Posted on 05/01/2003 4:30:44 PM PDT by adamyoshida
See link in #20
Haste makes waste, so make haste slowly.
All libs go north; all conservatives come south. Canada can be socialistic and PC and lib to its hearts content, and the U.S. can thrive and be the envy of the world.
Bingo. It is when the churches gave up their responsibility to determine marraige that started this process. Let the Church define who is married and who is not. Get the state out of it.
For things like child support and property issues, honor the right to contract, and have an enforecable, written contract that both parties understand, instead of the unwritten, uncertain "marraige contract" where people learn that they have undertaken obligations and given up rights that they had no knowledge of. The obligations and rights even vary from state to state when you move, so you are not even held to the contractual facts of when and where you married!
The author can't even get his facts correct. The above statement is false. There have always been numerous places where polygamy has been legal and honored. It still is, even today, in most of Africa, the middle east, and much of Asia.
Well, there's the problem right there. What they say they want, and what they really want are two different things. When people talk about limited government, they just mean they want government interference limited to those groups they have a beef with.
The culture which created the Canadian nation is the Judeo-Christian one, which has a tradition of monogamy going back thousands of years - monogamy was firmly rooted in the Roman, Germanic and Pharisaic Jewish cultures from which modern-day Canada ultimately derived.
Sadly, that's exactly true for most people.
Yes, which is why this concept would quickly lead to saner, reasonable contracts. We are already seeing a trend in this direction with pre-nuptial agreements.
Lex mala, lex nulla.
A bad law is no law.
When I first read that, I thougt he was saying that marraige law was bad, and should be done away with. Boy, was I surprised!!
For thousands of year, polygamy was practiced in Judaism. The Old Testament is chock full of it. The Germanic tribes practiced concubinage, though I have to admit, they only had one "wife" . The Romans definitely had concubinage, though again, only one wife. Having one wife in those cultures never meant exclusive sex with only that woman, as it came to be in later Christian cultures.
It is possible that my limited reading of history is incorrect, but AFAIK, the above statement is true. Please show me Roman Law forbidding sex with a woman not your wife, if you want an easy way to convince me that I am wrong about this.
Yet by 400 BC, religious Judaism characterized the practice of polygamy as a privilege of the patriarchs and restricted it to levirate marriages.
By the time of Christ, Israel had long been a monogamous society.
The Germanic tribes practiced concubinage, though I have to admit, they only had one "wife".
In ancient German and Roman society, as in modern US society, the wealthy and powerful often had "kept women" or concubines. Yet the moral standard of society was monogamy - if concubinage were considered legitimate and socially acceptable, then it would have been a legally recognized and lauded aspect of the culture.
The Romans definitely had concubinage, though again, only one wife. Having one wife in those cultures never meant exclusive sex with only that woman, as it came to be in later Christian cultures.
The lex Julia de adulteriis of 18 BC provides for severe penalties for both female and male adulterers - there is no provision in the law for legal concubinage. Moreover, that law was instituted to harmonize and recodify preexisting laws on the same subject.
This happened decades before the name of Christ was ever circulated in Rome.
These cultures all had prostitution, extramarital affairs, mistresses, nobles having a quickie with the scullery maid, etc. So did Christian Europe.
None of them had official recognition, endorsement or encouragement of plural marriage.
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