In California, like in most states, all it takes for a bride to take her new husband’s last name is filling out a form. But for Mike Buday to take his new wife Diana Bijon’s last name, Buday “must file a petition, pay more than $300, place a public notice for weeks in a local newspaper and then appear before a judge.”
Rather than going through all that, the Bijons sued California for sex discrimination. As a result, a state legislator is proposing a new law making it equally easy for husbands to take wive’s last names, as vice versa.
Only six states — Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York and North Dakota — have statutes establishing equal name-change processes for men and women when they marry. […] The Census Bureau does not keep figures on how many U.S. men are taking their brides’ names. But clearly it happening more and more. Milwaukee County, Wis., Clerk Mark Ryan estimated that one in every 100 grooms there now takes the name of his wife.
1 in 100 is, frankly, more than I would have guessed. The article also mentions that about 20% of brides elect to keep their own last names, up from about 3% in 1975.
Thanks to Bean for the tip!
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Thought you might be interested in how this all went down on Free Republic, which for those of you who don’t know is inhabited by a bunch of people who are mostly well to the right of me. They all thought that California’s procedures were dead wrong, and that the state had no business putting more barriers to a man taking his wife’s name than it did a wife taking her husband’s name.
Yeah, that is probably a libertarian site??? While most of the libertarians these days seem to fall on the conservative side; there are definitely some areas where they are not very conservative.
Heh. Interesting to see that gubmint-hatred trumps sexism with the Freepers.
I wouldn’t say that a call for fair play equates to government hatred.
Free Republic bills itself as a grass-roots conservative site, and very carefully separates conservative philosophy from the Republican Party, whom many of it’s users think have betrayed true conservativism. There’s plenty of libertarians there as well. “That government governs best which governs least” and “No man’s purse is safe when the legislature is in session” are philosophies well admired there.
The structure is different from here. Consider what this site would look like if any of it’s users (having registered, free, for the privilege) could initiate a guest post. People extract a few paragraphs from a news story on the web, post it with the story’s title and some commentary on their own, and then anyone is free to comment on it. The operator of the site runs it off of voluntary pledges; this quarter’s pledge drive’s target is $70,000, and if history tells he’ll likely get it. Fifty posts might scroll by in an hour, every hour during the day.
There are some real mouth-breathers that post on there, but there are also some thinking people. For example, a posting on Islam will get comments from virulent Islamophobes, but you’ll also see some very intelligent discussions of the different expressions of Islam around the world. Stories usually come up there one or two days before you’ll see them in the MSM (= “MainStream Media”), and the users delight in finding information that the MSM has either ignored or missed. This is the site where people first figured out that the memo that Dan Rather publicized as being from President Bush’s commander back when Bush was in the National Guard was actually recently written on Microsoft Word as a hoax that Rather fell for.
Perusing it would definitely raise the blood pressure of a lot of people here, but as I say you’ll see things come up well before you’ll see them elsewhere.
I wouldn’t say that a call for fair play equates to government hatred.
In a vacuum? No.
I wouldn’t say that government hatred abounds on Free Republic. I would say that distrust of governmental tendency to assume power it was never meant to have does. The current exhibit #1 for that would be the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision. The Constitution was designed to carefully limit the power of the Federal government, but all the mechanisms of government are exercised to get around those limitations and invade all aspects of private life. They forget that the philosophy this country was founded on is that rights are granted by God, not government.
rights are granted by God
I think I see some of the confusion clearing up right there.
How so?
Thanks for the update on this, Amp. And for my ‘learn something every day’ moment:
Woo Hawaii!
RonF, what you’re telling me is that it’s a discussion boards for Christians with a libertarian bent.
As an activist lawyer in California, it will be of professional interest to see if law is changed first by the litigation or the legislation. I do not think there is a welk’s chance in a supernova that this would pass constitutional scrutiny under the federal standard for sex discrimination, and the standard for analyzing sex discrimination under the California Constitution is even stricter than the federal standard. The only reason it is still on the books is inertia – no one has challenged it in at least 30 years.
This case is also interesting as a good example of how most laws that discriminate facially against men are actually intended to stigmatize women. I remember this point being made by O’Conner in a case involving a man whom Mississippi would not let enroll in the state nursing school, until the Supremes forced them to.
RonF-
The constitution is very clear as to the source of the rights and authority it grants, and it is not God, it is We the People.
The Declaration does declare that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, but:
1. The Declaration of Indepence has no legal authority; and
2. It was written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, a naturalistic deist who believed that the claims of miricles in the Gospels were the exagerations of Jesus’s biographers. The original intent of Jefferson et. al. is FAR different than the connotation currently of claiming that our rights are granted by God.
Decnavda, if that is true (that rights are granted by the People, rather than God, or by natural law if you prefer the Jeffersonian view), then does that not completely destroy the often-made claim that we should not hold votes on questions of “civil rights”?
If rights come from the people, then the people can alter, add, or remove them. If they come from some source outside humanity, then they are (or at least can be) immutable and inalienable.
Robert –
Regardless of what *I* think, I was RonF’s claim that philosophy this country was founded on was that rights are granted by God.
I actually believe rights derive from a varity of sources. Some rights are a matter of deontological morality, what might be roughly equivilent to natural law, some are subject to the vote of the social contractors, and some are proceedurally necessary to kepp the social contract (democracy) running smoothly. Operationally however, all of these have to be established by a constitution, preferably written, that enshrines as many of the rights as possible, and then is structured to be difficult, but not impossible, to change by popular action. The U. S. Constitution, written by humans, is far from perfect (the electorial college?!?), and there are many changes and additions I would like to see, but I have yet to see a better constitution in actual operation in history.
That is, I was refuting RonF’s claim.
then does that not completely destroy the often-made claim that we should not hold votes on questions of “civil rights”
As you know, the “often-made claim” is that we should not make civil rights something decided like a popularity contest. Whether or not one believes in God, God is not the law of the land; the Constitution is. If The People wanted to re-institute slavery, we have the power to do that–it’s just very difficult because we’d have to amend the Constitution substantially.
(I admit that I don’t understand the God Gave Us Rights argument, in that it fails to note that most of the texts at issue refer to God giving us obligations; and the rights we do get do not include limits on government.)
The Declaration of Independence is not a document stating the laws in the United States. But it does clearly set forth the philosophy underwhich we separated from the English Crown and declared not only our independence but, more importantly in this context, our right to do so. It was intended to justify to the entire world, in philosophical terms (not legal ones, we had no legal right to do so), our radical step of throwing off externally imposed authority and asserting that only the governed had the right to define what their government should be. The question of where we got the right to do that and where people get all their rights thus had to be answered. And it did, here:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, …
My emphasis added.
So: according to the DoI, rights come from God, not the government. The use of the word “Creator” instead of “God” (which, in the context of the day, would have been understood to be the Judaeo-Christian deity) made sure that no one religion could claim supremacy of place. According to the DoI, the job of the government is not to grant rights, but to secure those rights that God has granted. The authors and signers of the document were perfectly content to let a given individual interpret “Creator” as they pleased, so that Christians, Jews, Moslems and Deists could all accept it.
Now, you may not agree with that philosophy. Here in the U.S. anyway, that’s your right. But it is very definitely the philosophy that the U.S. was founded on.
Certainly the Constitution does not say this. But, then, the Constitution makes no comment on the source of rights at all. That’s not it’s job. It’s job was to define which particular ones of those God-given rights would be secured by a limited Federal government and what powers it would have to do so, with the presumption (as shown in Amendments IX and X) that any powers not specifically granted to the Federal government could not therefore be denied to exist and would devolve to the States and the people.
The Federal government, or any government, does not have rights; it has the power to secure rights. Rights belong to the people, and they exercise those rights to define the power of the government to secure those rights for them in such circumstances as they think it more efficient for the government to do so than for each citizen to do so individually.
The Constitution doesn’t address what the source of rights are. That was done in the DoI. There was no need to re-address the issue, so it wasn’t.
(which, in the context of the day, would have been understood to be the Judaeo-Christian deity)
There is no such religion as “Judeo-Christianity”. The Christian conception of God and the Jewish conception of God are not identical. If you’re looking at the “context of the day”, you’ll have to go to Jefferson’s deism. The idea that Jefferson wanted Christians, Muslims and Hindus to all put their views of the Eternal as a gloss on his document is a thoroughly modern approach.
The DoI is also pretty clear that the government is of the people, not in opposition to the people. It doesn’t enunciate specific rights other than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”–nothing in there about bearing arms or quartering soldiers in wartime, and I’m not sure how you get capital punishment or imprisonment around the DoI’s language.
mythago writes:
I don’t know that something close to Jefferson wanting Christians, Moslems and Hindus etc. isn’t accurate.
Jefferson’s Deism isn’t like atheism. He clearly believed in G-d, and he clearly believed that the Christian g-d was somehow related to the concepts he expressed in the DoI —
Deism, and particularly Jefferson’s variety which was common amongst many of the Framers, is not so much about believing that there is some other deity, as rejecting aspects of Christian theology which seemed incorrect or, to be blunt, made up by someone along the way.
Jefferson was not anti-Christian, and he said this in very plain English. Jefferson believed that the clergy, somewhere along the lines, had corrupted Christianity and that’s what he opposed. He stated countless times, often in protest of being declared a non-Christian, that he was a Christian, that be believed Christian doctrine superior to all others, and that he believed in the G-d of the Christians and the Jews.
This isn’t a modern interpretation — Jefferson was rather explicit, and at times quite forceful, in his belief that the Liberties he wrote about were something that came from G-d, and that the G-d they came from was the Christian one.
Jefferson considered himself a “Christian” in the same way one might consider oneself a Confusian or a Marxist: He believed in the philosophy esposed by the guy. It is NOT true “that he believed in the G-d of the Christians and the Jews.” He, like many of the Founders, believed in God and thought that Christ had described the best way to honor that God and God’s creation. That hardly changes my point. Hell, if you limit Christian theology to just the four gospels, *I* think Christian doctrine is superior to all other religious doctrine. (With the posible exception of some forms of Budhism I need to learn more about.)
The real argument here is whether the DoI & Constitution are products primarily of a Christian culture or an Enlightenment culture. And we may as well stop here, because those who believe we are a Christian nation instead of an Enlightenment one (or worse, try to claim that the Enlightenment was a Christian movement), will not be convinced by a world’s worth of evidence, because they have not been.
How about … an Enlightenment culture which was inseparable from a Christian culture?
Really — Jefferson made it painfully clear to anyone who claimed he wasn’t a Christian that he viewed himself as a Christian, the Christian G-d as the only deity in the universe, and these United States as somehow under G-d’s sovereign control, as was the rest of the planet.
(For the record, I’m Jewish, so I’m certainly not engaged in special pleading, only reported what I’ve read of Jefferson’s own words.)
If you’re looking at the “context of the day”, you’ll have to go to Jefferson’s deism.
The context of the day (and to some extent, today) is that when you use the word “God”, people tend to think you mean either the Jewish or Christian God. The use of the word “Creator” leaves the question as to what you mean more open.
It doesn’t enunciate specific rights other than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
No, but what it does say is “among these are”, which seems to me that there clearly are others.
–nothing in there about bearing arms or quartering soldiers in wartime, and I’m not sure how you get capital punishment or imprisonment around the DoI’s language.
I’m actually not sure where you’re coming from here. But the ability to bear arms enables one to protect one’s own life and liberty from threats from other individuals or from the government, and the power of the government to imprison and even execute criminals permits society at large to perserve the liberty and happiness of the public. Personally, I don’t favor capital punishment, BTW. Could you be more clear what your point is here?
That is, I was refuting RonF’s claim.
Decnavda, I fail to see how your comment even addresses my claim. The Constitution is a legislative document written in conformance with a particular philosophy. It was not written to spell out that philosophy. The Declaration of Independence was explicitly written to spell out that philosophy. You have not addressed that issue.
The Constitution was written to give us the form by which the government intended to assist the governed in securing their rights was to be structured. But there is nothing in it that addresses the source of those rights. That makes sense; that wasn’t its objective.
Please tell me how you think you’ve refuted my claim.
Mythago said:
I admit that I don’t understand the God Gave Us Rights argument, in that it fails to note that most of the texts at issue refer to God giving us obligations; and the rights we do get do not include limits on government.
You can look up John Locke; that’s where a lot of the framers of our government got their ideas. But in any case, while you may not understand the argument, that’s the philosophy that we were founded under.