The movement towards government-mandated marriage

Post lifted from Biased BBC

This BBC news article (link) appears to have swallowed completely the line the government is pushing about "giving more rights to cohabitees". There has been a suggestion from liberal lawyers that cohabiting couples should have the same "rights" on separation as divorcing couples. The BBC article buys completely the canard that this proposed interference in people's lives is somehow in pursuit of giving them rights. It completely fails to state the obvious intellectual challenge to this proposal, which is that imposing the same terms on cohabiting couples by default actually *removes* rights from them.

Oh yes it does. At present, cohabitees have the right to live together without a lifelong financial commitment to each other, if that's what they want. If they decide they do want to make such a commitment, they can always go and get married. At present they have complete freedom of choice.

If this mooted law ever happened, it would mean the *removal* from people of the right to live together in an informal way and a reduction of freedom. what would happen is that by default, and after some wholly arbitrary period of time, they would be forcibly connected financially. They have thus lost the freedom to live the way they do now, and would instead be forced to live in a way the Government decrees.

Nowhere in his article does the writer confront this. Instead, he cravenly accepts all the guff he has been spoonfed. 'What legal protection do cohabitees currently have?' worries Mr. Silverman. But wait: 'On separation,' he goes on, 'a claim to a share of property can be exercised only by using complicated trust law. By contrast, married couples can go to court to "divide the spoils"'. Well spotted, Jon! I think you just answered your own question there! That's right - the legal protection they have is that at any time they like, they can choose to become one of those married couples. Then there's no nasty trust law, see?

So if the BBC put two and two together it would work out that the answer here is for cohabiting couples who want a finacial piece of each other to get married. Meanwhile, those who don't, don't. Oh but wait. That last suggestion - well, that's how things are now. And that sounds a bit, well, pro-marriage, doesn't it? And we can't have any of that mucky talk on the BBC.

I could go on. For example, when someone lives with a family member who dies, what rights do they have to stay in the property? Answer: none at all if they can't pay the inheritance tax without selling it - a problem that has been solved for same-sex couples and is about to be forcibly solved (even though no problem may exist) for unmarried couples. Yet somehow, it isn't on the BBC radar at all as an issue for, say, maiden aunts sharing a house, or for children looking after elderly parents in their own home.

There is also a story arc embedded in this about the instability of the Left's attitudes to, well, everything really, but the family in particular. It was the left that pushed for the abolition of the family unit as the basic building block of society; it was the Left which thought it was somehow liberating for people not to have to get married before they had children. Now the Left seems to have decided that anybody who does will be forcibly treated as though they had got married. Now if you're the BBC, what to do, what to do? Should it agree with this (it's more "rights" after all, so it's right-on), or should it object to it because it's pushing marriage?

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