened to be men. Therefore, if their partnership had been a civil marriage, then it would have been a same-sex civil marriage.
Certainly this could’ve been the case. I mean, if there weren’t such a societal homophobic stigma with regards to men, I’d imagine that it would be more common to see male friends uninterested in religious marriage still getting civilly married in order to take advantage of the ability to protect a close friend of theirs. Although this of course would still involve an emotional connection lesser than they would achieve with a woman (assuming the Wrights were heterosexual), just as a gay man would achieve a stronger one.
If there were a history of same-sex civil marriages between heterosexual partners, then why would there be any connection between same-sex marriage and a movement advertising itself as seeking equality in civil rights, including in particular LGBT civil rights?
Well there’s not really a history of same-sex civil
marriages in the country. America has been well too homophobic throughout her history for anything close to that to exist. However, there is a long history of members of the same sex, particularly in the case of homosexuals, taking care of one another through life and helping manage it easier, especially in the days of massive anti-gay persecution by society and police in the United States. And certainly in the United Kingdom during the Victorian era, married women would be physically intimate with each other while their husbands were at work, in order to maintain an emotional bond, with no sexual tie-in attached whatsoever. Intimacy has always been nurtured between members of the same sex except in heavily homophobic cultures, particularly Puritan cultures. We are merely seeing the results of a Puritan society that says “do not be intimate at all with anyone or be in a straight marriage.” When faced with that [incredibly false] choice, it’s no wonder people are associating “marriage” with “emotional intimacy and trust between partners” and thus making an error [though logically consistent with Puritan culture] in concluding that marriage should be extended to both same-sex and opposite-sex committed partners.
