Post 4584912 - (Should the Federal Gov't Recognize Same-Sex Marriages?)

Post a reply

Username

Subject

Message body

Emoticons





View more Emoticons

[quote="visagrunt"][quote="YippySkippy"]Civil Unions.  Not just for gay people, for everyone.
If some couples also choose to get married, then that will be nobody's business but their own.  No license, no paperwork, no government record-keeping involved.[/quote]

Do you seriously expect government to extend benefits like preferential tax treatment, immunity from subpoena, and authority to grant or withhold consent for medical treatment in the absence of paperwork?  Putting on my doctor hat, I would [i]never[/i] agree to withhold treatment from a terminal patient on the instruction of a person who claims to be a common-law partner of the patient.  At a minimum I would want to see evidence of that partnership.  (Similarly, I would insist on seeing a marriage certificate or other evidence of marriage from a person claiming to be a spouse).

You may have a romantic notion about keeping the government out of your personal life, and that is all well and good.  But when it comes to matters like real property, mortgages, retirement savings, custody and guardianship of children, and the like, government is there, whether you like it or not.

It also bears noting that it is long established in Canada that marriages are not legally equivalent to common-law marriages--this one one of the significant bases on which the courts determined that marriage must be extended to same sex couples.  There is currently ongoing litigation in Québec between two former common-law partners where one is suing the other for the benefits that she would have been entitled to had they been married.

Now that's not to say that an entirely civil law remedy is the appropriate vehicle--but it will involve amendments to hundreds of statutes in 13 jurisdictions in Canada (and even greater legislative change in the United States).  Or we could simply redefine marriage.  Which do you think is more likely?[/quote]

Options
HTML is OFF
BBCode is ON
Smilies are ON

	Disable BBCode in this post
	Disable Smilies in this post