How did the Supreme Court rule, in the past, that States can take sex into account within the process of legal marriage? Religion and politics, as we know, shouldn't intermix. The purpose for having a legal marriage through the government is simple: When people decide to be romantically involved in a permanent way, they require certain legal protections in case that arrangement goes bad, in which case specific guidelines are followed to handle various situations between two people in this situation together. Nowhere in that legal process does the sex of either of these two people matter in any way shape or form legally speaking. Am I wrong? So someone, please explain to me, a straight guy (therefore non biased) by the way, why the legal system of the US goverment (previously) decided States could base the qualification for legal marriage, on the sex of the people wishing to be married, a position that is in every way shape and form culturally and religiously founded, with no business being included in the law? I find the distinction no different from our legal system, not too long ago, similarly deciding the people of different skin color couldn't be free. Its intollerance towards 'different', and as an American citizen, I find it appalling that my government recently applied this bevahior in its legal system. So can anyone explain the legal justification for taking sex of the participants into account in the process of legal, government facilitated marriage? Note: I'm interested in legal reasoning that gay marriage wasnt supported by the Supreme Court until only last year. It seems like the only reason the change came was due to media pressure and coverage, and our legal system should protect minorities before such coverage is had, for example for the past decade and longer.
The first thing to note is that your question is kind of the wrong way around. US states are sovereign and generally have the ability to make any kind of laws they want, unless they violate some specific tenet of federal law or the US Constitution. You suggest, for instance, that arguments which are "culturally founded" have no place in the law, but that's just your opinion, and there isn't generally anything preventing a state from making law based on such things, should its elected legislature see fit to do so. (Indeed, one could argue that nearly all laws are in some sense "culturally founded", since they are based on some notion of what kind of behavior is or is not appropriate, and those tend to be culturally based.) So legally speaking, the states aren't, by default, obligated to give any sort of justification for the laws they made. The burden of proof is on the other side. Someone seeking to overturn those laws would have to convince a court that the laws violated some specific provision of the Constitution (or another superior law). If they couldn't convince a court of this, the law would stand. From what I have read, before the US Supreme Court's 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, the previous precedent was set in 1971 by the Minnesota Supreme Court in Baker v. Nelson. The decision itself is quite short and is worthwhile to read. Quoting Wikipedia's summary, the plaintiffs claimed that Minnesota's restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples violated several provisions of the US Constitution: First Amendment (freedom of speech and of association), Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment), Ninth Amendment (unenumerated right to privacy), and Fourteenth Amendment (fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause and sex discrimination contrary to the Equal Protection Clause). The Minnesota court determined that none of the plaintiffs' objections were valid. Again, I'll refer you to the decision for the details, but the court mainly focused on their Fourteenth Amendment arguments (the others may have been addressed by the trial court, whose opinion I can't find online). They wrote: The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, like the due process clause, is not offended by the state's classification of persons authorized to marry. There is no irrational or invidious discrimination. They specifically rejected any analogy to bans on interracial marriage, which had been held unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia: But in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex. Baker appealed to the US Supreme Court, but his appeal was dismissed "for want of a substantial federal question," without any further explanation. (Nobody quite seems to understand what they meant by that, but here is an essay discussing the situation in a little more depth.) The effect of the dismissal was that the Minnesota court's decision became binding precedent upon the whole nation - laws against same-sex marriage didn't violate those provisions of the Constitution. And that was how matters stood for 44 years until Obergefell. (Of course, there was nothing to stop individual states from deciding to allow same-sex marriage, and some in fact did so in the meantime.) You have suggested that laws against same-sex marriage were religiously motivated. This might suggest an argument that they would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The plaintiffs in Baker didn't raise that point, so it wasn't considered in the Minnesota court's opinion. I don't know whether any other courts have considered it; no such argument was mentioned in the opinion in Obergefell.
There are only a few areas of law of which I am aware that U.S. law treats people who are engaged to be married differently (although perhaps with more thought I could expand the list). Fiance(e)s come under a special immigration status when applying for a visa. There is a body of law related to whether an engagement ring is an absolute gift or is conditional upon being married (this is not uniform from state to state and I don't recall what the majority rule in those cases is under the common law). In South Carolina, ownership disputes over engagement rings are litigated as breach of promise to marry actions. Pre-marital agreements governing a future marriage can be made by people who are engaged (although a post-nuptial agreement is also equal in effect in most cases). People who are engaged, like spouses, are generally considered to be in a "confidential relationship" with each other which imposes higher duties with respect to fairness in their dealings with each other than strangers, but generally less high duties than fiduciaries. While not strictly arising from the status of being engaged, adult cohabitants are generally agents for service of process of each other at their shared home, and are often considered to have a legally significant relationship for purposes of domestic violence statutes (usually related to either domestic violence crimes or temporary restraining orders). I am not familiar enough with the law of France to fully answer the balance of the question, which someone more familiar with that law can expand upon. But, there is similarly a special immigration status in French law for a fiance(e). And, French law, in a flourish so romantic it could scarcely be any other country's law, also allows people who are engaged a right to marry after one of them has died in certain circumstances: "The legislation that allows posthumous marriages stems back to when a dam burst in 1959 and killed 420 people in southern France." It was most recently invoked in 2014 when a grieving French woman was granted permission by the French President to marry her former fiancé, who tragically died in 2012, just a month before they were due to wed. To be eligible the bride to be had "to convince the President of France that her’s was a special case and that her love for Michael went beyond the grave. It took four letters to the president and 20 months of waiting, desperately hoping for a positive response." The President's discretion in this matter is somewhat similar to the pardon power in U.S. law. This French law was also invoked in 2009. The law in question is set forth at Articles 171 of the French Civil Code. In English translation this states: Article 171 The President of the Republic may, for serious reasons, authorize the celebration of the marriage if one of the future spouses is dead providing a sufficient gathering of facts establishes unequivocally his consent. In this case, the effects of the marriage date back to the day preceding that of the death of the spouse. However, this marriage does not carry with it any right of intestate succession to the benefit of the surviving spouse and no matrimonial regime is considered to have existed between the spouses. I am aware of one documented case where a court entered a post-humous marriage in the United States between people who were engaged, but I am not familiar with any legal authority actually authorizing that action.
The article "Enforcement of Religious Courts' Judgments Under Israeli Law" (Asher Maoz, Journal of Church and State 1991) is useful in understanding the legal underpinnings of this question. The beginning point is the Palestine Order in Council 1922 (this is from the UK Privy Council), where religion-based courts are established, so sect. 52 is about Muslim courts, 53 (later repealed) is about Jewish courts and 54 is about Christian courts. Section 53 was replaced with Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law, 1953, stating that marriage between Jews follows Jewish law, and says that rabbinical court has exclusive jurisdiction. Article 6 of that law allows a district court enforce a final judgment by a rabbinical court by imprisonment. Muslim courts similarly have exclusive jurisdiction over Muslims, though it is wider (it pertains to all matters, not just marriage). Actual enforcement apparently involves the Chief Execution Officer. Basic Law 15 gives the Supreme Court supervisory power over all courts, including religious courts. So rabbinical courts don't have unfettered power to do whatever they want (under Jewish law), but there is direct state sanction of imprisonment as a penalty for not obeying a rabbinical court decision, there is non-religious execution of court orders, and there is secular supervision. Since civil marriage is non-existent in Israel, there is no choice (if you want to have the wedding in Israel) but to go to the recognized religious authorities, which seems to make Cyprus a popular wedding venue. A Roman Catholic divorce is not possible in Israel, a Muslim one is, and I really cannot tell about the various Orthodox Christian churches.
When you get married is possible to have contract renouncing both parties right to a divorce. No. That clause would be redundant, materially indistinguishable from breach of contract, and otherwise unenforceable. It is redundant because the legal definition of Marriage (Black's Law Dictionary) states that it is "A contract, according to the form prescribed by law, by which a man and woman [...] mutually engage with each other to live their whole lives together in the state of union which ought to exist between a husband and a wife". Thus, the perpetuity as expressed in the term whole lives preempts the conceiving of an eventual separation. Insofar as marriage is legally cognizable as a contract (see legal definition), it might specify or imply remedies in the event that one or both spouses decide(s) that substance of marital relationship no longer exists; that is, in the event that a breach of that contract occurs. A court may order to the breaching spouse performance of certain acts (for example, alimony) in accordance to statutory law or common law. However, a prohibition to divorce goes beyond the scope of what is legally permissible. The U.S. Supreme Court in Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609, 617-618 (1984) helps explaining why a prohibition to divorce would be unenforceable: "In one line of decisions, the Court has concluded that choices to enter into and maintain certain intimate human relationships must be secured against undue intrusion by the State because of the role of such relationships in safeguarding the individual freedom that is central to our constitutional scheme. In this respect, freedom of association receives protection as a fundamental element of personal liberty." If that is not possible how much can you limit the right to a divorce with a contract or something similar? There is no possible limit or requisite duration of a marriage, as that would inherently infringe a person's fundamental element of personal liberty mentioned in the Roberts case.
That depends entirely on the laws of the country involved. Some countries do make having homosexual relations a crime, indeed a very serious one. I haven't heard of one which prosecutes for being in a same-sex marriage or relationship entered into in another country, but such a country could hold such a trial if it chose to. Perhaps more likely, if a same-sex couple visited such a country, evidence of a continuing same-sex relationship might be treated as evidence of same-sex sexual acts, and thus of a crime under that country's laws.
The main relevant bit of constitutional law is Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, where it was held that a general law against use of peyote does not violate the Free Exercise clause, though in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 a law specifically designed to restrict Santeria animal sacrifices is an undue burden on religion. The Employment Division court cites Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 and Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 as the only cases where the First Amendment prevents a generally applicable law from applying in a religious context, which the court notes "are distinguished on the ground that they involved not the Free Exercise Clause alone, but that Clause in conjunction with other constitutional protections". The TRO doesn't go into detail about the reasoning: Based on the materials presented and the arguments of counsel, the court finds: (1) Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim alleging a violation of their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion So it is hard to say on what grounds the plaintiffs are likely to succeed. The governor's order is a bit peculiar, because it initially looks like a neutral 10-person limit on gatherings, but on the one hand makes an exception for religious events by allowing any number of people "officiating" so sets the limit on participants (advantage to religion, not constitutional), but then also includes numerous exceptions to the order, including schools, day-care, food pantries, detox centers, shopping malls, restaurants and so on. The set of exceptions is large enough that one might conclude that this is an undue burden on the exercise of religion. The breadth of the number of exceptions undermines claims of "necessity" which are crucial to any order that closes churches.
With respect to disciplining its students and employees, a private school can basically do whatever it wants. There's more freedom to do so with respect to students than with employees, who have greater protections derived from anti-discrimination laws, collective-bargaining agreements, and the like. If a private school wants to impose a No Burger Tuesdays and a complete ban on political activity, that's probably going to be permissible. The First Amendment will protect the school's right to associate with only those who meet its standards, as absurd as those standards may be. Again, there are exceptions to this rule, like Title IX, which requires equal educational opportunities regardless of sex, but they don't have much bearing on your question. Even for a public school, there will be quite a bit of latitude here, because these rules don't actually regulate off-campus conduct. If a student wants to attend an off-campus public gathering, the campus police aren't going to lock him in his room or arrest him for leaving campus. The rule is simply that if you attend a public gathering off campus, you may not come back on campus afterward to threaten the lives of your classmates.
As someone with ties to the "foreign" community in the United States, I see these "marriages of convenience" from time to time. In their most "legitimate" form, the couple will move to the same address and "technically" live together, but without consummating the marriage so that it can later be legally annulled. American immigration authorities counter this by asking each spouse about the other's underwear (literally!). Some "marriages of convenience" are legal, insofar as they technically conform to the marriage documents, e.g. regarding "co habitation," even while violating the spirit of the law. Others don't. Your best chance of attacking such "marriages" is not regarding the marriage itself (basically only the couple can decide what constitutes a valid marriage), but rather "compliance" with the marriage documents. That's something any law enforcement officer can understand.