Engineering student Mr McIntosh, 23, and teacher Mr McCormick, 24, will tie the knot to win a The Edge radio station competition and a trip to the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England.
Mr McCormick said from Auckland yesterday opposition to the wedding was understandable but the pair never intended to offend anyone.
“We are not here to insult anyone. We are here to do our own thing and travel our own path.” Mr McIntosh said the wedding was not mocking the institution of marriage.
At my law firm, we have already had discussions of the possibility of having same-sex heterosexual marriages for avoiding taxes on large gift transactions, since transfers between spouses are pretty much always tax-free.
Day 1: Man 1 and Man 2 “marry.”
Day 2: Man 1 transfers assets to Man 2 tax free.
Day 3: Man 1 and Man 2 file for divorce.
To a certain extent, this was tongue in cheek, but I suspect this will happen at some point.
I have two heterosexual women friends who live together in support and friendship. They have independent means, so have no real reason to “marry”. But if you are going to privilege any relationship other than real marriage, why not two rugby buddies?
Tongue-in-cheek event, yes, but the moral and legal questions are serious and interesting.
If marriage not open to procreation, then why should it be defined by sexual relations, either? Isn’t it about “not standing in the way of two people who love each other”–but, we could now add, “just happen to be straight”?
The two heterosexual women no. 2 mentions, together with the legal possibilities no. 1 brings up, really do suggest a possible tipping point. I can see gay activists opposing a joke to win a radio prize (or whatever the article said), but what if two same-sex straight people were serious, age 85, and really thought their bond of love est’d over many years amounted to marriage, as newly constituted? Wouldn’t a hug or a firm handshake at the ceremony do just as well on the physical side? Or is there some normativity attached to physical coupling?
#3–I see your example as quite possibly occurring. Right now much is made of the fact that there are plenty of opposite-sex seniors cohabiting but not marrying because of the so-called “marriage tax” penalty imposed on married couple’s incomes. But I can see many of these couples, as well as same-sex heterosexuals who are good friends, marrying shortly before the death of one to be able to pass their estates on to the other tax-free. Why not do it if you don’t otherwise have beneficiaries, are single and know you have a terminal condition? It would be good tax planning.
I don’t think we have seen much of this yet, but it is coming. And then the IRS will be stuck with having to try to promulgate regulations to try to discern the difference between “real” marriages and “fake” marriages, when all the indicia of what we used to consider marriage have been struck down as irrational.
No. 4: The law would have no way of preventing what you describe. A heterosexual couple could present themselves as homosexual, if they had to–and who would snoop on their bedrooms to check them out? They could have “come out”–first to themselves–only the day or the week before. And if sexual identity comes to be seen as a a shifting spot on a continuum anyway…? It would be easier to check on violators of disability claims out mowing their lawns.
Come to think of it, a detective could catch an adulterous couple enjoying–a kiss, let’s say–but he would not be able to read anything off of a married couple’s separate bedrooms and lack of sex. If a gay man and a gay woman can have a long-term marriage blanc, then what’s to prevent two heterosexuals (same-sex) from enjoying (not enjoying in the same sense as the adulterous couple, I mean) a long and happy marriage?
#3 –
I trust you picked up on the conditional clause in my proposition. 🙂
In fact, I entirely agree that openness to procreation is the defining element of true marriage. Even if actual procreation doesn’t occur, you are still dealing with the biological reality that the reproductive system is divided between the male and the female. The union of those two halves is essential to marriage. After Dad died, Mother remarried in her 70s, and we certainly hoped procreation was not an issue (pun intended). But the biology was there for a marriage. I’m not saying that’s all there is to marriage, but I think it was C.S. Lewis who asked the rhetorical question: can the greater stand without the lessor?
Wikipedia is a little ahead of us (me, anyway) in its article on marriage blanc.
What if, under a Nazi regime, a young Jew and a young Christian married to keep the Jewish partner from harm–and neither male nor female intended coitus (and it didn’t happen)? Would that marriage be morally justifiable?
Sort of ironic that gay groups would condemn heterosexual marriage.
I don’t know what the law says in NZ, but in the UK government lawyers could not find a definition of consummation which would apply to these same-sex ‘marriages’. There is no necessary consummation required to establish the legal validity of the marriage. And don’t forget this is same-sex marriage, not gay marriage, so there is no requirement to be of a particular orientation to enter into it.
I would say the door is wide open for the type of ‘marriage’ entered into by the NZ blokes. The people who wanted it in the first place have only themselves to blame if they don’t like what they have created.