Here's a piece from his post:
The argument that these stupid people make about "no laws allowing for same sex marriage" is just that, stupid. Forrest was right: Stupid is as stupid does.The General Laws of Massachusetts carefully regulate marriage. Unfortunately for the anti folk, it did not originally consider SSM. On the other hand, Chapter 207 starts with 14 very specific Sections forbidding this or that type of marriage - bigamy, incest, underage and on and on.
It goes into the heart of marriage regulation here. The question remains, who is legally entitled to a license to marry? The bulk of the who-can laws related to the license and solemnization. Again, the General Laws are very specific about that. This reinforces the clear distinction carried over from English common law to the Bay Colony to our Commonwealth's constitution, that marriage here is a civil contract.
3 comments:
The only way Mass Marrier's argument works is only if you assume that people back in the colonial times could have even imagined same-sex marriage taking place. It's not mentioned one way or the other because no one back then ever thought two men would want to get married.
The point is not that they were stuck on one-man/one-woman. Rather, they viewed marriage as a civil contract, forbade ministers from solmenizing weddings originally, and had a clear distinction between civil and religious ceremonies.
That's the way the constitution and resulting laws were written. It is the way they remain (and should). It is also why the Goodridge decision was the reasonable one here.
Then again, it must be reassuring if you are anti-SSM or anti-gay to think that our colonial and pre-immigrant ancestors didn't know of or think of homosexual couples. That's balderdash, of course, as much as pretending that marriage in general and one-man/one-woman marriage has always been the way of humans. You don't have to leave the Old Testament to see that.
Whether our colonialists would have banned SSM if it existed openly at the time is moot. The fact remains that they set up a civil structure enabling marriage, first with JPs, then with clergy. They kept the idea that what is not forbidden is allowed. That's sort of the essence of America, no?
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