Welcome to Part II of Stephen L. Hall’s post. It’s posts like this that make me wish we were visited by more leftists. Jazz hands at the ready? Enjoy!
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I wrote in the first part how relationships, as a legal concept in certain aspects of law, have been corrupted with pretend contractual obligations of an overreaching state to promote leftist control of the economy through regulation, agencies, and the creation of pretend rights.
Now I seek to address the mirror image of those problems; the application of relationship concepts to certain aspects of the law which have ever traditionally been viewed as being of a contractual nature. Whereas the first dealt with business concepts, I would now address some more social concepts.
The conflation of relationships and contracts have created a muddled mess. The legal nature of social connections runs the gamut of strangers, friends, and family. You develop a relationship with your friends, but family is permanent, akin to a contract. So, naturally, that is the manner in which the law has traditionally treated social connections.
People readily accept that dating is a relationship, implying that any member of a couple is free to terminate that relationship at any time for any reason and go their separate ways. People may have some emotional investment and entanglement, but I eschew such considerations in this present discussion.
Think first of such things as adoption, which is simply turning an unrelated person into kin, a legal recognition of family ties. In essence, an adoption is a contractual arrangement recognized by the state creating a parent and child from unrelated parties. (Yes, I know that we commonly and freely call many of these things relationships, but sometimes language and common parlance lags behind mathematically precise legal concepts . . . foolish mortals.)
Adoption is a way to make a person a permanent member of one’s family, inseparable without a court determination of the breach of that familial contract.
Most common is the recognition by the law of marriage as a contract, rather than a mere relationship. The marriage is a way to make that other person a part of the family, a permanent addition. Traditionally conceived, the wife becomes part of her husband’s family, but the marriage is also seen as a binding or union of the two families.
Divorce is thus like a formal legal disinheritance, a permanent separation from the family. It is the fact that a person must undergo a legal process cements the concept of marriage as a contract rather than a relationship. Even in modern times, men have been sued for breach of promise, a breaking of the contract of marriage, for merely calling off an engagement.
Because the marriage contract is considered of a permanent union, there are traditionally only two ways to end a marriage contract: through annulment or by divorce.
First, let us consider the divorce. Divorce is traditionally based upon what can only be considered a breach of the marriage contract. The grounds for such a breach of contract are based in such ideas as mental or physical cruelty, infidelity, abandonment, impotence, et cetera. The breaching party, the one at fault, is viewed unfavorably by the law in the dissolution of the marriage precisely because of their breach of their contractual obligations.
Which brings us to the modern corruption of the family, which just like the previous examples mentions comes to us courtesy of the progressive. Progress to the progressive is change for the sake of changing because they don’t like a particular outcome and don’t want to take the time and effort to actually understand why things are the way that they are.
By which corruption, I mean the advent of the no-fault divorce. You see traditionally a divorce is caused by a breach of the marriage contract, meaning that one party was at fault for the divorce, and the legal ramifications and consequences for this destruction of the legal family was borne by the party at fault.
No-fault divorce turned the marriage contract from a permanent addition of family, to a temporary relationship of convenience. The dissolution of the family begins with this different concept of marriage as no longer a contract of family, but a relationship of frivolity.
The no-fault divorce, a product of leftist feminist ideology, as a byproduct has created what is deemed by many feminist as the very symbol of the patriarchal society against which they struggle, the trophy wife. The idea that a prosperous man may simply dump his first wife for a newer, younger model as a symbol of his power and place in society.
But really, there could not be nearly as many trophy wives without the ease of divorce and the social acceptance of divorce fostered and promoted by the no-fault divorce which freed women from unsatisfying loveless marriages. In an ironic twist, the ultimate symbol of feminist success is also the most despised by feminists, the trophy wife. The trophy wife is the icon of the feminist movement . . . unwittingly.
However, there are other consequences to the aversion to treating marriage as a contract because of its connection to tradition, and it is oddly related to the other way of ending a marriage, annulment. Annulment is the ruling by the court that a marriage contract can be dissolved without a breach due to the legal failure of the contract itself. For example, annulments can be granted if the marriage was induced by fraud, bigamy, lack of competence, impotence, frigidity, or even failure to consummate.
Once marriage itself has been divorced from the concept of contract, the purpose of marriage itself is called into question. Marriage ceases to be an economic, social, and political union but a relationship which must be based upon the emotion of love, however often it is really based upon lust pretending that it is love.
It is the introduction to deviant, or non traditional marriages, to which the principles of annulment may add clarity. As a contract, homosexual marriage simply cannot exist.
In contract law, the word void means that a contract is deemed legally invalid and it ceases to exist; a contract which can be voided at the election of one of the parties is called voidable rather than void; a contract which cannot legally exist is called void ab initio meaning void from the beginning and rather than being voided it is as if the contract never existed in the first place.
Consider that “failure to consummate the marriage” are grounds for annulment; such a condition makes a marriage contract voidable.
Consummation has a specific legal meaning that the couple have engaged in sexual intercourse; sexual activity other than intercourse is not legally sufficient.
Intercourse is legally defined as penetration of the vagina by the penis.
Now consider the situation of a homosexual union. A homosexual couple, whether male or female, may engage in various sexual activities, but they can never engage in intercourse. Ergo, a homosexual couple can never consummate their marriage, it is a physical impossibility. As consummation, an activity necessary to complete the marriage contract the absence of which renders the marriage voidable, is physically impossible, the marriage ceases to be voidable and makes the marriage automatically void ab initio.
Homosexual marriage simply cannot legally exist no matter how much people may desire it to exist.
If marriage is a mere relationship rather than a contract these old fashioned ideas become antiquated notions to be brushed aside. But remember why marriage and adoption are considered contracts by the law in the first place, to make these unrelated persons family, to create a permanent bond between people. When those bonds are taken as ephemeral temporary relationships, family itself loses its meaning. Children born out of marriages grow up without that feeling of belonging which makes them part of a community or a nation.
Those who suffer from such distortion of traditional concepts of relationships and contracts are many. It pervades many areas of society, but many in our society do not want to take the time to understand concepts, but merely to jump to whatever notion argues for the outcome they desire at the moment. Corruption always comes first at basic level of concepts, but the effects are always more far reaching than people expect.
