And when my first wife tried to divorce her first husband, at the age of 18, in NY State, besides NY's divorce law requiring PROVABLE adultery (and the standard was set so high that it figuratively had to occur in front of the judge to be provable) she soon discovered that NY's divorce law considered a wife to be chattel if she was under the age of 21 (she was 18) and since her parents had signed for her to get married, they could not be assigned as her guardians should she succeed in obtaining a divorce from her property holder.cb1000rider wrote:Prior to 1965, there were many places in the USA where African Americans were not allowed to vote due to the will of the majority.baldeagle wrote:By refusing to rule on the California amendment banning gay marriage, the Supreme Court has effectively said that government officials, by fiat, can chose to ignore the will of the people and refuse to defend a Constitutional amendment passed by the people.
Prior to that, it was the will of the people that African Americans couldn't own property.
Prior to that, African Americans WERE property.
Women couldn't vote until 1920.
Clearly, we can't depend on the will of the people to make fair decisions. History teaches us over and over that an unprotected minority gets treated unfairly.
Want a marriage policy that we call can agree on?
Marriage is a religious institution. One of the basic founding principles of our country is separation of church and state.
The government should get out of the marriage business. If they want to regulate something, they can regulate civil unions.
Churches get to regulate marriage and via that means, they can include or exclude whomever they want per moral doctrine.
Rights granted to citizens should not be predicated on marriage. They should be predicated on civil union. To do anything else results in some form of inequality and discrimination.
The chattel law for wives remained on NY's books until Nelson Rockefeller discovered how tough it would be to divorce his wife to marry the woman he was carrying on with, and as governor was able to twist enough political arms and call in enough favors to get the law changed, and during the rewrite they conveniently left out the chattel part.