I was watching television with my wife the other night and it reminded me why I don’t typically watch sitcoms. For starters, all the men are such absolute idiots, you wonder how they manage to stand upright, much less hold a high paying job. But that has nothing to do with this post…
What brought this on was the season finale of “Rules of Engagement“. As is typical in this type of show, they try to wrap up most of the season’s loose ends and create a bit of buzz for the next season: babies born, couples wed, that sort of thing. Nothing wrong with any of that, even if one of the couples being wed was same sex. Actually, it is the same sex wedding that bothered me, but not for the reason you might think. Both parties in the wedding are actually straight, they’re getting married because one has lost his work visa to stay in the country and the other is trying to help out. It’s a spur of the moment thing in a hospital chapel and that is what bugs me. In New York state, there’s a 24 hour cooling off period after you get the marriage license before you can actually get married, you can’t just get married on the spur of the moment. Now I realize that the writers are probably LA based and may not have known this, but you’d think that someone would have have pointed it out. The other problem is DOMA (the Defense Of Marriage Act), I personally think it’s a bad idea (the states should be able to decide these things for themselves), but it means that same sex marriages aren’t recognized for immigration purposes. So not only is the marriage a sham legally, it’s not even a useful one! But since it appears the show has been cancelled,it doesn’t really matter.
For the record, I think the state should get out of the marriage business entirely. All legal marriages should be “civil unions”, if you want a “sacred marriage”, you do that separately in the church or religious establishment of your choice. That way religious establishments aren’t forced to perform (or even acknowledge) marriages they don’t condone, but you can still have the legal benefits. The civil union would be a simple (or not so simple) contract between the two parties outlining their rights and obligations as a married couple. Deities need not be invoked or involved. For those wanting a religious ceremony, they can have a church wedding with the attendant vows and ceremony, but that wedding won’t be legally binding until they sign off on the civil contract.