JCC Thoughts on cousin marriages?

Yes, both claims are true -- people have sex regardless of marriage and married people don't necessarily have sex. However, I think that it's difficult to say that they don't yet have anything to do either each other or that marriage is purely a legal construct these days.

The fact that it can be true doesn't make it true in all circumstances or even the majority of circumstances.


Misa ab iPhono meo est.

 

All of the laws you mentioned above are safety issues.

So what exactly is the "reasoning behind" the so-called "marriage law", if not to provide ease of access to inheritance and power of attorney?

The idea that people should be forbidden from having sex outside marriage is a ****ing joke (pun intended), and the idea that unmarried people can't be good parents is insulting at best.

 

Sure -- but you can't deny that a large segment of the population (I won't use numbers because I don't know where the majority stands) operates exactly under those assumption. For a lot of people, marriage means a lifetime commitment to a person, it means settling down, it means having a family -- it means more than legal privileges. That's a descriptive statement. The normative statement whether that should or shouldn't be the case is not at issue here; that's a completely different discussion.

 

Who said it didn't mean a "lifetime commitment"? I would assume that if a person wanted another person to inherit his or her assets and have power of attorney in case he or she were incapacitated, that would imply some sort of "lifetime commitment."

It does not, however, automatically mean "having a family." And in the eyes of the government, it only means legal privileges, as there is no mandate to have children or even a mandate to have sex.

 

Depends on how you define "lifetime commitment."

 

My point is that the "actual ideas" people have about marriage vary greatly, and one cannot really codify such ideas into law. One can only look at what legal benefits marriage provides. (And yes, I recognize that Jello is a law student.)