New marriage laws

My prediction: Any law defining marriage has to deal with duration and permanence (that is, it must address the social problem of serial divorce), or it will ultimately be found to be stealth discrimination. Because, my friends, any rationalization that such laws are written to protect the "sanctity" of marriage ignores the situation as it has been for some time: those horses have already left the barn.

Half of first marriages and two-thirds of subsequent marriages end in divorce, so we need to redefine what it is that the state is licensing. Consider the cultural icon, Elizabeth Taylor, who has been licensed for eight marriages and eight divorces, and tell me, please, what exactly is it that we are we calling "marriage."

If marriage depends upon commitment and duration, It seems to me that sometime after the third divorce, what is really being licensed is "civil union." In fact, if "marriage" indicates for most people a "sanctified union," then it is outside the purview of a government that maintains a separation between church and state. That is, any state within the U.S.is only able to sanction a civil union. A "sanctified" union requires a religious authority.

And if you want to bring religion into it, read what Jesus told his shocked disciples (Matt 19: 3-12):
3 Some Pharisees [i.e., a sect that rigidly followed the letter, but not the spirit, of Jewish law -- the religious right of Jesus' day] came to him to test him. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?"
4 "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,'
5 and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'?
6 So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."
7 "Why then," they asked, "did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?"
8 Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.
9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery."
10 The disciples said to him, "If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry."
11 Jesus replied, "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given.
12 For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage [alternately translated as "made themselves eunuchs"] because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it." [Here Jesus almost certainly means "eunuch" in the figurative sense, i.e., celibate or unmarried--although some unmarried Christians have taken it literally and castrated themselves.]

As the shocked disciples said, "it is better not to marry" than to be held to that kind of commitment. And it is exactly that kind of commitment that these new marriage laws ignore. So they aren't "Christian" corrections of the definition of marriage--unless they also attempt to correct liberalized divorce laws as they apply to heterosexuals. These new laws are meant to limit our system, of serial "marriage" and divorce, to heterosexuals.

This is hypocracy and stealth discrimination by our pharisaic religious right.