Comments on: Why isn’t infertility grounds for fault-based divorce?

By: Jake Squid

Jake Squid — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 04:54:55 +0000

How does a marriage, which is a legal bond, procreate?

It buds. Just like yeast does.

By: mythago

mythago — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:19:09 +0000

How does a marriage, which is a legal bond, procreate? I thought men and women did that.

By: Amanda

Amanda — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:14:17 +0000

Lemme try: Men and women should only copulate with an audience in a field of poppies with fairies sitting on their toes and elves holding their clothes?

By: Johnny Moral

Johnny Moral — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 22:15:27 +0000

no, antigone, you don’t have it right, you’ve made a lot of majorly offensive mischaracterizations. Plus, you totally didn’t address the point in this thread, and Ampersand doesn’t like that. Try again.

By: Antigone

Antigone — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 21:58:08 +0000

Let’s see if I have this right, Johnny:

Marriages are not created for procreation, but one can (or should) only procreate within a marriage. Only a two-parent heterosexual relationship can raise proper children.

Homosexuals should not, or can not procreate, and therefore would undermine the spirtual nature of marriage, and should not get married.

Fertiltiy treatments lead to eugenics.

Totally ignoring dictionary.com, and Webster’s, a human is only completely human in a heterosexual state-sponsored relationship.

Is that about the gist of your beliefs?

By: Johnny Moral

Johnny Moral — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:55:54 +0000

So, as soon as I show the correct way to interpret the fact that infertility is not a traditional grounds for divorce, the whole subject is not relevent anymore? I didn’t see you making this point earlier in the thread. Yes, there is now no-fault divorce, but it is NOT because now there is an individual “right to procreate”.

Zablocki was decided in 1978 (Eisenstadt was 1972), and made it very explicit: “if appellee’s right to procreate means anything at all, it must imply some right to enter the only relationship in which the State of Wisconsin allows sexual relations legally to take place.”

And note that Wisconsin was a pioneer of no-fault divorce going back to the 1860’s, with their modern law going into effect in 1977, a year before Zablocki was decided. So, mythago, no-fault divorce didn’t change anything about marriages being the only thing that has a right to procreate, anyway.

By: mythago

mythago — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 02:43:40 +0000

Except that what is “traditional” in divorce is no longer the case.

By: Johnny Moral

Johnny Moral — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:02:13 +0000

i mean “same-sex couples, who don’t have a possibility of reproducing, don’t deserve benefits and protections of marriage…”

(I’d rather not have to post this correction, because it ought to have been clear what i meant, but someone would probably find that error to be the thing to comment on.)

By: Johnny Moral

Johnny Moral — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 19:44:31 +0000

and jake - i look at your first post on this thread and am mystified. That IS what the anti-SSM side says. Society doesn’t care if infertile people get married simply because that isn’t a problem, and there are all sorts of reasons they should marry anyway. But the SSM side seems to think it’s a big problem, and some sort of inconsistency.
As for a reason to stop people from marrying someone of their own sex, the anti-SSM side generally says that same-sex couples, who don’t have a possiblility of reproducing, deserve benefits and proections of marriage, and that their being allowed to marry would mess up the meaning of marriage. Plus, there’s now a need to prohibit same-sex couples from attempting to procreate, due to the high risk of birth defects, and to do that is to also prohibit SSM.

By: Johnny Moral

Johnny Moral — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 22:26:28 +0000

Yes, I did, though I might have missed some comments. But no one showed that Amp was wrong, as far as I saw, though people cited some exceptions. The basic point is true - infertility is not traditional grounds for divorce. You are stuck with an infertile person, and denied a “right” to procreate, if your spouse doesn’t do anything else that is grounds for divorce.

By: Jake Squid

Jake Squid — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 22:03:34 +0000

All right, I’ll bite. Did you bother to read any of this thread? Your second sentence is absolutely false. Go back and read through the comments and then feel free to try again.

By: Johnny Moral

Johnny Moral — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 21:14:37 +0000

any comments on this?

By: Johnny Moral

Johnny Moral — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 20:44:30 +0000

What this shows is not that that procreation has nothing to do with marriage, but rather that there is no individual right to procreate. A person who marries an infertile person is stuck with that person. And adultery laws were still in effect, they aren’t exempted for infertility. So the conclusion of this thread should be that there is no right to procreate, no right to use D.C.. All there is is a right to marry and attempt to procreate with your spouse and only your spouse, for life, unless the spouse provides cause for divorce, such as drunkenness or abuse or something.

By: Jake Squid

Jake Squid — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Why? Because the anti-SSM bigot faction (which, I believe, are the ones that put forth this argument) have the facts backwards. At least the possible facts as they relate to the marriage/procreation ruse.

Let me try to make this coherent so early in morning—

If I were in their shoes I would be arguing that the primary purpose of marriage is to insure that people who procreate remain together as parents. At least as far as our society goes (can’t speak for the whole world you know). Think about it. We’ve never cared if married folks didn’t have kids. We’ve accepted that throughout our history. What we, as a society, have a problem with are unmarried folks having kids. Think of that favorite derogatory term “Bastard”. Just part of society’s way of saying you better be married if you’re having kids. Because society knows that children are far better served by having 2 parents care for children.

But, hey! That doesn’t do anything to keep homos from gettin’ married. Maybe that’s why they ignore the true case in which they can argue the marriage/procreation tie.

(Was that comprehensible? If not, I’ll try to make it more clear when my brain is warmed up)

By: Joe M.

Joe M. — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

How do you know that sterility/infertility was not grounds for divorce? And how do you know what were the grounds for divorce in 50 states?

I ask because the simplest Google search reveals articles stating that sterility/infertility ARE or were grounds for divorce in at least some states. See this article about Tennessee or this article about Pennsylvania, for example.

Not that it makes any ultimate difference to the gay marriage issue, but I prefer honesty over making stuff up.

By: Elayne Riggs

Elayne Riggs — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

One reason is that “but think of the children!” has become a tried-and-true staple in the cynical political manipulation of the electorate.

By: Hestia

Hestia — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Well, according to state divorce laws, infertility is not grounds for divorce in Tennessee. Ditto with Pennsylvania.

If it is true that PA used to allow divorce based on fertility, then that fact only strengthens Ampersand’s point. The state must have removed that requirement from fault-based divorce proceedings for a reason, and I’m guessing it wasn’t for the benefit of SSM proponents.

Besides, as long as infertility isn’t grounds for divorce in even one state, it’s true that marriage has nothing to do with an ability to have children.

By: Joe M.

Joe M. — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Well, see, most states adopted no-fault divorce in the 1960s or 1970s, which made it irrelevant to allow fault-based divorce except for the most awful situations. If Amp is going to talk about what was a “traditional” reason for fault-based divorce, then he should actually look at whether those “traditional” reasons did include infertility.

By: Stentor

Stentor — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

If changing the law to allow no-fault divorce doesn’t invalidate the status of with-fault-divorce-only as the traditional correct form of marriage, then I don’t think that removing infertility as a grounds for with-fault divorce doesn’t necessarily change the status of infertility as a traditional correct grounds for divorce. SSM opponents may just want to reconsider their time period of reference, reaching back past Nock’s ideas to the days when infertility counted. It seems pretty clear that for centuries infertility (on the part of the wife) was grounds for divorce, even if the law has changed since then. Heck, failure to give birth to a son used to be an acceptable grounds.

By: Ampersand

Ampersand — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Not that it makes any ultimate difference to the gay marriage issue, but I prefer honesty over making stuff up.

Joe, I’m getting sick of your “I’m going to go to Amp’s site and insult Amp personally” attitude. I dobn’t treat you like that; is it really so hard for you to treat me with basic civility?

Even if you do catch me in a mistake, that doesn’t show that I’m being dishonest. It’s not as if you’ve never made a mistake in your life. But it’s as if you beleive that by virtue of disagreeing with you, I’ve given up any claim to being treated with human decency.

I did not “make it up.” I quoted an expert from a law journal - an expert whom your side of the debate has often relied on, and so who can’t be accused of having a pro-SSM bias. I had no reason to think he’s unreliable.

Nonetheless, his comment clearly didn’t apply to Tennessee and Pennsylvania historically. I don’t know (and you don’t know, either, I suspect) if he was really mistaken regarding the USA in general.

Finally, as Hestia’s links show, both Tennesee and Pennsylvania maintain both fault and no-fault divorce laws. It’s absolutely correct that infertility is not legal grounds for fault-based divorce in either of those states today, which suggests that they didn’t think maintaining the infertility grounds was as important as maintaining the other grounds. And you’re making the pro-SSM case for me when you argue that infertility is apparently not “the most awful situation” for a marriage.