France is to enshrine in law the end of so-called “conjugal rights” – the notion that marriage means a duty to have sex.
A bill approved on Wednesday in the National Assembly adds a clause to the country’s civil code to make clear that “community of living” does not create an “obligation for sexual relations”.
The proposed law also makes it impossible to use lack of sexual relations as an argument in fault-based divorce.
Though unlikely to have a major impact in the courts, supporters hope the law will help deter marital rape.
It took until 2026 for France to remove the sex requirement of marriage
Don’t pretend it’s some innocent institution
It should be scrapped entirely as a legal mechanism and replaced wherever possible
I didn’t pretend marriage is universally innocent. I said it’s a tradition just like hanging colourful lights on a tree within a home in December, and that it’s just as aggressive to state everyone be rid of their decorations as that the concept of marriage should be abolished.
I didn’t say I thought you were wrong - I said the initial comment read a bit hot off the stove.
It’s not just a tradition it’s a tradition that actively creates and informs legal rules anchored to that tradition
Your analogy between the enduring institution of marriage with Christmas lights is simply false
https://www.logical-fallacy.com/articles/false-analogy/
Your argument seems more against religion (and inferrably monogamy) than it does marriage itself. Especially if “civil union” is your alternative.
I don’t see what the benefit would be to just go through the family law and replace the term “marriage” with “civil union”.
Health Insurance is a big one.
Civil unions can be a mere superficial replacement of the name but it can also be a creative and new way to create legal relationships
Civil unions being basically just marriages is lazy and people should just enter into legal relationships with one another for various reasons (child custody, medical determinations, property distribution etc)
There are tax and government benefit reasons to get married it’s an artificially maintained institution to perpetuate notions of the family and continued existence of a people
It needs to be abolished and society needs to respect different and specific legal arrangements that people make instead
So you want to remove all of the various privileges and duties bundled together as legal marriage, save for the ones that people manually enter into. I think that’s a terrible idea.
People already have freedom to contract. With a competent lawyer you can already co-parent with one adult, give another your medical power of attorney, and specify the disbersment.of property after you pass in a relatively tax-efficient manner. Even if you’re married to someone and want those other adults to all be someone other than your spouse.
If we did what you suggest and remove the underlying default bundle of agreements we call marriage, we would dramatically increase the cost of divorce and the rate of economic spousal abuse. All someone would have to do to get out of a “marriage” absent its original terms would be to burn the copies of their agreement, and even the simplest separations would be subject to adversarial litigation.
I think there’s some wide latitude to modify that default bundle and remove some of its limitations and presumptions. (Especially when it comes to taxation and social welfare, where a UBI + ~40% flat tax is better in nearly every way). But humans do pair-bond, and it seems to make much more sense to argue for the actual changes you want rather than insisting that we wholly disregard the atomic unit of human civilization.