Thursday, June 22, 2006

Married To Myself

The redefinition of civil marriage to encompass homosexual couplings is already threatening to expand to include polygamous unions. And now some pranksters would like it to include single-person marriages:

Now a group of women in Vancouver are going one better than mere polygamy and are moving into previously unexplored realms of narcissism and marrying themselves. One said, “You can't commit to anyone else unless you're in touch with yourself.”

The seven women, ranging in age from 24 to 50, have announced they will gather on a local beach, dressed in wedding gowns, and undergo a mock marriage ceremony.

Melanie Talkington told the Province newspaper she wants “to embrace her femininity” with the mock ceremony, which she describes as “a big theatrical event.” The women described the event as a kind of costume theme party to be held at a park near Jericho Beach.


A joke? Perhaps. But if the sex of the partners is now irrelevant in law, of what greater relevance is number?

Being able to claim spousal benefits for oneself would be incentive enough to change the law for some persons.

For that matter, with marriage redefined as the union of two persons, one could just as easily marry a corporation, or have corporations marry, because corporations have the rights of natural persons in law.

Corporations, instead of hiring employees, could marry them and bind them to spousal obligations instead of simple contractual ones. Employees would also gain added job security since they could not be fired without going through divorce settlements.

The most practical solution might be to incorporate oneself and marry the corporation, thus taking advantage of corporate and spousal tax benefits at the same time.

It would be no more a mockery than same-sex "marriage", and almost certainly far more beneficial to society through the concomitant reduction of the tax burden on all citizens.

Source: LifeSite News

UPDATE: At least one law professor at UWO thinks corporations can marry legally. And we all know that law professors are only slightly less infallible than Supreme Court judges, thought more infallible than the Pope. Surely somebody could take advantage of the federally-funded court challenges program to test his thesis. Any takers?

3 comments:

Mark Richard Francis said...

Are you serious?

Corporations do not have the same rights as we do.

Polygamy is not aided in law, nor held back, by SSM.

In Egan v. Canada, the SC ruled that parliament can withold state benefits to SSM partners, ergo so too to people marrying themselves. There's no context or legal meaning to it since you can't contract yourself in to a union.

Anonymous said...

I love the article. I laughed my head off (at 2:21am, no less).

Mark -- if you haven't got a sense of humour, perhaps you could marry a person or corporation with one.

Joanne (True Blue) said...

Marrying yourself is already happening in a common-law sense. There are lots of single people adopting kids now. How is that not marrying yourself?