Contrary-to-nature unions and unintended consequences

My friend The Motley Monk writes about an interesting consequence of the NY legislature’s and Gov. Cuomo’s approval of contrary-to-nature unions as if they were “marriages”.

Homosexual marriage: The law of unintended consequence…

With the initial wave of glee receding a couple of weeks after the State of New York approved so-called “homosexual marriage,” the law of unintended consequences has now predictably come into play.

As reported in a New York Times article, some companies that heretofore have provided “domestic partner benefits” to homosexual partners who have been living in domestic partnerships are now requiring these employees to get married if they want their partners to qualify for health insurance. In the State of New York, these companies include Corning and IBM; in Massachusetts, Raytheon has moved in this direction. All three are providing a “grace period” for homosexual domestic partners to comply with the marriage requirement.

These decisions have forced proponents of so-called “homosexual marriage” to reassess.

Why?

The federal government does not recognize these so-called “marriages,” requiring corporations to comply with federal law.

The goal of achieving “equal treatment under the law” has now caused homosexual advocacy groups to wonder if they’ve pressed too far and too fast. According to the New York Times article, proponents will now argue that, until the matter is settled at the federal level, companies should stick to their current policies providing the current option to domestic partners.

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12 Comments

  1. LisaP. says:

    That wasn’t an unintended consequence. Fully intended. Another plank to leverage the federal government to change its laws. If you have to throw a few individuals under the bus by getting their health insurance taken away in the short term, look at what a wonderful long term goal you’ll have moved closer to. End, means.

  2. Stephen D says:

    Many same sex people sharing accomodation who are not closely related (and are not sexual partners) have every incentive to ‘marry’. The pretended ‘spouse’ may receive valuable financial benefits in the event of death or serious illness, may be eligible for medical care etc. etc. There would also be the ‘spin off’ advantage of benefiting from positive discrimination when applying for jobs or housing. If I were in this situation and lacked a conscience, I might be tempted to ‘marry’. I wonder how many heterosexuals do or will?

  3. BaedaBenedictus says:

    The whole point of spousal benefits is to provide for the needs and raising of the children of these marriages. So exactly how does this apply to same-sex couples, who can’t produce children unless they manufacture one in a lab in a menage-a-trois?

  4. o.h. says:

    Stephen D.,

    The university I used to attend had fantastic married student housing, which naturally they made available to same-sex “domestic partners.” It was well-known that roommates would claim to be “domestic partners” just so they could get the premium housing. So this has already been going on. The whole point of the housing (which was communally arranged, with a large protected outdoor common space), of course, was to provide a safe, domestic environment for small children, who often show up in actual marriages.

  5. MarylandBill says:

    So lets see, they want the benefits of being married whether they are “married” or not? Do they want equal treatment or preferential treatment?

  6. “…small children, who often show up in actual marriages.”
    Problem is so often they don’t show up in “actual marriages.” The contraceptive “marriage” is almost as egregious a fallacy as the same-sex “marriage” and one of its two principle causes.

  7. Fr. Basil says:

    In my teaching job after I graduated from college, I was responsible for my mother’s support, which whom I lived. Teachers who were married could get insurance for their spouses and children, which was only right.

    I, however, could not get health benefits for my mother, for whose support I was just as responsible as married teachers were for their spouses and children. Was this just to me?

  8. sejoga says:

    I’m fairly convinced that a lot of the “supporters” of same-sex marriage don’t even really support it. Notice how even our President is usually pretty tight-lipped about his opinions on the issue. But the reason they want to ram through legislation permitting these unions is simply to create tensions like this where there are conflicts between federal and state law, tensions that are almost always resolved by consolidating even greater power at the federal level of government. It’s an assault on the rights of citizens to govern themselves locally.

    It’s kind of similar to the way I’m also convinced that the Eurocrats know and always have known that the monetary union of the Eurozone nations would lead to financial instability, but they pushed it through precisely because there are two ways of dealing with problems of that sort: 1) End the monetary union, and 2) Increase the political union. Guess which is going to happen? The Eurozone was always a back-door to centralization of authority under unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies.

    Same-sex “marriage” is a similar phenomenon. Support for “gay rights” is just a red herring for consolidation of power in the federal Congress and in the White House, away from the States and the People.

  9. ejcmartin says:

    I am interested to see if over time another unintended consequence comes up. I do some work in tax planning for estates. In Canada at least one is allowed to rollover one’s assets to a spouse without attracting taxation. Only when the estate transfers to the next generation does it attract tax. Now a way to avoid tax is if Mom is widowed and sitting on a significant estate she can “marry” her son’s girlfriend. Once Mom dies boyfriend marries his mother’s widow (all the while he has been cohabitating with his Mother and “step-Mother”). Son now has access to his Mother’s estate without any tax. If you think this is outlandish it is not, I have seen and heard of people doing some crazy things to avoid tax.

  10. mike cliffson says:

    I hope the appropriate comment is NOT “you aint seen nothing yet”. The -intended- c onsequences in Education alone! Here in Spain consequences depend on the vagiaries of a Napoleonic-Code based system, not commonlaw, so the exact knock-ons will differ . Think! In education , not just YOUR kids- morality and Christianity aside – do you want be around in society when the present generation who have been forced, in school, NOT to even employ words like “father” and mother” in the playground, arrive on the scene?

  11. If I ran a company, I would discontinue offering benefits of any sort until this abomination were corrected, and to blazes with ObamaCare. Let them come and get me. I’d take the money I saved by not paying benefits to hire a good lawyer. And if I lost, I would go sit in jail before I paid a penny to further this deviant agenda. Maybe if I had enough employees, they would come to my defense, if only to save their jobs. But everyone runs scared, so the good guys lose… or maybe we aren’t that good after all and deserve to lose.

  12. AvantiBev says:

    Our Illinois legislators have within the past few months passed, and our Dem governor signed, a civil union bill. Just 2 weeks ago one of the lawyers of our firm was over waiting to step up and get a heterosexual couple divorced while the case before the bench involved the “dissolution” of two lesbians who had been “married” in Canada just a few years earlier.

    I have ALWAYS contended that we heteros opened the door to this whole same-sex marriage thing with our embrace of the Sexual Revolution and women falling for the Boomer males pleading, “Come on, baby, we don’t need a piece of paper.” Well now that my gay pals are going to find out what it means to have the Court order a split of your “stuff”, they may find that that Judgment for Dissolution of Marriage is a piece of paper they were better off without!

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