Oh dear, the federal government seems to have got a bit confused over rights and responsibilities.
People thinking of moving in with a partner have been warned to read the fine print on a bill before Parliament that will treat de facto relationships in exactly the same way as marriage.
see here at smh
In the mad topsy-turvey world in which we live, people who have chosen not to get married (and accept the responsibilities that go with that) want to receive the rights of the thing that they have chosen not to do. You work it out. I can't.
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I guess whether we're talking about rights or responsibilities depends which way you view it.
That is, if (say, stereotypically) a man leaves his de facto wife, he may shirk his responsibilities to care properly for her (and, presumably, any offspring) if their relationship was never treated as a marriage.
With the new law, men will no longer have the (legal) right to leave their partners in such unfavourable circumstances as is currently possible. That is, from a certain point of view, what's being enforced is in fact responsibility, not rights.
(Of course, you might want to argue that women are claiming a 'right' to financial security. I think this scenario would be rarer, though: every survey I've ever seen (including a survey of Genesis, which I'm reading at the moment) suggests that men are less likely to be committed to their partners, and women are more likely to be made vulnerable by a break-up.)
And since I have a realist ethic (that is, I follow Christopher Ash in thinking that there is content to the notion of 'marriage' - it's not just a relationship that is arbitrarily baptized 'marriage'), it seems like a good thing to me to force people to shoulder the responsibilities inherent in their de facto marriage relationship: such relationships are closer to 'real' marriages than, say, simply a debauched fling.
Yep, you are quite right Stuart (about responsiblities being enforced). I suppose I meant to put the question this way - isn't the reason why these people didn't want to get married in the first place was that they didn't want the responsibility?
It feels as if you are saying to people who chose not to get married that they are married after all... ?
Yes, I think that at least some (and my instinct would say many) people avoid getting married as a way of avoiding responsibility, leaving a little escape hatch for if things go wrong. It may not always be conscious, either: it's an understandably unattractive and daunting commitment, for example, for those who've grown up in broken homes.
But as I've written elsewhere (and following Christopher Ash in his big book, Marriage: Sex in the service of God (IVP, Leicester, 2003)), I think that the essence of marriage is stitched into creation. It is a lifelong, committed, exclusive, sexual, consensual, public relationship between a man and a woman. It also has set purposes: to create a new family, to enjoy fellowship and to produce children (Gen 1:28, 2:18, 22-24, 1 Cor 7:3-5).
So for some people, even if they haven't wanted to formalize their marriage in a legal way, the real shape of their relationship so resembles the real shape of marriage that it should entrain the same responsibilities. This seems to be the (unconscious?) theology of the Federal Government, too: they are seeking to establish criteria by which a relationship might be judged a marriage de facto.
(And by the same token, we can imagine a legal 'marriage' which had none of the hallmarks: we might well ask, to what extent is it a marriage? But that's a more complicated question :)
And yes, I know not everyone has a realist ethic like this. If you want to see my non-academic defence of the idea, it's here: http://www.matthiasmedia.com.au/briefing/library/5276/
Thanks for the Briefing article Stuart, food for thought.
As Tim Blencowe likes to say, "The only thing we know about good deeds is that they're bad!"
I don't think the stereotypical defacto man ever had the right to shirk his responsibilities to his children. Just like in a marriage, the mother may have to go to court to obtain support.
I wonder if further strange issues will be raised such as if one partner sleeps at another for a fraction of a week, whether they count as a pro-rata defacto!
Stuart, those seem like very general secular or OT views of marriage. Let's not forget Ephesians 5 that indicates the special nature of Christian marriage! :-)
Yes, and there are lots of inequalities in regard to children in the family court, from what I've read, but I can't imagine those will be fixed soon :)
What kinds of things are you thinking of when you talk about 'Christian marriage', Elwyn? What's specific to this?
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