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Date published: 1/18/2004
ON PAPER and without forethought as to human nature, civil unions for gays sound harmless. However, civil unions cannot be reserved for "same-sex" couples, and that is the real danger. The California and Vermont civil-union laws, because they are contractual laws, could not pass legal standards unless they were offered to any two people. Many heterosexual couples, when they see that civil unions offer financial advantages while being very easy to dissolve, will choose this alternative to marriage. Thus, civil unions will promote cohabitation not only among homosexuals and lesbians but among heterosexuals as well. The civil unions grant privilege without responsibility. The group most likely to utilize civil unions is not same-sex couples but rather the elderly. About one million elderly adults in America currently cohabit--about half a million couples. They do not marry because of inheritance, tax, and other, mostly financial, issues. Civil unions will legitimize these relationships in the eyes of the states and allow medical and social benefits they do not now have. For example, one partner may have superior medical-insurance benefits because of having worked for the federal government or for a large corporation. His or her partner would become eligible for those same benefits under the terms of a civil union. Civil unions will quickly become popular with young couples as well. A man will be able to share his insurance benefits with his live-in partner but can ask her to leave at any time because they are "not really" married. Within a few decades civil unions could overtake marriages as the preferred arrangement of those who want a live-in relationship. Sound impossible? Right now only 60 percent of marriages are conducted in the church and sanctified. The rest are conducted by government officials such as judges. These marriages are secular in nature and have nothing to do with the biblical base of marriage vows. Why would these 40 percent bother to marry at all if they can have the same "privileges" of marriage in a civil union, without the potential difficulties of divorce? This group will move toward the civil union.
1. Be respectful. No personal attacks.
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