One thing to note is that most of the regressive Hindu customs around marriage, inheritance, family law etc. had already been largely secularized through a series of bills in the 50s. This applied...
One thing to note is that most of the regressive Hindu customs around marriage, inheritance, family law etc. had already been largely secularized through a series of bills in the 50s. This applied to Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs.
Parsis, Jews, Christians, and Muslims each retain their own civil codes. But of these it's basically only the Muslim community that has managed to retain a lot of the pre-modern Sharia conventions. UCC conversations are a little difficult because everything ends up being really communal/partisan between Hindu nationalists and "Muslims" as a whole. Because Hindu Nationalists have leaned on it as a electoral promise, it's assumed to be bigoted even though it would actually dramatically improve the status and rights of Muslim women in India.
The live-in relationships bit is weird and will probably be removed or struck down. I actually think it's not a terrible idea in principle (though the operational policy is ridiculous). They are operating on the assumption that women are culturally viewed as "damaged goods" if they enter into one (which is objectively true whether we like that implication or not). The idea is that if you enter into such an arrangement and it doesn't work out, the male partner still owes the woman some amount of support to compensate for her reduced value in the marriage market.
Where it goes off the rails is that enforcing such a principle is far too onerous. And the majority of women entering into live-in relationships (that aren't abusive) are from a social stratum where the "damaged goods" stigma is not nearly so strong. Chalk this up to the difficulties of having a single set of rules that makes sense for all the varied social and cultural contexts people operate under in a country like India.
It's been my opinion for ages that governments need to get out of the marriage business -- marriage is a concept defined by religions individually. Replace it with a civil partnership. You can be...
It's been my opinion for ages that governments need to get out of the marriage business -- marriage is a concept defined by religions individually.
Replace it with a civil partnership. You can be married to however many people you please in whatever combination you can get someone to do, but you have a legal, secular civil partnership with tax benefits and legal unity with one other adult human being of your choosing.
Some things would need to be adjusted, like hospitals would likely still need to recognize wedded spouses in some way (perhaps with the civil partner taking precedence in a disagreement?), but overall I think this would end nonsense like children being married to adults (who then become their guardians, making it illegal to divorce...), or civil clerks who believe marriage is between a man and a woman and protest marriage between anyone else.
And the insanity of requiring people cohabitating to register with the government...
As often happens with arguments for secularism and radical individualism, this is basically just treating the Christian worldview and belief around the issue as an objective moral default and...
marriage is a concept defined by religions individually.
As often happens with arguments for secularism and radical individualism, this is basically just treating the Christian worldview and belief around the issue as an objective moral default and pretending this is an axiomatic truth instead of pure ideology.
The idea that a marriage is primarily a commitment between two people and God is a Catholic doctrine. Before that, marriage was considered to be a commitment two people are making to society to take care of each other and create and raise children (so that their community doesn't have to). In Islam marriage is very much viewed as a state matter.
Also, people don't have "individual" religions. That's a fully Western idea. Religious affiliation is a communal thing and vulnerable people within those religious communities shouldn't just be left to be governed by the beliefs and interpretations of the most conservative religious elements within their communities. You'd be putting them in a situation where they can't get a divorce unless they take an active step to convert out of their religion, and possibly be assaulted or ostracized as a result.
Things like what age is appropriate to marry, what the default norms around inheritance are, what people owe each other in the event of splitting up, who will be responsible for taking care of the kids, etc. are all important legal questions that the state has to be involved in because the state is ultimately responsible for holding people to those obligations.
You can decide the state shouldn't be involved in it, but that functionally just means that the more vulnerable people have less protection.
This is true. But none of this needs to be tied to the word "marriage" in 2024. All of these things can and should be governed by civil partnership laws if the state got out of the marriage...
Things like what age is appropriate to marry, what the default norms around inheritance are, what people owe each other in the event of splitting up, who will be responsible for taking care of the kids, etc. are all important legal questions that the state has to be involved in because the state is ultimately responsible for holding people to those obligations.
This is true. But none of this needs to be tied to the word "marriage" in 2024. All of these things can and should be governed by civil partnership laws if the state got out of the marriage business.
Religious affiliation is a communal thing and vulnerable people within those religious communities shouldn't just be left to be governed by the beliefs and interpretations of the most conservative religious elements within their communities. You'd be putting them in a situation where they can't get a divorce unless they take an active step to convert out of their religion
This is true regardless. Christians who don't believe in divorce aren't going to think a divorce is legitimate because it was state-sanctioned. Getting one regardless involves forsaking the community of beliefs.
Then you're just redefining terms. The underlying issue remains. For most cultures that stuff is the whole point of marriage. The love and commitment bit is just incidental to supporting those,...
All of these things can and should be governed by civil partnership laws if the state got out of the marriage business.
Then you're just redefining terms. The underlying issue remains. For most cultures that stuff is the whole point of marriage. The love and commitment bit is just incidental to supporting those, but not necessary.
Christians who don't believe in divorce aren't going to think a divorce is legitimate because it was state-sanctioned.
They won't have a choice, because they have no enforcement mechanisms. People can still call themselves Christian and get a divorce rather than needing to formally convert, which means there is demand pressure for the clergy to get with the times because there are divorced Christians still in their community.
The underlying issue is the overlap between government marriage and cultural marriage. Separating the two is a way to reduce religious influence in setting public policy for civil partnerships,...
The underlying issue is the overlap between government marriage and cultural marriage. Separating the two is a way to reduce religious influence in setting public policy for civil partnerships, not further regulate religious concepts of marriage.
This separation of “government” from “religious” matters is sort of a fiction we operate on but don’t really go by. Like I said, the West has a Christian baseline so when government and policy...
This separation of “government” from “religious” matters is sort of a fiction we operate on but don’t really go by. Like I said, the West has a Christian baseline so when government and policy just takes Christian conceptions of what religions role in life is as granted there’s no real incongruity there. You don’t even really see it as a religiously derived ideology, but it is. Which means it’s not an easy concept to just transplant into another society with a totally different concept of what these things mean.
Nobody cares about “government marriage.” The religious conception is the one that people actually care about, and they want the norms and mores of society to reflect what they’re doing, not be some completely disconnected concept that they deal with in parallel.
Speak for yourself. As a queer and an atheist, I very much care about “government marriage" and the legal protections and privileges (like medical visitation and substitute decision-maker rights)...
Nobody cares about “government marriage.” The religious conception is the one that people actually care about, and they want the norms and mores of society to reflect what they’re doing, not be some completely disconnected concept that they deal with in parallel.
Speak for yourself. As a queer and an atheist, I very much care about “government marriage" and the legal protections and privileges (like medical visitation and substitute decision-maker rights) it provides. And I doubt I am alone in that, or in not caring at all about any religious ideals of marriage.
I do very much care about the legal protections associated with "government marriage" as well for similar reasons (I'm queer but I'm also an immigrant with a residence permit based on being...
I do very much care about the legal protections associated with "government marriage" as well for similar reasons (I'm queer but I'm also an immigrant with a residence permit based on being married to my spouse). But the idea of severing "government marriage" from religious marriage only serves to regressively sever the commitments my spouse and I make to each other from those a religious couple make. It's the exact same strategy homophobes have done for ages to try and deny gay people marriage -- to create a weird second category for the "others" to fit into to protect their conservative notions of marriage. If this "civil partnership" thing entails legal rights identical to marriage, then what is the point of avoiding the terminology of marriage here? Marriage has historically been what we call a legal and economic union like this between two people, and the only reason to depart from that terminology from some separate secular "civil union" is to sequester secular marriages from religious ones for some reason.
I also think that, as NaraVara pointed out already, separating religious marriage from "government marriage" just allows conservative religious communities to run amuck without any government interference, making the whole thing rather regressive in my eyes. It lets those communities "win" in a sense by allowing them to continue to hold their regressive beliefs and enforce them without any challenge from the government or outside culture.
Those are definitely fair points. But TBH, I feel like bigots gonna bigot, so I will gladly take what I can get. If governments needs to call it a "civil union" or some other combination of...
Those are definitely fair points. But TBH, I feel like bigots gonna bigot, so I will gladly take what I can get. If governments needs to call it a "civil union" or some other combination of synonyms in order to get the legislation passed, instead of using "marriage" because of bigoted religious idiots refusing to support it otherwise, so be it. So long as the same rights go along with it, it's still a win, and a step in the right direction.
If legal marriage is still combine automatically with religious marriage ceremonies as it is now, I don't see the point. Queer religious people exist anyway and will get queer religiously married....
If legal marriage is still combine automatically with religious marriage ceremonies as it is now, I don't see the point. Queer religious people exist anyway and will get queer religiously married. It isn't actually the word that religious anti-queer people object to, it's allowing queer people access to equal rights and respect.
It's also allowing women access to divorce that they object to. Which is one moe reason why civil rights impact everyone.
If you swap the word "marriage" in your comment with "matrimony" and the word "civil partnership" for marriage - without changing the meanings - this is kind of already what's going on. Why would...
If you swap the word "marriage" in your comment with "matrimony" and the word "civil partnership" for marriage - without changing the meanings - this is kind of already what's going on. Why would a child be legally able to be "married" to an adult, but not "civilly partnered"? Because you've added "adult" to be a requirement for "civil partnership", and there's no reason it couldn't be added as a requirement for legal marriage. The whole thing sounds a bit like it's just a move down the euphemism treadmill to me.
I kinda dislike those clickbaity headlines where everything is about some group being "angered" or "offended". Though this fell out of fashion a decade ago.
I kinda dislike those clickbaity headlines where everything is about some group being "angered" or "offended". Though this fell out of fashion a decade ago.
One thing to note is that most of the regressive Hindu customs around marriage, inheritance, family law etc. had already been largely secularized through a series of bills in the 50s. This applied to Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs.
Parsis, Jews, Christians, and Muslims each retain their own civil codes. But of these it's basically only the Muslim community that has managed to retain a lot of the pre-modern Sharia conventions. UCC conversations are a little difficult because everything ends up being really communal/partisan between Hindu nationalists and "Muslims" as a whole. Because Hindu Nationalists have leaned on it as a electoral promise, it's assumed to be bigoted even though it would actually dramatically improve the status and rights of Muslim women in India.
The live-in relationships bit is weird and will probably be removed or struck down. I actually think it's not a terrible idea in principle (though the operational policy is ridiculous). They are operating on the assumption that women are culturally viewed as "damaged goods" if they enter into one (which is objectively true whether we like that implication or not). The idea is that if you enter into such an arrangement and it doesn't work out, the male partner still owes the woman some amount of support to compensate for her reduced value in the marriage market.
Where it goes off the rails is that enforcing such a principle is far too onerous. And the majority of women entering into live-in relationships (that aren't abusive) are from a social stratum where the "damaged goods" stigma is not nearly so strong. Chalk this up to the difficulties of having a single set of rules that makes sense for all the varied social and cultural contexts people operate under in a country like India.
It's been my opinion for ages that governments need to get out of the marriage business -- marriage is a concept defined by religions individually.
Replace it with a civil partnership. You can be married to however many people you please in whatever combination you can get someone to do, but you have a legal, secular civil partnership with tax benefits and legal unity with one other adult human being of your choosing.
Some things would need to be adjusted, like hospitals would likely still need to recognize wedded spouses in some way (perhaps with the civil partner taking precedence in a disagreement?), but overall I think this would end nonsense like children being married to adults (who then become their guardians, making it illegal to divorce...), or civil clerks who believe marriage is between a man and a woman and protest marriage between anyone else.
And the insanity of requiring people cohabitating to register with the government...
As often happens with arguments for secularism and radical individualism, this is basically just treating the Christian worldview and belief around the issue as an objective moral default and pretending this is an axiomatic truth instead of pure ideology.
The idea that a marriage is primarily a commitment between two people and God is a Catholic doctrine. Before that, marriage was considered to be a commitment two people are making to society to take care of each other and create and raise children (so that their community doesn't have to). In Islam marriage is very much viewed as a state matter.
Also, people don't have "individual" religions. That's a fully Western idea. Religious affiliation is a communal thing and vulnerable people within those religious communities shouldn't just be left to be governed by the beliefs and interpretations of the most conservative religious elements within their communities. You'd be putting them in a situation where they can't get a divorce unless they take an active step to convert out of their religion, and possibly be assaulted or ostracized as a result.
Things like what age is appropriate to marry, what the default norms around inheritance are, what people owe each other in the event of splitting up, who will be responsible for taking care of the kids, etc. are all important legal questions that the state has to be involved in because the state is ultimately responsible for holding people to those obligations.
You can decide the state shouldn't be involved in it, but that functionally just means that the more vulnerable people have less protection.
This is true. But none of this needs to be tied to the word "marriage" in 2024. All of these things can and should be governed by civil partnership laws if the state got out of the marriage business.
This is true regardless. Christians who don't believe in divorce aren't going to think a divorce is legitimate because it was state-sanctioned. Getting one regardless involves forsaking the community of beliefs.
Then you're just redefining terms. The underlying issue remains. For most cultures that stuff is the whole point of marriage. The love and commitment bit is just incidental to supporting those, but not necessary.
They won't have a choice, because they have no enforcement mechanisms. People can still call themselves Christian and get a divorce rather than needing to formally convert, which means there is demand pressure for the clergy to get with the times because there are divorced Christians still in their community.
The underlying issue is the overlap between government marriage and cultural marriage. Separating the two is a way to reduce religious influence in setting public policy for civil partnerships, not further regulate religious concepts of marriage.
This separation of “government” from “religious” matters is sort of a fiction we operate on but don’t really go by. Like I said, the West has a Christian baseline so when government and policy just takes Christian conceptions of what religions role in life is as granted there’s no real incongruity there. You don’t even really see it as a religiously derived ideology, but it is. Which means it’s not an easy concept to just transplant into another society with a totally different concept of what these things mean.
Nobody cares about “government marriage.” The religious conception is the one that people actually care about, and they want the norms and mores of society to reflect what they’re doing, not be some completely disconnected concept that they deal with in parallel.
Speak for yourself. As a queer and an atheist, I very much care about “government marriage" and the legal protections and privileges (like medical visitation and substitute decision-maker rights) it provides. And I doubt I am alone in that, or in not caring at all about any religious ideals of marriage.
I do very much care about the legal protections associated with "government marriage" as well for similar reasons (I'm queer but I'm also an immigrant with a residence permit based on being married to my spouse). But the idea of severing "government marriage" from religious marriage only serves to regressively sever the commitments my spouse and I make to each other from those a religious couple make. It's the exact same strategy homophobes have done for ages to try and deny gay people marriage -- to create a weird second category for the "others" to fit into to protect their conservative notions of marriage. If this "civil partnership" thing entails legal rights identical to marriage, then what is the point of avoiding the terminology of marriage here? Marriage has historically been what we call a legal and economic union like this between two people, and the only reason to depart from that terminology from some separate secular "civil union" is to sequester secular marriages from religious ones for some reason.
I also think that, as NaraVara pointed out already, separating religious marriage from "government marriage" just allows conservative religious communities to run amuck without any government interference, making the whole thing rather regressive in my eyes. It lets those communities "win" in a sense by allowing them to continue to hold their regressive beliefs and enforce them without any challenge from the government or outside culture.
Those are definitely fair points. But TBH, I feel like bigots gonna bigot, so I will gladly take what I can get. If governments needs to call it a "civil union" or some other combination of synonyms in order to get the legislation passed, instead of using "marriage" because of bigoted religious idiots refusing to support it otherwise, so be it. So long as the same rights go along with it, it's still a win, and a step in the right direction.
p.s. Here in Canada it's known as a "civil marriage" so we basically got the best of both worlds. But sadly, that isn't always possible. In plenty of places in the world our basic human rights as LGBT+ people are still criminalized, with 12 even still imposing the death penalty on us. :/
If legal marriage is still combine automatically with religious marriage ceremonies as it is now, I don't see the point. Queer religious people exist anyway and will get queer religiously married. It isn't actually the word that religious anti-queer people object to, it's allowing queer people access to equal rights and respect.
It's also allowing women access to divorce that they object to. Which is one moe reason why civil rights impact everyone.
If you swap the word "marriage" in your comment with "matrimony" and the word "civil partnership" for marriage - without changing the meanings - this is kind of already what's going on. Why would a child be legally able to be "married" to an adult, but not "civilly partnered"? Because you've added "adult" to be a requirement for "civil partnership", and there's no reason it couldn't be added as a requirement for legal marriage. The whole thing sounds a bit like it's just a move down the euphemism treadmill to me.
I kinda dislike those clickbaity headlines where everything is about some group being "angered" or "offended". Though this fell out of fashion a decade ago.
How would you have restructured it?