Posts by Idiot Savant
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Although the authorised person that officiates at the ceremony is traditionally a religious official of some sort. It's important not to ignore the context laws actually operate in, rather than just what's written down in our laws.
"Traditionally" in the past - but not so much any more. And egardless, what empowers them to officiate is not that they are religious officials, but a licence from the government.
Which leads me to wonder: hypothetically speaking, if the Marriage Act was updated to be gender-neutral, and two men wanted to get married in a church whose congregation they both belonged to, what would their legal options be in forcing the church to allow the ceremony? Could churches be required to supply a minister of the faith to officiate?
I've blogged about this here, and the legal case is pretty clear cut. Acting as a marriage celebrant is providing a service. Discrimination in the provision of goods and services is outlawe dby the Human Rights Act. So a celebrant couldn't refuse to marry a gay couple. Neither could a religious body refuse to provide a venue which was otherwise made available to members of the public or their congregations for such functions.
In addition to that, there's another limb, which is going to have serious weight in NZ courts because of the Saskatchewan case. Marriage celebrants are public officials. They must therefore conduct ceremonies for whoever asks in a non-discriminatory manner. Arguing otherwise is to argue that a WINZ bureaucrat can refuse to process a benefit application for someone because they're gay or Maori. So, if priests don't want to marry gay couples, they'll have to surrender their role as celebrants.
(In practice, I expect this not to come up. After all, who wants to be married by a celebrant who doesn't want to marry them. But there's an important principle here, and when the day comes, I'll be hounding bigots off the celebrant rolls).
This is the dream for some people, and I think it's also why some older religious conservatives object to legal recognition of gay marriage as marriage.
To put it politely, fuck them. We didn't let old racists stop us from becoming a better society on the racial front, and we shouldn't let old bigots stop us from becoming a better society wrt sexual orientation.
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Associated with? That's generous.
True. Equated with would be more accurate.
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The Catholic church swung the ban hammer immediately, the Methodists hummed-and-hahhed before deciding against it and the Anglicans seemed to leave it up to individual clergy for a while, but then disallowed clergy from performing civil union ceremonies in their official roles last year.
And then christian churches wonder why their religion is associated with bigotry in the public mind. They made their bed, now they get to die in it.
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I'm not in favour of marriage at all, personally - I think it should ALL be civil unions.
If you don't like marriage, don't get married. Problem solved. But telling other people how to live their lives? That's exactly the shit that has been heaped on the gay community by bigots.
And in NZ law, marriage has nothing to do with invisible sky faeries. Its entirely civil. What matters is not whether there is a church and a priest, but whether you fill out the paperwork and make an appropriate statutory declaration before a government official.
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to Idiot Savant,
And, now that the snark is out of the way (seriously, can we have this discussion without people trolling about the "slippery slope of sin" or trying to sow division by concern trolling, or actual lawyers just being dicks by asking people to do something they're perfectly capable of doing better themselves) then the answer is "sure". How consenting adults choose to arrange their social relationships is their own affair. Relationship law exists solely for convenience, to reduce the legal hassle for the parties involved. Our law should provide that convenience, while leaving people free to pursue the sorts of relationships they want to.
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Can you tweak it to allow for plural marriage?
Go and troll somewhere else.
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But perhaps now is the time for the idea to be formalised into a private member's bill.
Which is conveniently already drafted (available in other formats on request, and I'll happily tweak it). So all we need is an MP brave enough to put it in the ballot. So come on, who's got the balls for this? Who wants to do what is right?
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After I finished the book last night, I mused on a thought experiment: if a great state was behaving entirely virtuously, and in accordance with its public positions, would its foreign service officials still sometimes need to speak in confidence, if only to help and protect human rights and democratic activists suffering under less enlightened regimes?
Sure. The problem is precisely that our government's don't behave virtuously, and use secrecy to hide the fact and to avoid being held to account. And there's a NZ example of this just today, with the government exposed as having lied to us (and potentially lied to Parliament) over its negotiating position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership FTA.
If we repealed s6(a) of the OIA (the "international relations") clause, or made it subject to the public interest like the others, then the sorts of information cited above, which everyone would agree should be protected, could be, while giving us a much better picture of - and therefore much greater control over - what our government was doing. But that would require the government to voluntarily yield power to the people. And that is somethign politicians as a class a loath to do.
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The Herald finally wakes up:
Urewera raids: Lone judge to decide cases
Most of the 18 people charged after the Urewera "terror" raids have been denied a jury trial.
Fifteen of the group, who are facing firearms charges stemming from police raids in 2007, will be tried before a judge alone when their case goes ahead in August.
Suppression has been lifted on the decision, after the Crown argued that it was in the public interest to know the sort of trial the 18 defendants would go through.
Human rights activists have decried the ruling, saying the high-profile, controversial case should be decided by a jury of peers.
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Hard News: Behaving badly at the bottom…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It does strike me that the judge could have revealed more of his reasoning, even if only by structuring the text of the original decision to facilitate that course.
Sadly, those structuring decisions mean that her reasoning is not subject to public scrutiny, and some bits of it are not going to receive the contempt and outrage they thoroughly deserve.