Felix and Oscar quarrel all the time, but they cannot imagine life without one another. Each has the other’s power of attorney. There is as much chance of their moving to separate apartments, now, after all these years, as there is that the Empire State Building will spontaneously collapse into dust. They wouldn’t know how to get through a single day. So they wish to celebrate this lifelong friendship. They wish to throw a party, and to gain the Social Security benefits that accrue to the survivor in a marriage.
So Felix and Oscar are going to tie the knot.
In a saner day than ours, someone would object, “There’s no knot to tie! They can’t marry! You’re confusing friendship with marriage.” That would be quite right. Nothing prevents Felix or Oscar from naming the other as sole legatee in his will. But nothing that Felix and Oscar do with one another is specifically marital. The thing that a married man and woman do, that no one else can do, is to consummate the marriage, bringing it to its fullest realization. The marital act unites across the chasm of the sexes and across the generations, from the past into the future. In it alone do human beings bring together precious strands of human history, from the beginning of our race. In it alone dwells the possibility of new life. The act is biologically, essentially, summative of the past and oriented toward the future.
And there you have it! The end result (at least in part) of government subsidization, even of such subsidization of something that is an unquestioned (and, IMHO, unquestionable) human and social good—heterosexual marriage. And it can all be traced back to the failure of our educational system to distinguish, and teach students to distinguish:, between law and legislation, between natural rights and man-made rights.
The (purported) “noble experiment” that is Western civilization, exemplified by the United States and by much of Europe, will all end (in a human sense, not in an eternal one). And it will do so not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer
In these days when the federal debt is a monster which makes the 500lb gorilla an understated metaphor, it would be fiscally wrong to offer a couple other than a married man and woman a tax break, but isn’t that the essence of the elderly female petitioner’s claim before the Supreme Court? Maybe not; maybe our debt is so enormous that giving tax breaks to those of the same sex would make no difference to the economic mess we are in. If we grant such tax relief, however, why discriminate between same sex pairs who engage in homosexual sex and same-sex friends who live together without any thought or desire for sex, but solely to save on their living expenses? And why should the granting of any tax break be justification for calling the relationship “marriage”? IMHO, such would be a first amendment violation permitting the government to stomp all over religion’s role in the definition.
sophy0075,
IMO, taxes are fundamentally theft. That having been said, the Rule of Law includes the concept that everyone should be treated equally before the law, which includes not only criminal law, but tax law as well. Informed by an argument made about a decade ago by Catholic attorney, Robert P. George, in First Things, I think that any number of people who form a household for an entire tax year should be entitled to file a joint income tax return. Doing so should not depend upon whether or not all earners in the household occupy the same bedroom, nor upon the conduct in which they do, or do not, engage therein. If there are minor children of one or more of the parties in the household, then each child would contribute a “child deduction” on the joint return.
One big advantage of following this line of thinking is that it removes the “discrimination” argument from the table, as no one is either the victim or the beneficiary of differing treatment by the state (i.e., by the government).
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer
Why shouldn’t a college fraternity (or sorority) get “married” simply for the tax breaks? They can’t keep the number at 2 forever, because there is no principled reason why marriage between people of the same sex should be limited to two. The number 2 is simply a hold over from the now outdated concept of marriage being between a man and a woman which naturally gives the number two, decouple marriage from that and the number is totally arbitrary.
So marriage is simply a delivery device for benefits that singles don’t get.