UTAH AMENDMENT DISCRIMINATES: Daniel Greenwood

Should Utah become a refuge for parents fleeing child support obligations? Do family values Utah-style mean that children of divorced or unmarried parents have no right to support from their parents? Is this the way Utah should defend marriage?

Supporters of Amendment 3 to the Utah Constitution contend that it is necessary to prevent our lesbian and gay fellow residents from marrying--even though same-sex marriage is not legal anywhere in this country. This discriminatory purpose alone should be reason enough to vote against it. marriage is a fundamental human right, as our Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized. In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the old segregation laws that barred mixed-race couples from marrying were fundamentally unjust. More recently, in Turner v. Safley, it held that prisoners, even convicted murderers, have a fundamental right to marry.

If murderers can marry, surely law-abiding citizens should be allowed to do so, too. It is as unfair and unjust to prevent homosexual Americans from marrying as it was to ban black and white Americans from marrying each other. ...

True conservatives will see that integrating additional people into the marriage establishment--not excluding them--is the best way to preserve marriage. ...

Clause 2 of the amendment states that "no other domestic union, however denominated, may be recognized as a marriage or given the same or substantially equivalent legal effect."

But current law recognizes many domestic unions and gives many relationships some or all of the legal effects of marriage. Family limited partnerships, common-law marriages, divorced and reconstituted families, trust agreements meant to protect children from prior marriages, foster care arrangements, grandparents rights, hospital visitation agreements, family powers of attorney--all these domestic unions share in the legal effects of marriage. Given the vastly greater number of heterosexual than homosexual couples in America, the main effects of Amendment 3 will be on heterosexual parents and their children. ...

Unwed mothers and fathers are obligated to support their children under current law. After the amendment, they will no longer be entitled (or subject to) the legal effects of marriage. Instead, the children will be subject to the tender mercies of taxpayer-financed welfare systems.

Children of divorced parents may suddenly discover that their parents' domestic union is of no legal significance--that parental obligations end with the marriage.

Powers of attorney authorizing grown children to look after the affairs of their parents create rights similar to those of married couples. Every such agreement will be in legal doubt if the amendment is passed.

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posted by Eve at 5:41 PM | link

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