Sir James Munby has opened the debate on the rights of cohabitees, and on the procedures for divorce. Let that debate be joined in earnest.
Never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated same-sex couples, or even to unrelated couples generally.
Never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated same-sex couples, or even to unrelated couples generally.
Furthermore, any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce, and any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage which it conducted should be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly.
Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses.
There should be similar provision relating to the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.
Entitlement upon divorce should be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault be proved.
That would be a start, anyway.
I read about this idea. If this idea of rights for cohabitees is adopted, how does cohabitation then differ from marriage. At that point, the option to choose to live together outside wedlock is abolished. Who then decides if 2 people are "living together" or just living together? Do we have to check the bedsheets?
ReplyDeleteYes its another horrific idea from the Liberal Elite that would just extend state power even further.
ReplyDeleteThe state would now be able to intrude even into the intricacies of casual unmarried relationships, even people who have only been dating a few weeks.
The complexity of working out what constitutes "cohabitation" would require the state to have unprecedented power to pry into private lives (possibly "checking the sheets" indeed).
It would give the state the capacity to define human relationships and seize private property on a flimsy pretext.
Many are put off marriage by the easy divorce laws which render private property vulnerable go swift state seizure.
If private property isn't even safe for "cohabitees" people are going to start bringing lawyers with them on the first date.
We may as well hand all our belongings to the state at birth.
ReplyDeleteIt shows the judge's pure contempt for private property and British liberty that he could even conceive of this.
What will be the cohabitees equivalent of "pre-nups"? Will we all have to consult a lawyer before staying on a friend's sofa?
It's like Nick Cleggg's horrible, horrible, proposed "wealth tax".
That would have given the state the right to tax everything twice-from paintings to jewellery and furniture.
So good we had to tax it twice.
Can you imagine all those prying tax inspectors snooping around the house and rummaging in your drawers to check you weren't hiding a "taxable" necklace or portrait?
We might as well declare British liberty and private life dead.
Where has our spirit gone?
Or are we going to roll over and become another Cuba?
As I said in the post, let opposite-sex couples have civil partnerships if they don't want to get married. In return for everything else in this post.
ReplyDeleteBut allowing that would weaken marriage, in the same way that bad money drives out good money, because it's easier.
ReplyDeleteFaced with a choice between the harder alternative (pre-1969 marriage) and easily-dissolved civil partnerships, no prizes for guessing which one most people would go for.
And they would be welcome to it. They don't get married now.
ReplyDeleteJust so long as our people also got what they needed.
That's politics.
You clearly don't get it.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is the 1969 divorce laws-not the absence of civil partnerships for heterosexual people.
The purpose of social policy ought to be to encourage an increase in marriage-not an increase in civil partnerships.
Those are people who don't get married anyway, and who never will, because they just don't believe in it.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand why they would civil partnerships instead. But they do.
So, if letting them have that is the price of letting our people have this, then so be it.
If they "don't get married anyway and never will" it's odd that they did get married before 1969.
ReplyDeleteFamily breakdown only exploded after that, and has been soaring ever since.
95% of British marriages endured until death in 1960. And even pregnant teens were typically married.
Now 25% of all UK children are raised without a father. The number rises every decade.
And cohabitees will soon outnumber the married.
Since that was certainly not the case in the Britain of recent memory, there is no reason to give into it.
No, they did not get married before 1969. People like that never got married.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, at least outside certain religious minorities, which were heavily predominant in certain areas, lifelong marriage to the same person, or serial cohabitation complete with children, were the norm below a certain socioeconomic level from the Industrial Revolution, or even the Reformation, until into the twentieth century.
The women routinely took their partners' surnames, and the children were given them, so people glancing at it all now assume that they were married.
But they were not. And if and when they split up, as they quite frequently did, it became fully apparent that they were not married.
As in the matter of married women with children's not going out to work, there is nothing in the least historically normative about the 1950s.
Then how come the number of unmarried people and single parents has skyrocketed since the 1960's?
ReplyDeleteThe number of unmarried adults now outnumbers the number of married adults for the first time since records began.
25% of children are now raised without a father-three times as many as in the 70's.
In some council estates it is 80%.
Additionally, how come the divorce rate trebled in the decade after 1969?
ReplyDeleteThat should of course have read, "Moreover, at least outside certain religious minorities, which were heavily predominant in certain areas, lifelong non-marriage to the same person, or serial cohabitation complete with children, were the norm below a certain socioeconomic level from the Industrial Revolution, or even the Reformation, until into the twentieth century."
ReplyDeleteOf course divorce became more common once it was made easier. But to be divorced, you have to have been married in the first place.
Huge numbers of people never were.
That didn't not stop them living together, taking each other's surnames, having children, and so on.
There has only been a "sky-rocketing" since an historically aberrant period that began no earlier than the First World War.
And even during that, any number, we shall never know exactly how many, of couples were and are assumed, by those who wish to see the world that way despite knowing better, to have been married when in point of fact they were not.