Nick and Sarah Jensen have announced that they will get a divorce if marriage equality is allowed in Australia, which is simply the most childish, spiteful response to the situation that I’ve heard of yet. It’s like, if stupid people were allowed to marry, I’d have to top Jensen by divorcing my intelligent wife and tearing up my Ph.D.
The logic behind their decision is inane.
Mr Jensen goes on to explain the divorce plan, where the pair will continue to live together, have more kids, and refer to each other as husband and wife, but will legally end their marriage because they believe
marriage is not a human invention.
Our view is that marriage is a fundamental order of creation. Part of God’s human history. Marriage is the union of a man and a woman before a community in the sight of God. And marriage of any couple is important to God regardless of whether that couple recognises God’s involvement or authority in it,he writes.In the piece, Jensen describes the intervention of the state into marriage as
odd, and says he and his wife refuse to recognise the government’s regulation of marriage if its definition includes same sex couples.
If our federal parliament votes to change the timeless and organic definition of marriage later on this year, it will have moved against the fundamental and foundational building block of Australian society and, indeed, human culture everywhere,he writes.
All right then. I’m going to have to call up my wife and tell her that she’s too clever to be in this relationship, and I’ll have to rummage around in the basement for my diploma, because the numpties have clearly taken over marriage.
Marriage is an entirely human invention, and if it’s so timeless and organic
, and the foundational building block
of human culture, how come it varies so much in different societies, and even in subgroups within a single culture? Has this guy ever managed to pull his head out of his ass and look around him at something more than the lining of his own colon to see that his premises are patently false?
But there are smarter, more compassionate people around. Annie Haggar is getting married, and she and her fiance are friends of Nick and Sarah…but they’ve disinvited the bigoted couple from their wedding. And she makes a very good argument for why it’s unfair for Nick and Sarah to act as they do.
We’ve lived together quite happily for the last five years as a de facto couple. I didn’t expect to feel different when we decided to get married, but I do.
It felt different for my fiance when he decided he wanted to ask me to marry him, and it feels different now that I’ve accepted his proposal. We have known for years that we will spend the rest of our lives together, have children, watch them grow and grow old. But knowing that someone wants to marry you, and that you want to marry them — something changes when you know that.
I’m sure everyone already married or currently engaged knows exactly that feeling, and how joyous declaring and celebrating that with your family and friends is. I’m entirely certain Nick and Sarah remember this feeling, too — and it’s a happiness Nick has decided some people should explicitly be denied.
Marriage isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine — you need to live your life as your conscience tells you to do. But some people flourish in marriage, and it isn’t only heterosexuals, so it is not humane to deny people mutual happiness.
Haggar also makes a good point: the Jensens are grandstanding — they want to be divorced in name only, while living as a married couple.
Nick and Sarah are going to have to jump back over their broomstick on the threshold if they’re going to get divorced. Google ‘divorce in Australia’, and in three clicks you’ll know that to apply for divorce you have to prove that you have been separated for 12 months, and there is no reasonable likelihood of resuming married life. While you can live under the same roof and still be considered ‘separated’, you need to provide evidence that married life has broken down irreparably.
Given that Nick and Sarah have as publicly as possible said they’re going to still refer to each other as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, are going to try to have more children together and that for all intents and purposes, their lives will continue unchanged as a de facto couple, I’m pretty confident they have zero chance of getting a divorce.
Do I even need to get into the poisonously god-soaked rationale for Jensen’s idiotic decision? No, I do not. You know how much contempt I have for that kind of crap.
Ignorant, petty, unemphatic and hypocrites.
There is already a facebook event set up to celebrate their divorce.
Hilariously, their divorce won’t be legal if they intend to cohabit afterwards…
http://roygbiv.jezebel.com/straight-couple-trying-to-divorce-over-gay-marriage-can-1710622776?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
Well, this will certainly free them up for their new gay relationships. Let’s face it, there marriage must have just been an act of convenience to tied them over until gay marriage was made legal. (*sarcasm intended)
I’ll bet anyone bragging rights that they don’t go through with it.\
So God approves of divorce now?
Annie Haggar: “We’ve lived together quite happily for the last five years as a de facto couple. I didn’t expect to feel different when we decided to get married, but I do. ” This.
After living together for 15 years I didn’t really to expect to feel differently when we got engaged and then got married, but I did. It was a deeply sublime and moving experience.
And This:
Marriage isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine — you need to live your life as your conscience tells you to do. But some people flourish in marriage, and it isn’t only heterosexuals, so it is not humane to deny people mutual happiness.
QFFT !
No human being should be denied that opportunity by ignorant, bigoted, idiotic “dogs in the manger” like Nick and Sarah Jensen.
Funny…the bible has a lot more to say about divorce than homosexuality.
Trigger alert – bible babble ensues.
The drunken homophobes I heard hinting that they’d rape married gay people’s children in order to “cleanse” them of their parents’ “perversion” beat the Jensen couple by several orders of magnitude in the spiteful department.
Who are these people? Why are they getting the time of day?
This is an attack on the institution of sham divorce
Sham divorces have a long and noble tradition as a mechanism for financial fraud, and it just breaks my heart to see people desecrating that to shove their petty bigotry down our throats. We need a constitutional amendment to fix this. Also it needs to apply to Australia somehow.
Maybe after the Jensens have been divorced for a couple of years and have had to deal with the complications of not being legally married*, they’ll understand why being married in the eyes of the governemt is so important to so many gay couples.
Not that I expect them to change ther views, but stranger things have happened
*(I’m not familar with Austrailian law, but I’d assume that is is roughly similar to US law with regards to benefits to married couples)
I mean, could those people pick up their own bible or, you know, a history book, once in a while?
Their timeless and organic fountational building block has been defined and redefined so many times it’s hard to count.
Also kudos* to Annie Haggar
*Very pretty animals
I suspect they take the “slippery slope” arguments a bit too literally.
As in:
So they’re just trying to exemplify it.
I was tempted to go all “strawmanny” and claim they are shills of the big anti-gay-marry lobby we have here in Murica; who are always claiming, “gay marriage will RUIN all marriages”.
But I avoided That slippery slope. See, it ain’t too slippery after all.
Somebody please tell me why we, or anyone else for that matter, care what these two nobodies do or don’t do with their own marriage? Leave them to wallow in their bigotry.
Sorry, we need to point and laugh at them. Ridicule is required for outlandish ideas.
1. They are very funny in a sick sort of way. Other than laughing at them, no one gives a rat’s ass what two Australian religious kooks do.
2. Fundie xians lie a lot. I doubt they will actually do it.
3. There is a huge amount of passive-aggressiveness in an act like this and in his rationale.
As well as a huge amount of sanctimonious holier than thouness. I have the perfect life with the perfect marriage, and the perfect kids yada, yada, yada. Quite often with xians like this i.e. Jim Bakker or the Duggars, the reality is actually quite a bit darker.
Over on Dispatches, I pointed out a key point here:
The Jensens are doing this in order to play the holier-than-thou-card with their fellow believers and grant themselves even more opportunities to “complicate their lives” by explaining over and over and over again why they feel (ie God feels) that gay marriage is wrong. They don’t seem particularly worried that their literally grandstanding “divorce” will “complicate their lives” legally, like with inheritance or emergency rights.
1. It is automartyrdom. The same idea as pouring gasoline on youself and lighting it off. A few extreme xians will cheer while standing safely away while the rest of us go WTH.
2. These holier than thous are also terminally boring. Who talks about their marital status and automartyrdom at sports events? Most people are there to watch the game and the people playing it.
How dare they devalue my divorce like that. Now I’m going to have to get the remarried just to spite them.
I don’t know. For me, the French guy who blew his brains out in a church because of SMM still tops these idiots.
Very out of touch people, these two.
First, they can’t be bothered to read the fine print on what the kind of marriage you get from an Australian marriage celebrant entails (regardless of said celebrant’s religious affiliations or office). Then, they’re shocked and complain that they can’t get a divorce just like that, on the grounds of wanting to make a bigoted point.
And they also clearly have no idea of what unmarried life as a couple is like:
I see that they are trying to be consistent with their diatribe about, “government has no right to define marriage…” So they are trying to be consistent by removing that government approval sticker (the marriage license) from their government documents.
That’s why, they’ll make no other changes to their life, saying: “God married them (not the OZ)” and continue to call themselves “man and wife” and keep their kids. To thumb their nose that the gov would separate them from their kids in a conventional divorce. So they’ll just civilly disobey, to create the scene of forcing the Govmint to come drag their kids away forcibly.
aarrrggh, to conclude. They are just publicity seekers, and we are feeding their publiityholism by discussing it here. Not to disparage actual trolls, but I gotta follow the advice of “don’t feed the trolls”.
Funny story about marriage in Australia.
In 2004, John Howard’s conservative government changed the Federal marriage act to explicitly add the words “Marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.” This language was also added as a mandatory part of any wedding ceremony. (With a statutory exemption for “approved” religious ceremonies)
The aim of this amendment was to prevent any state from unilaterally allowing gay marriage, and also to mandate not recognising same sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions.
The practical effect, though, has been that every vaguely left-leaning couple (myself included) whose wedding I have attended since 2004 have been so creeped out by having to include this statement that they’ve felt forced to add a section to their ceremony pointing out their personal objection to marriage inequality, and their hope that one day Australia will change.
I think the 2004 Marriage Act amendment has done more to evangelise marriage equality than any other single thing in Australia.
I’ll go all legalese: to say that “exclusion” phrase is mandatory to prevent group marriages, that if a couple wants to get get married they have to exclude all other participants from the marriage contract (they have as many as willing in their bedroom howevah). The “man and woman” is just thrown in there as the common expansion of “couple”.
But then my other strawlawyer will counter argue that the “exclusion” phrase defines marriage as being ONLY for a man/woman couple, any other possible combination are disallowed/illegal.
Once again, Ms. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian™ has proven fundy xians to be full of it: Betty Bowers Explains Traditional Marriage to Everyone Else.
@24 I believe the intended meaning is your first one. The section packs four things into the legal definition: “man and woman”, “exclusive”, “voluntary” and “for life”.
Another side-point about the 2004 amendment; before this passed there was no statutory definition of marriage in Australia. The Act was just a set of administrative regulations around whatever the Common Law defined as marriage. So the other reason they put it through was as a hedge against that common law definition changing, as the common law definitions of marriage tends to do when society evolves.
Stone the adulterers!
#25 Usernames and Betty Bowers are right. This couple is probably divorcing in order to uphold traditional marriage by letting the man take on a second wife or a concubine or two. Once the man has three or four baby-mommas living with them, they will then be in a traditional biblical marriage. What part of traditional polygamy don’t you understand?
How fucking clueless do you have to be to be able to say “the timeless and organic definition of marriage”? If only the rock these two morons have been living under got Wifi from the neighbour’s, their astonishing display of mind-boggling ignorance could have been averted. Although someone who knows so little about the world to be able to say that, might not be familiar with something like the internet, or books…
Signs that “human intelligence” is just another myth are everywhere. Per this Daily Kos post, the Spawn of Graham (aka Franklin) has called for a boycott of Wells Fargo because of an ad showing a loving Lesbian couple with their baby. Horrors! But, it’s his language that is indicative and particularly galling: “the tide of moral decay that is being crammed down our throats by big business, the media, and the gay & lesbian community.” Emphasis added. “Crammed down our throats” is an expression I often heard when Ed Sullivan had a black performer on the show.
I’m still waiting for a coherent and cogent reason why the Redhead’s cousin marrying his long time partner hurts the Redhead’s and my marriage. We notice no difference. Babbling banally is an apt description of most bigots justifications.
Leave them to wallow, and innocent bystanders get splashed with their mud.
Demonstrating once again how really really stupid religious fundamentalism makes its adherents.
You all missed it.
This divorce is not a protest though they will couch it that way for their families and friends.
The real reason is so they each can now be free to finally marry their gay lovers.
haven’t we seen this movie before?
Fundies ignoring the legal, governmental role in marriage, and then start frothing at the mouth when the laws and the government start to be inclusive in marriages. It’s privilege, it is blindness and stupidity, it is a blatant double standard, and it all very much illustrates the degree to which they despise gays and how territorial they get in defending something that they feel entitled to have exclusive reign over. It’s all so very….typical. Among all the progress, which is heartening, the same old homophobia lashing back is still somewhat dismaying. But I guess people like this will never change, it is all about getting the fencesitters to finally see them as the stubborn bigots that they are which is the real trick.
I think I wee’d myself. It’s been too long since I sat down and watched that. But your premise seems a bit off. In this case, I don’t think this couple are the wily good guys, and the general public gullible buffoons. (Then again, I haven’t checked the pro/against stats for same sex marriage in Australia. But they’ve got to be better than here in the U.S., and I think we hit 60% for gay marriage recently.)
Actually, took a minute to do some googling. We seem about even, somewhere between 60 and 65%, depending on the poll. Yay sensible people! Boo ignorant pillocks like these wankers! Now someone get me a VB and throw another drop bear on the barbie.
Completely irrelevant and off-topic, but there is a GIANT fucking moth in my room that keeps flying at my monitor. Does anyone have an irradiated electricity-spewing reptile that I could borrow?
I can think of one reason a different-sex married couple would need to divorce when same-sex marriage becomes legal.
Though, come to think of it, not anymore so much.
Anyway, I find Haggard’s Law juvenile. I don’t know if it’s hypocritical, but it is immature.
anteprepro gets it right. I would add that marriage is two different things, the confabulation of which produces this kind of nonsense. On the one hand, marriage is a legal status, a secular thing that the government controls and, as long as it grant legal benefits to married couples that it doesn’t grant to unmarried couples, has no justifiable right to favor one couple over another. On the other hand, there is the “religious” marriage, entirely distinct and unrelated to the secular, legal type of marriage. Any religion is free to restrict its acknowledgement of marital status however it chooses. But no religion should be allowed to dictate to the state what marriages should be acknowledged as secular (legal) marriages. So all you religionists go ahead and get married in your church. Go ahead and deny whomever you want from getting married in your church – blacks, gays, Jews, Arabs, Nepalese … whoever. But don’t expect the state to back your prejudices by the denying couples you disapprove of the benefits of a legal marriage. Cuz you know what? Some day the majority may just disapprove of your marriage. And after reading about your inanity, I think that day may just have arrived.
What I find telling is the Jensen’s apparently utterly unquestioned assumption that they are free to make what decisions they wish about their own marriage. This is, of course, exactly as it should be, but it’s interesting they don’t pause for even a moment to consider if other people should have that self-same freedom: to determine the course of the marriage with they person they love.
If they’re serious about their plans, they are likely to (as has been pointed out in the thread) find legal obstacles in the way of how they want their marriage arranged. And I do not doubt they will cry to the heavens about the injustice of these obstacles without the tiniest awareness of the overwhelming irony of doing so.
On the other hand, who knows? Maybe they’ll wake up one day and say, “My god, we’ve been stupid!”
Wait a minute. Timeless and organic? Aren’t those near antonyms in this context?