SAME-SEX UNIONS

[For about the past ten years, there has been an extensive campaign in Europe, North America and some other countries to grant formal legal recognition to same-sex unions, relationships between people of the same sex. This MercatorNet backgrounder discusses the moral and practical difficulties of allowing gay couples to marry. The author, Dwight Duncan, is a professor of constitutional law at Southern New England School of Law in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Over the years, Mr Duncan has participated in litigation as attorney for amici curiae in opposition to so-called same-sex marriage in Hawaii, Vermont, Massachusetts and New Jersey. He has written extensively on the topic and given expert testimony to the Canadian government. ]

#182 Hogar Categoria-Matrimonio y Familia

by Dwight Duncan, a professor of constitutional law at Southern New England School of Law
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Background

For about the past ten years, there has been an extensive campaign in Europe, North America and some other countries to grant formal legal recognition to same-sex unions, relationships between people of the same sex. Whether this legal recognition takes the form of “marriage” or a marriage-like status variously called “civil union” or “domestic partnership,” the intent of this campaign, waged largely in the media and in courts and legislatures around the world, is to officially sanction and endorse homosexual relationships and put them on the same level as the spousal relationship between husband and wife. In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to recognize same-sex “marriage,” and Belgium, Canada and the state of Massachusetts in the United States have since followed suit. This social experiment runs counter to the universal consensus of history, across wide divides of geography, religion and culture, as to the nature and meaning of marriage. Historically, marriage has always been understood to be an enduring relationship between a man and a woman and to have some intrinsic relationship to the possibility of having children and thus providing them with a both a mother and a father. Even traditions that have recognized polygamous unions have always understood them to involve both sexes and not just one.

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