CSotD: Conservatives afraid of getting their asphalt
Skip to comments
Today's "Pardon My Planet" explores the world of silly, ignorant people who don't understand that some things really are set in stone.
There are many things about the controversy over gay couples, gay adoption, gay marriage that I don't understand, but I'm thinking that the problem is not complexity but simplicity. Once you pass most of it off to ignorance, and admit the long history you're attempting to overcome, the issue itself isn't so hard to resolve.
For example, it's a good thing we use the term "issuing a birth certificate" instead of "baptizing," or we'd have quarrels over that, too. And I'd understand the outrage if one group of people were able to be baptized at city hall while another group was told, "You can't be baptized, but we'll issue you a birth certificate." It's not the same thing.
Unfortunately, we use the term "marriage" to mean both a civil contract and a sacrament, and they aren't the same thing, either.
We should never have let the civil government take over marriage from the churches in the first place, but, of course, there's all that civil-government stuff about who inherits what that ties into parentage. Henry VIII had at least one son who lived a long and productive life, but he couldn't be an heir because he wasn't legitimate, and, knowing what they knew about genetics and biology at the time, it's understandable that concerns about parentage were, well, a bit medieval.
It goes back to all that language about men "planting seeds" and women being "barren" or "fertile."
I read a book of medical advice for women, written in the mid-19th century, that cautioned against interracial dating in part because, if you married a black man and then wanted to move north, he would be likely to catch cold and die. This advice makes me wonder if the author had ever visited the north, since there were plenty of African Americans, including some native to the Old Country, who lived quite long and well in places like New York and Boston.
But the author — a doctor, mind you — also went on to caution that, once you had sex with a black man, you never knew when some random seed of his might take root in your fertile field. Using the agrarian metaphor, this is like the well-known phenomenon of planting beans in your garden but having "volunteer corn" pop up from a previous year.
As ridiculous as it seems from our standpoint, it was perfectly sensible from his, although I don't suppose it occurred to him that "volunteer corn" sometimes pops up in a year when you haven't tried to plant anything at all, but "volunteer babies" don't. Or possibly women were smart enough to convince their men that they sometimes do. "Yes, I know you've been at the Crusades for five years, but … "
And, of course, science, despite its many discoveries, has never been very good at changing people's beliefs in the things they prefer to believe, especially when it comes to sex.
In any case, it explains why men, and particularly royal men who felt their lands were given to them as a trust from God, were a bit obsessed with being the only farmers to have ever planted seeds in that particular field. And thus why people like Henry Fitzroy could not be heir to the Tudor crown.
The problem, of course, was not Henry Fitzroy but that Henry FitzElizabeth and Henry FitzMary and that Henry FitzEverybodyinthebloodykingdom but never managed to FitHisWife, whoever she might be at the moment, in a way that produced a viable male child.
Royal marriage was a combination of religious and civil law because inheritance was a civil matter. For the Queen, this theory of dormant seeds not only meant that being less than frank about her history could land her in the fires of hell, but that any straying from the marital bed was also treasonous and could cause her to reach that final, lamentable destination quicker than planned.
I'm not saying any of this is fair, of course, just that, given the logic of the era, it's understandable. I blame God, who, in the course of banishing Adam & Eve from the Garden for having eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, should have handed them a piece of fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Sperm and Egg as part of the exit interview. For someone claiming omniscience, He certainly seems to have been making it up as He went along and to have failed to anticipate any number of future circumstances.
In any case, if the Crown Princess of Sweden can marry her fitness instructor and the future heir to Britain can marry the daughter of a family of mail-order merchants, there has been a lot of unclenching of royal sphincters over this whole matter in the past couple of decades and perhaps it's time for the commoners to follow suit.
Fact is, there are only a few things that are of concern to the civil authorities: Property and taxes. The rest is none of the government's damn business, and should be left up to the individuals involved.
My solution ties in perfectly with the current urge to reform the tax code: Simply tie the civil benefits of procreation with the fact of procreation.
There's no reason a man and a woman or a man and a man or a woman and a woman should get a tax break for living together, with or without a certificate from the civil or religious authorities or both. The point of a tax break is to encourage parenthood. We already have formulae for determining whether you can claim a deduction for a child, and it would extend to an adopted child, a natural child (in either the biological or Shakespearean sense) or a dependent grandchild.
Let that be it. Make the benefit considerably larger, but then, that's it. No more "head of household," no more "filing jointly." When the child reaches its majority, the tax benefits are over, not just the deduction, but all of them. You're just two people who co-own a house and a couple of cars and TV sets and some furniture. No "marriage penalty," no "marriage break."
And if you happen to be in a joint contract that, besides confering widespread power of attorney to your partner, also specifies who inherits what, good on you. Otherwise, you can leave it all to the kid, or the dog, or the Nature Conservancy.
Amen.
Now, please rise and join in singing our hymn:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
Comments 5
Comments are closed.