Mindel wrote:
The point is that we have a Right (with a fancy big "R") to equal treatment under the law. That is the underpinning of the equal application application of the law, be it a penalty, a requirement, or a grant of benefits.
Irrelevant to this discussion. Unless you are arguing that the state cannot discriminate in any way when determining the qualifications for state funded or mandated benefits.
And I think that's a super hard argument to make given how often it's done.
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And yet the government provides all kinds of benefits to people who have kids regardless of marital status. Are you arguing they're both incentivizing marriage-for-reproduction and reproduction outside of marriage? And that actually makes sense to you?
Ah. And the slippery slope rears it's ugly head!
Many conservatives opposed those child benefits outside of marriage for exactly the reason that they could be construed as an incentive (or lack of disincentive) for single mothers to raise children on their own. And the statistics for children born to single mothers would appear to show that concern to have been correct.
Arguing that we should accept that marriage isn't relevant or necessary in this regard because we lost that earlier argument over benefits to single parents is pretty insulting really.
You're correct. It doesn't make sense. In an ideal world, we'd simply provide massive tax breaks and other benefits for heterosexual couples who were married and allow that to help out with child raising. It would certainly get a whole lot of people to get married, and would likely improve things for a whole lot of children, wouldn't it?
But the women's rights folks insisted that it was somehow unfair that they be saddled with relationships with men, so this is what we got. We can debate it another day if you want, but don't use that as an argument for taking the next step in said slippery slope.
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This is the purpose of the FMLA:
Title 29, Volume 3, U.S. Code wrote:
FMLA is intended to allow employees to balance their work and family life by taking reasonable unpaid leave for medical reasons, for the birth or adoption of a child, and for the care of a child, spouse, or parent who has a serious health condition.
I see it doesn't mention anything about encouraging people to get hitched and make more babies.
Yet it mentions "child" twice. Didn't you start by asking what this had to do with children?
The issue is confused because over the last 50 years or so the liberals in this country have slowly changed the laws so that child rearing is no longer associated with marriage the way it used to be. But some of us believe that's the wrong direction to go and that we're hurting ourselves doing this.
In any case, you're again arguing a slippery slope. That since we've already detached aspects of child care from concepts of marriage and men and women as parents, that there's no reason not to put that final nail in the coffin and just re-define marriage entirely. Afterall, it no longer really has to do with two people getting together and starting a family, right?...
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So perhaps that's the intent behind marriage benefits, yet strangely no one's thought to include that intent in the descriptions and statements of purpose of the underpinning laws.
No one? It may not appear because it's so obvious that it need not be written. It's like needing to write down why murder should be illegal.
Marriage throughout history commonly required consummation before it was "official" and could be annulled if not. In some cases, it could be annulled if no children were produced, or even children of the wrong sex. The underlying assumption of marriage has pretty much always been procreation. Arranged marriages certainly make no sense if there's no assumption of children being involved, and were incredibly common for most of history across most of the globe.
You'd have a hard time finding much evidence that marriage customs throughout history didn't rely almost entirely on the assumption of having children. Heck. The Bible is full of stories about women failing to provide children for their husbands and the legality of using a sister or other female relative to do the job.
Let's turn it around. If not for procreation, then why did marriage come to exist? There's pretty much no reason for the custom to exist without procreation being involved. You can argue that modern cultures have changed that, but that's again a slippery slope argument. You're saying that since we've already changed things this much, there's no reason not to change things a bit more...