Not quite. You generally can’t disinherit a spouse and it’s difficult to disinherit children.

Our very reproductive strategy is partnership

The many polygamous societies throughout history and cultures, as well as other higher primates, would be surprised to hear they don’t exist and never did.

As to your estate… Yes, but it is still open to being challenged by actual legally recognized kin.

As to durable power of attorney… In theory, yes. In pratice, it ain’t that easy. It’s much easier if the person making medical decisions is your wife/husband/son/daughter/mother/father. Especially if your wife/husband/son/daughter/mother/father is around to contest against the person that you’ve designated.

Besides which, those were merely two examples of the legal rights that next of kin possess with regards to you. There are lots of others.

You can designate anyone to make your legal and medical decisions by virtue of a durable power of attorney (If I’m not mistaken), and you can choose to leave your estate in its entirety to anyone you wish through a will.

Really? I can just name my bestest buddy in the whole world my next of kin & that will be legally recognized if we are not already recognized as next of kin due to familial relationship and if we are not married? Last I checked, there is no way for me to name, say, Magis as my next of kin & have it be legally recognized in matters of inheritance or medical decision making/visitation.

And besides that, what Omar said.

And here I am once again. Sucked into the immense vacuum created by appalling ignorance. Bleh.

Nothing. Did you mean to ask some other question? One that makes sense?

Let me ask then, what is endemic within the institution of marriage that may not exist without it? Love? Certainly not. One does not have be married to have or designate a next of kin or a beneficiary. I’m not married and yet I have a “pair bond” that has endured 20+ years. Marriage is indeed about breeding.

Perhaps would would care to enlighten me about evolution. Perhaps you’d assist me to enlightenment. Perhaps would would compare the breeding strategy of other high primates to humans.

Wow. What a myopic view of marriage. Marriage serves purposes other than breeding - designating next of kin for one example. What an ignorant view of how taxes work wrt marriage. What a lack of knowledge of anthropology & history - without even going into the huge missing understanding of evolution, etc. Why am I even reading people like this any more?

Having said all of that though, we have to view our evolutionary progress against the structures we have created. The human animal’s glory is its ability to adapt. We have created societal structures where it is possible for a female to survive and raise offspring without the male being closely attached. This was impossible at one time because who would hunt for them?

Society, in order to nuture and protect it’s “breeding pairs” has given marriage all sorts of protections, tax incentives, etc.

So what is marriage now? In the traditional sense gay marriage seems pointless. But, in the traditional sense, heterosexual marriage without an intent to procreate seems equally pointless. Gays, not without reason, point to hetero couples of advanced age getting married and getting all of the goodies they are denied.

Society is not ready to equate gay unions with traditional marriage. Score last election cycle 0-11. But I think the main objection is giving tax breaks, etc. to people just because they decide to live together. I have an objection to supporting a union, gay or straight, with tax dollars unless there are children (who all society has an interest in). I don’t think society objects to other rights like successorship, medical decisions, inheritance, etc.

I think it is wise to have something other than marriage open to straights and gays to signal a stable relationship but without the intent to procreate. Civil Unions provide that. Traditiona Marriage should be reserved for “breeding pairs” but the only societal benefits should attach are to the children not the couple per se. Gay couples raising children should receive those same benefits.

The Right wishes gays would just go back in the closet but it ain’t gonna happen so we have to deal with reality sooner or later.

The well-being of children really is what is important, men really are different than women, and the ideal family situation is where a father models manhood and the mother womanhood, parents love each other, and share work as best they can. You can find many examples of happy men and women that follow these roles, and their lives are a witness to what I say.

i’m the first to admit that i may lack understanding of many words in common use. could you explain exactly what “manhood” and “womanhood” actually are?

according to dictionary.com:

manӢhood
1. The state or time of being an adult male human.
2. The composite of qualities, such as courage, determination, and vigor, often thought to be appropriate to a man.
3. Adult males considered as a group; men.
4. The state of being human.

does this mean that women cannot model “courage, determination, and vigor” to their children? and is it only a parent that can model what an adult male is, or “the state of being human” for children?

interestingly enough, dictionary.com defines “womanhood” as:

1. The state or time of being a woman.
2. The composite of qualities thought to be appropriate to or representative of women.
3. Women considered as a group: “The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womanhood” (Mary McLeod Bethune).

apparently, women do *not* model “the state of being human” according to dictionary.com. i know a fair number of women who would take issue with that, myself included.

i wonder what the ” composite of qualities thought to be appropriate to or representative of women” actually are - or at least those “qualities thought to be appropriate to or representative of women” that men cannot also model.

perhaps you could provide some insight into that.

i’d also venture to say that i could find many examples of families that consist of men and women who do *not* follow the roles of which you speak, and offer direct contradiction to the well-being of their children.

and other than their reproductive function, i wonder how “men really are different than women”. what, exactly, are those differences and how do those differences contribute to the “well-being of children”?

See, you can assert this, and you can assert this some more, and you can restate it in a variety of different ways, but I’ve never seen any coherent reason why I should believe this rather than thinking that two people who both care about the child’s welfare make the best parenting combo whatever plumbing they may have.

Oh, and speaking of plumbing, who should I (pre-everything FtM, birth mother of a baby girl) partner with to give my daughter the “ideal family situation”?

I suppose that after dropping the foundations which established our society, we will only be able to sort this out by ‘trial and error’ but I have this feeling that the social mores which have been established for longer than anyone really knows were really close to what is ideal, although sometimes women have been mistreated or undervalued, children have been neglected, families have failed.

The well-being of children really is what is important, men really are different than women, and the ideal family situation is where a father models manhood and the mother womanhood, parents love each other, and share work as best they can. You can find many examples of happy men and women that follow these roles, and their lives are a witness to what I say. I wonder if we will live to see the day when ninety-something year old gay couples will be on the news because they have just enjoyed a 60th anniversary. There might be an occasional oddity, but I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime.

For this statement to be true, divorce would have to be harder to obtain, or more obsticals placed before re-marriage when children are involved. Otherwise, what incentive is placed on heterosexual couples to stay together with those children? Also, why the focus on reproduction when you don’t have bloodties as a requirement for hetorsexual couples? Does it really matter that two men or two women can’t reproduce children naturaly when they have children now? Preventing SSM does nothing for these children.

—JRC

Even in the 2000 document, you might have noticed that the last item on the list deals with children:

Marriage is a family-making bond. Marriage takes two biological strangers and turns them into each other’s next-of-kin. As a procreative bond, marriage also includes a commitment to care for any children produced by the married couple. It reinforces fathers’ (and fathers’ kin’s) obligations to acknowledge children as part of the family system.

This factor is NOT true of gay relationships. There are NO “children produced by” gay relationships. Two men, or two women, simply cannot reproduce together. No child has “two mothers” or “two fathers” — it’s a biological impossibility. The only way they can produce children is by engaging in heterosexual activity, or by using expensive technology that takes the place of heterosexual activity. And even then, they have not reproduced as a couple. One of them has reproduced heterosexually with someone else, and the other person is a mere bystander.

Not all heterosexual couples reproduce. True. But that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that ONLY heterosexual couples have even the possibility of producing children as a couple. That is the main reason why the rest of society has an interest in making sure that parents (fathers in particular) are incentivized and pressured to be responsible for the children that they might produce. I don’t see how society has any interest, however, in promoting gay pairing.

People (gay or straight) who want children will get them one way or another, whether it’s the old-fashioned way, adoption, IVF, or whatever. It’s in society’s interest to promote the best environment for raising those children. I see no reason why biological parents and children should get special consideration.

. . .except of course, that gay and lesbian couples can and do have children, either through artificial insemination, surrogacy, or adoption, and society has a vested interest in promoting both healthy, loving, financially secure homes and legal, recognized, non-stigmatized families for those children.

Other than that, yeah.

Perhaps you would care to explain (using actual evidence, please) why you believe society has any interest in discouraging financial and legal stability for two parent families.

—JRC

I don’t see why society has any particular business “promoting” any sort of marriage myself.

As I see it, marriage is indeed about families. It’s about people making a formal commitment to stay together and support each other, bond their destinies together.

And yes, I agree with the people who say marriage probably wouldn’t have been invented if not for children. Children need a stable place to grow up, a family, and marriage is how families are made. And marriages are best built on love.

But I don’t think children are an inherent part of families; I’m perfectly fine with people getting married without having children. (I do think people who have children really ought to get married.)

Where we part ways is at your emphasis on the married couple needing to be the child’s biological parents. Sure, maybe that’s usually the best route, but it’s not the only route, and I’m not one to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I see no reason why a couple shouldn’t be allowed to marry and raise adopted children, or children of one partner’s earlier marriage, or children born out of one partner having been raped, or whatever. And I therefore see no reason that those two partners need to be the same sex.

And, of course, no reason why same-sex couple should need children (or the biological potential to have children) to get married, any more than opposite-sex couples do.