Monday, April 13, 2009

You're Freakin' Me Out

chairm, edio, opine, paternity, presumption, same sex, gay, traditional, marriage, homophobia, homosexual,
Chairm, over at the Opine Editorials, is really starting to freak me out. Let me put it this way: I showed a gay friend chairm's latest, What is the basis for the presumption of paternity?, and his reaction was, "He thinks about gay sex way more than I do- and I have gay sex!"


The cultural, traditional, and legal presumption of marital paternity is based on the sexual relationship of husband and wife. And? for those of you who haven't seen this out of an Opiner before, lucky you!, the way paternity works in a marriage in the US is that it is assumed if a couple is married. In other words, any child the wife gives birth to is automatically assumed to be the husband's.

This rule was developed at a time when no medical tests existed to prove paternity. In addition, a husband could not testify that he had no access to his wife at the time of conception. A husband could rebut the marital presumption only by proving his impotence or his absence from the country.

By the late nineteenth century, U.S. courts began to allow the defense of impossibility to rebut the marital presumption. The question of paternity became a fact that could be rebutted by clear and convincing evidence that procreation by the husband was impossible.

This isn't exactly a hard and fast rule anymore, as shown above. We have DNA tests now.

The criteria for rebutal of the presumption are based on the opposite-sexed nature of human procreation and conjugal relations. no, they're not. they're based on DNA testing or the idea that if one was incapable of performing a sex act at the appropriate time, one probably wasn't the father. I suppose this is based in the nature of procreation, in the sense the argument is about the result of said procreation, but no, not really.

However, this does not apply to same-sexed sexual behavior from which there arises no possible presumption of paternity to rebut nor to recognize. i can't even figure out where this is going. clearly, we're not discussing gay males, unless chairm knows something i don't know. we must be discussing lesbians. first of all, exactly how many married lesbians does chairm suppose will be having illicit hetero sex and then ending up pregnant, to their spouse's dismay? i'm going with not that many.

If society were to treat the sexualized male-female relationship the same as the sexualized male-male and the female-female relationship types, how could the marital presumption of paternity be sustained without discriminating (justly or unjustly) on the basis of sexual behavior? making marriage contain the idea of same sex as well as hetero marriage solves the entire problem. paternity/maternity ends up the same in a same sex marriage as in a hetero marriage, and no one is being discriminated against. and we're done. problem solved.

or not. When it comes to the presumption of paternity, must society be shackled by a fear of being anything but indiscriminate? If yes, why? Does that mean abolishing this presumption? wow, way to raise problems that don't exist, and then create problems from those problems. why should society be anything but nondiscriminatory? why abolish the presumption? marriage is marriage is marriage, the presumption applies. done.

If not, then, what, if anything, could be the alternative nonsexual and non-behavioral basis for this presumption, at law? okay, we already dealt with this. see above.

Perhaps the marital presumption of paternity (which is aimed at the class of sexual relationships which are male-female) could survive the imposition of SSM, if it ever came to that, through the reanimation of the once disputed doctrine of seperate but equal. or, we could just declare all marriages equal, presumption applies and we're done. i just don't see the problem with this.

Abolish it or retain it, the marital presumption of paternity is a knot that SSM arugmentation has yet to resolve. because there is no knot, except in your own head. asshat.

8 comments:

  1. Hahahahah! Really now?
    So, let me get this straight. He believes that people will no longer be able to prove their kids are theirs if they are born when a couple is married because of the gays? Wow. That's just weird.
    The gays are really coming to take your kids if you are this guy.

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  2. I'm fairly certain that if I sneeze, it's the gays' fault. All of them. Somehow. And gay sex somehow invalidates hetero sex. or something.

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  3. Oh, but its counterfeit sex!

    So CLEARLY it will be hard with all the counterfeit children running around all the counterfeit families in all these counterfeit marriages with their counterfeit love.

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  4. "He thinks about gay sex way more than I do- and I have gay sex!"

    Many anti-gays do, I think. If anyone's perverted, it's them for thinking about homosexuality and other people's sex lives so much, actually.

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  5. which is lowering the value of real children, real families, real marriages and real love. always check children for the security strip that clearly says, when held up to the light, "the product of hetero sex".

    you know how often i think about other people having sex? exactly as often as other people mention it. otherwise, i really don't care.

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  6. pf: Exactly! I almost never think about other people having sex, unless someone is talking to me about their sex life. And I'm not even having sex, so you'd think it would be on my mind. These people are more concerned with sex, who's having it, and in what position, than most porn sites are.

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  7. our roomate's girlfriend just had a baby (day before yesterday, actually) (and i am so fucking pissed about it. i clearly stated to her, back in october, that she could stay here for a month or two until she found a job, but that under *NO* circumstances could there be a baby here. guess fucking what? there is a baby here. in a two bedroom townhouse with 4 adults. its not even *legal* goddamnit! but because Pete doesn't want to be mean, she continues to live here rent-free, and now with a goddamned two day old infant)

    erm. anyway. i had a point.

    oh! right. so, we know for a FACT that this baby's father is not our roommate. this woman and our roomate did not start dating until she was FOUR MONTHS PREGNANT.

    and yet, they had a HUGE fight with the hospital to not put roomate's name on the birth certificate because he was her boyfriend.
    WTF? with all the Jerry Springer and Maury and other "not your baby daddy" type-shows, where did this presumption come into play?

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