(no subject)

[naath]

Yay Obama is still president!

Also yay! 4 states voted for (or against being against) same-sex marriage to be allowed!

Legal notions of family.

I am strongly in favour of allowing same sex couples to get married (also couples where one or both parties are neither male nor female). In the UK we have the campaign for equal marriage who would like to introduce this right here too. I support them (but think they have a kinda nasty website). I don't like calling it "gay marriage" because it's not really - not all same sex couples are gay (some are bisexual) for one thing.

Also I'm in favour of bringing in civil partnerships (or similarly named non-marriage marriage-like things) for all couples; because I have strong personal reasons to not want to get married myself. I'm not in favour of claiming that CPs are "just like marriage" and should be "good enough" for same-sex couples. They really aren't; it's a principle-of-the-thing even if the rights are very-nearly-identical.

I'm also also in favour of extending legal recognition of marriage (and/or CP) to groups of more than 2 people; although I understand that this is rather harder, because (for instance) if you have 3 wives who are all exactly as closely related to you in law then how does the law decide which of them gets to turn off the life support machine? Also if my wife's wife husband divorces her then does he get a share in my worldly wealth (because I agreed, by marrying her, to own all things in common with her)? It's not as simple as writing three names on the marriage cert. (Although note that it's clearly not IMPOSSIBLE; and Islamic jurisprudence presumably has a full set of rules for how one-man-many-wives works).

I'd also like the law to recognise intentional family bonds other than "spouse" (through marriage) and "parent-child" (through adoption); and also the dissolution of blood family bonds in a similar way to divorce. For instance the law recognises my brother's relationship to me if I die intestate or if I'm on life support, especially if our parents are dead; it would be nice if I could "divorce" my brother and/or "adopt" friends as my siblings-in-law (er, except that term already means something). This seems like it might be a legal minefield.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

Trouble is, the Islamic rules governing marriage are somewhat inequitable. We wouldn't want them as part of an egalitarian legal framework for poly relationships (and they wouldn't work at all unless you were prepared to pin down which person got to be the man and which ones had to be the women).

I gather the Netherlands has been looking at legal recognition for poly relationships for many years, but has yet to come to any sensible conclusion. As well as nearness of kin, there are a lot of obvious tricky problems surrounding tax, inheritance, children, welfare, legal testimony, etc.

Personally, I'd be in favour of "flattening" the law a little, to remove quite a lot of the special recognitions that marriage gets. I'm not certain that society should be encouraging people to pair up, still less to breed given the UK would be a rather more comfortable place if there were fewer people. This would have the pleasant side effect of removing some of the complications of recognising poly relationships.

[chess]

It's advantageous for 'the system' to ensure people settle down in small family units and have children, because people with children are less likely to do anything that might endanger their chances of being able to continue to look after their child (like activism or revolution or leaving a job because the conditions are bad) and more likely to work under terrible working conditions (because the incentive 'feed, clothe, shelter and educate my child' is stronger than the incentive 'save up for a nice retirement').

And the smaller the family unit, the less external support they have and the more precarious their position is, so they're even more likely to shut up and fall in line...

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think I pretty much agree with all of this.

[gerald_duck]

Surely, as a single person I'm more exposed than one person in a marriage or civil partnership? I'm hosed if I become redundant, whereas a couple has two people who could be earning.

By that principle, the system should be trying to make everybody become single parents?

[chess]

True, but it does also want to produce productive adults, so there's a balance between keeping people hungry and feeding them just enough.

That or my cynicism gland is working overtime as usual :-).

[gerald_duck]

Mmm. Though experience shows there are more than enough people determined to sprog whatever the state does that I often wonder why we think they need encouragement.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think the world is now a very very different place to what it was 100 or even 50 years ago. Relationships are more diverse, families are more commonly "unusual" as opposed to broadly average. Property and decisions are divided up in ever more complicated ways. Really I suppose we need to go back to basics and look at all the different kinds of mutually-supportive and voluntary relationships people have, the purposes they serve and how the law could best serve them.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Yes, I don't think we should import the sharia framework for multiple wives as is; I just think that it's evidence that it is possible to do, and not just some pie-in-the-sky dream. The main downside of existing legal frameworks are that they are largely one-person-many-spice and do not account for the possibility of varying levels of intimacy between sibling-spice and do not account at all for more sprawling arrangements.

I'm not so much in favour of bribing people to marry with *money* but I think legal marriage is a recognition of a thing which exists anyway - that the couple want to be each other's close family. We inevitably end up giving close family members legal rights (and responsibilities) to/over each other (such as the intestacy laws, questions of giving medical consent for the incapacitated etc.) it is useful to have a legal codification for who counts as "family".

Also I'm in favour of people settling down in pairs or larger groups because people take up less housing space per person that way (usually).

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

While I certainly agree with the desire to widen the relationships recognised by law, I feel that attempting to introduce laws that allow all manner of possible relationships seems to be a futile project, as there are so many possible variants. As far as I can see, the simplest thing to do is to simply remove all the laws that recognises, and privileges, certain range of defined relationships (other than, perhaps, the automatic one of parent/child - and already that is fairly wide, as to the classes of people who can obtain parental rights sand responsibilities.)

All else is probably best organised by personal arrangements and agreements between the involved parties. For this to work all that would be needed is clear judicial recognition, and enforcement, of such agreements. Because, frankly, family law, even with its currently limited range of relationships, is already complicated enough.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Wot she said. It's not the 1950's anymore, whatever the party conference and the Daily Mail believe, and the 'standard' family is now a popular choice - a majority, but not predominant one - among many, many other arrangements.

What we're left with is idiots imposing personal beliefs on others, quoting 'tradition' and using the force of law: we refer to them as social conservatives in polite company, but the label 'Authoritarian'.

A deeper study of the institution of marriage and the actual composition of households over the last five centuries would surprise most of us, even those who know that the Victorians were an historical oddity - but I am certain that traditionalists are capable of ignoring the evidence for everything that was or is traditionally done.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I think a system of more individual agreements would be good; better even than the set of agreements packaged as "marriage".

I do think that would require law-making though; not just a gradual shift in how people arrange their own things. It would be nice if the law would, for instance, view joining the organ donor register as a contract to provide my organs on my death between me and the NHS and not try to involve my parents/husband/siblings/children/etc... but it apparently doesn't; if such a (to me) simple notion as that can't reliably be enforced I don't have much hope...

I would also be concerned about the protections currently afforded by divorce law being removed.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Oh fashions in these things come and go :-p I just want the freedom to be unfashionable.

Were I inclined to pursue historical study I'd be quite interested in looking at historical family set ups; but I'm rather not, being almost useless with such wordy subjects. Maybe you know of a decent popular work?

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

The thing with organs is the fact that (a) dead bodies can't be owned, and (b) contracts expire at death (and it's not really a contract anyway, in English law, as it's a unilateral promise) (c) instructions in a will as to what is to be done with ones body are not binding on executors. So the executors, and medics tend to ask the living to confirm. Although I gather medics are getting better at pressing the fact of the dead would-be donor's wishes.

I do understand what you mean about divorce protections, but I think a general "equitable treatment" doctrine might go a long way to achieve that for more varied relationships. (The place my thoughts run into the quicksand is when it comes to clear provision for children.) And the beauty of the common law is that we could then allow it to unfold in whatever way people wanted to take it, without having to devise and codify them all up front.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Instructions in a will as to what will be done with one's *money* seem to be fairly binding; so long as no-one manages to demonstrate the will-writer was being strong-armed into it. I'm not sure why my money is somehow more mine to dispose of than my body; my family might actually get some *use* out of the money...

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Instructions regarding property are (to a first approximation) absolutely binding -- because most of the law, and succession in particular, is obsessed with property rights above all; personal rights and wishes are afterthoughts. Even matrimonial law is founded on property rights, although it has at least advanced beyond regarding a wife as property.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I just think that it's evidence that it is possible to do, and not just some pie-in-the-sky dream.

I'm not convinced by that argument, alas - I'm not aware of any existing multi-person-marriage framework that doesn't function by regarding one person's wishes as hugely more important than those of all the other people combined (where it doesn't simply discount women as property not worthy of possessing rights). It looks to me a little like arguing that since we have helicopters (equitable 2-person marriage) and jumbo-jets (sharia polygyny), we should be able to build jumbo-sized helicopters (equitable polygamy). I'm not sure the properties are transferable.

I certainly hope you're right (and we can certainly improve on the status quo), I'm just not convinced that there's much evidence to go on at present.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I'm lost in a sea of generics; please give an example of how the husband's wishes are "hugely more important" that wouldn't be easy to remove.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I'd be strongly opposed to any system that goes beyond two people if it was going to give them equality of rights over children. Given the spectacular degree of selfish fuckage TWO parents can inflict on a child, I don't think adding and extra party would help.

Sharia is not a useful model, really, given that it does not recognise marital rape and still has tenets to address witchcraft etc etc.

I've always thought that getting married should be as protracted and expensive (in terms of the legal license, not the faff, fun and frolics) as getting divorced. Say, a 5K tax on the marriage, and a 10K penalty if you divorce within the first decade.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I quite disagree about parents. Yes, there are awful parents, and yes we need rules for removing these people's right over their children (in part, or in full). But if three people are raising a child together then it makes sense for all three of them to be regarded as the child's parents by the law. It is a matter of the law recognising the truth of a situation which *already exists*.

And it doesn't have to involve poly families either - families where parents have separated and now have new partners are also strong affected by this.

I think both marriage (and/or civil partnership) and divorce should be as legally and financially easy as possible. I certainly don't think we should be trying to use the law to bribe people into remaining in relationships which suck.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Why can't my body be defined as part of my property? This is all very odd to me.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I think the law should make it much harder to get together in the first place, rather than keeping people together - more 'don't breed until you know this relationship doesn't suck, and if it does, don't expect the state to pay for the fallout'.

My attitude is definitely shaped by my work though, and I think I feel the same way about elderly people as I do about children. I don't think people should expect the state to rear their children or look after their doddering parents. Extending the range of potential family ties while letting so many in existing 'traditional' roles abnegate their repsonsibilities seems crazy to me. If people want the rights/status/kudos/label etc they should accept that the responsibilities that go with them.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

"What we're left with is idiots imposing personal beliefs on others, quoting 'tradition' and using the force of law: we refer to them as social conservatives in polite company, but the label 'Authoritarian'. "

I spent part of my day yesterday dealing with the fall out from the idiotic personal beliefs of someone who calls herself 'alternative' and 'ecological' and 'hoilistic' foisting her beliefs on her child and risking the child's life in the process. I call her a witless self-indulgent bigot, and there are just as many of those who fit the label 'Liberal' as there are who fit the 'Authoritarian'.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Well, clearly people don't feel any need to marry in order to sprog... so, um, don't think that would work.

I think I have a much broader notion of the role of the state than you do - it certainly includes welfare benefits and health and social care provision for elderly people and being a back-stop on ensuring that children receive adequate care, education, and so on.

I don't think the state currently does very well at handling children who are being failed by their parents - I don't think I'm at all in a position to propose useful guidelines on what should be done there. But I don't think the answer is "the state should do nothing".

[naath.livejournal.com]

Alas a great many people would claim it was entirely her right to force her useless beliefs on her child (because they are often keen to force their useless beliefs on their children).

Also alas the state isn't really a very good parent, sure it's better than an abusive fuckwit; but it's not better than parents that a "merely" a bit crappy. So preventatively taking children away from parents who you think might be shitty doesn't work so well. Even though I often think that raising all children in state nurseries would be better for many than leaving them with their parents.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

Married or not, there are presently financial incentives to sprogging - I'd like to see disincentives.

Necessary welfare and health care is fine for those in desperate need and without families. As the law stands, you are obliged to pay for your children up to the age of 18 (and your income is taken into account for their uni fees etc after that), but only the individual's income is taken into account when they are elderly, so many fairly affluent to actively wealthy people continue to be so, while the state picks up the bill for their parents.

I can't think of a single incidence of the state getting bigger in education in the last thirty years that has has a genuinely beneficial outcome, unless creating taxpayer-funded jobs for white middle class people is classed as such.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I don't like my parents; I have little intention of doing anything to support them in their old age, I'm certainly not letting them move in with me. I think I basically think the whole notion of "biological family" is irrelevant to the way I view the world and the way I live. I don't like it when the state tells me I should care about (and for) people I would rather have nothing to do with just because of some accident of birth.

No, the state isn't very good at being a substitute parent; although of course sometimes "not very good" is better than the alternatives available. If parents are shit, and the state is shit... what other options remain? private companies taking on the parenting of all children? I don't see this as working very well.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I don't think more children should be taken into the care of the state, far from it - cf the account I gave on LJ recently of most of colleagues advocating compulsory sterilisation for some of the most neglectful and abusive parents.

My recipe would be pretty starightforward: Shut down all faith schools, ban persons under the age of 16 from political or religious activities; ban the mutilation of newborns.

The law as it stands is protection enough for the child I mentioned; what terrified me yesterday is the number of my colleagues who seemed to think homeopathy was a perfectly acceptable alternative form of care for a child with a chronis and life-threatening condition, really. Alas we have education system that actively supports the acceptance of half-arsed, bigoted or frankly dangerous views under the banner of 'equality and inclusion'.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

So by the same token, if you accept no responsibility for your parents, you are happy for parents of children they neither like nor want to dump them on the state?

You don't have to like them, and they don't have to like you but I think it would be MUCH fairer to get people to support their parents because we each have two (and I thoroughly detested mine) than for the state to expect me to subsidise other people's choice to have children they can't raise properly.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm broadly in favor of stopping shitty parents from being able to inflict their shitty parenting on children. The problem is that I'm also not in favor of forcing people to undergo medical interventions they don't want - by which I include all forms of contraception. Taking the children into state care is a possible solution, but I'm not convinced it's great.

Using sugar pills to treat life threatening conditions is CLEARLY NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE. Grief people. WHAT.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Well, I have the choice to not have children I don't want... I don't really have the choice to not have parents I don't want do I? (parenticide probably not a reasonable way out).

I'm in favour of parents being able to give their children up for adoption, if that is their preferred choice. I do think the state should step in where adoptive parents can't be found.

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

I typically agree with most of what you say, but being squeamish about compulsory contraception for people who have already demonstrated incompetence at parenting while being relaxed about removing children compulsorily from their incompetent parents is insane. [ETA: I acknowledge that it's our entire society that's insane here, not just you, but I still think it's insane.]

I also disagree about the straightforwardness of giving equal parental rights to multiple adults in parental roles. I don't know any polyamorous families with children who have more than two parents, but from what I read, a child in such a family typically has a much stronger relationship with one parent (often the biological mother) than with any of the others. You suggest that it's similar to the situation in which one parent remarries and the new partner takes a parental role, suggesting that we ought automatically to regard parent's new spouse as another parent: there I have lots of observational experience and will assert that there's very good reason why by default parent's new spouse doesn't get parental rights. While there are exceptions, of course (just as there are exceptions to the "official parents take full parental role" general rule) that role usually just is not the same as a parental role. (And why should it be?)

[naath.livejournal.com]

I don't think we should "automatically" anything with parenting! But I think that a step-parent ought to have the option of becoming a de-jure parent without depriving the genetic parent of that right should they wish to continue to have it. The present situation is that a step-parent may adopt a child, but in order to do so the other current parent (supposing the child has two living legal parents at this point) must give up their parental responsibility (or, I suppose, have it forcibly removed on grounds of their unfitness as a parent). I believe this situation is fundamentally unfair to all of the current parents and the step-parent and the child. I have known more than one family in this position and actually I know zero people trying to raise a child in a polyamorous group marriage situation so I conclude that it is like to be a situation better understood and more empathised with by more people.

It is my body, my choice (provided it co-operates and I can find a consenting provider of sperm). But a child of my body is not my property, and has the right to a decent life which may mean that the state needs to remove that child from my care. I don't really see why this ought to be a controversial position really; the controversial part would be the exact definition of "decent life" and how one might determine whether or not I am providing one.

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

I think that a step-parent ought to have the option of becoming a de-jure parent without depriving the genetic parent of that right should they wish to continue to have it.
True, although I think it should be up to the child at least as much as up to the adult! (Adoption proceedings, at least in Scotland, do take the child's opinion seriously.)

It is my body, my choice (provided it co-operates and I can find a consenting provider of sperm). But a child of my body is not my property, and has the right to a decent life which may mean that the state needs to remove that child from my care. I don't really see why this ought to be a controversial position really; the controversial part would be the exact definition of "decent life" and how one might determine whether or not I am providing one.
No, this is an extremely controversial position. A child isn't property, but feels to a typical parent - even to a typical bad parent, I warrant - as integral and more important than a part of the body. Removing a child involuntarily from a parent is orders of magnitude more damaging to that adult than any forcible medical treatment, and absolutely mustn't be taken lightly, and I say again that being squeamish about enforcing contraception while being happy to contemplate that is insane. We cannot possibly justify such a thing on the grounds of being better for the parent. So we would have to do it on the basis of being better for the child, or better for society. Given how bad the outcomes are on average for children removed compulsorily from incompetent parents, and how expensive in every sense it is for the society, neither of those holds water either. (Your tone suggests that the state can unproblematically provide a decent life for children removed from their parents. I'm afraid it is not so.)

Overall, it would be morally much better if people who can be shown to be unfit parents (I would include as proof a child having just been removed from their care, at least, and probably also convictions for certain crimes especially drug-related) were given compulsory contraception (until such time as they can bring strong evidence of now being in a position to be good parents), rather than the current situation in which nothing stops them from going on to procreate. It can only be a slippery slope argument that stops us, as a society, from taking this decision. We would, indeed, have to be careful about that slope. But you really do not have to know very many people permanently damaged by incompetent parenting by adults and/or the state to think that we're wrong.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Up to the child> yes, I think they child should be consulted supposing they are old enough to, well, express an opinion I guess. I'm sure this is well understood in family courts.

I don't know whether children who are adopted in generally do very badly, of course that'd have to mean taking the child away *at birth* (before the horrid parent was able to inflict damage; and of course tiny babies are much easier to find adoptive parents for) if the parent were known to be awful.

I'm sure having your child forcibly adopted is a horrid thing to happen to any person - but I'm not seeing how being given the choice of "don't give birth" or "have child removed at birth" is worse than being forced into either of those options without choice (such a choice is of course not fantastic, and I'm sure some would say that making the other option SO VERY BAD amounts to not offering a choice at all). I would especially note that all medium-long term contraceptive options (and you aren't going to be forcing people to use condoms at gun point...) have serious negative side effects (suicidal depression, crippling migraine...) for some of the people who use them, being forced to continue on with that would surely be Cruel And Unusual Punishment.

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether children who are adopted in generally do very badly, of course that'd have to mean taking the child away *at birth* (before the horrid parent was able to inflict damage
If the mother is a drug user or heavy drinker, very considerable permanent damage has already been inflicted by birth. Smoking too damages babies in utero permanently.

Here is a paper on outcomes for children adopted from care in the UK:
http://apt.rcpsych.org/content/13/4/305.full
Roughly 20% of such placements encounter such severe problems that, despite the very careful selection and preparation of adoptive parents, they break down.

AdoptionUK thinks (http://www.adoptionuk.org/files/234383/FileName/Educationoutcomesofyoungpeopleincare-AdoptionUKresponse-13September2010.pdf) that all adopted children should get the same priority for schools that children in care do, in recognition of their ongoing problems.

I don't have UK data for outcomes of adoption at birth specifically, but this US page (http://hss.semel.ucla.edu/Programs/Adoption.html) says "Even children adopted at birth have twice the odds of having a mental health diagnosis related to poor adjustment, making them often difficult to manage in school and home settings. Being adopted doubles the chances a child has of entering mental health treatment."

I'm not seeing how being given the choice of "don't give birth" or "have child removed at birth" is worse than being forced into either of those options without choice
The parents (mothers, let's be clear - we have no non-permanent way to prevent bad fathers procreating) we're talking about aren't making a "choice" to go on and have a child, not really, and they certainly don't see themselves as making a choice to have a child and have it removed at birth; in as far as getting pregnant is a choice at all, it is a choice made in the unrealistic hope that this time it will be different. (Here I'm speculating, but I think not very controversially.)

You're right about the side-effects being in some cases cruel and unusual, though.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Parents vs mothers> some men have uteruses, which is why I say parents. IWBNI there were reversible medium/long term birth control options available for people with penises too; although I think if the non-birth-parent is the abusive pos then there exists also the possibility of telling the birth-parent to take the child with them and leave the abuser.

I've not myself been in this position, and I don't believe I know anyone who has been (that is, the position of "being an abusive parent") so I don't really feel qualified to comment on the extent to which their decision to repeatedly have children in spite of the state taking them all away is something they actually choose or not. I guess you are thinking a lot of parents who are abusive and neglectful because they are permanently drunk/stoned/high; which is not the image in mind that I had, so I hadn't really thought about the problems relating to how such an altered mental state causes one to fail to think about the consequences of one's actions.

I wasn't previously aware that adopted-at-birth children suffered such an inflated chance of problems; which certainly would push my thinking towards putting a higher value on "prevent these people having children" than "allow a free choice between birth control and adoption".