Ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, Sapporo High Court rules
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
For some people the difference in rights might feel small but there are certain edge cases when it makes a big difference. If my friend's partner was not the same sex as his, then he would be eligible to a spouse visa regardless of job status and could get permanent residence in as low as 3 years.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to alter marriage to solve immigration issues.
Or i inheritance rights when you pass away and you lifelong partner gets little or nothing because your relationship doesn’t mean anything to the state?
What about parenting rights?
And what about simply people who decide to commit to a relationship enjoy the same rights, privileges and duties as anyone else instead of making them second rate citizens unworthy of the protection and recognition of the state?
There are some things that aren't replicable easily, some things that are more difficult to deal with because institutions are more used to dealing with marriage, there are recognition issues and anticipation issues because both the things covered and the legal forms necessary to acheive them differ by jurisdiction, and may not have the degree of mutual recognition marriage does, and there are innmost jurisdictions a very large number of things that this applies to so it complex, potentially costly, and leave lots of room for error to get everything yoj can do by contract.
And there are things you still can't duplicate at all because they are, e.g., benefits conditioned directly on marriage by the state or a third party, so contract between the parties outside of marriage has no effect on them.
Very off base. Requiring gay couples to jump through hurdles to access the rights and privileges afforded to straight couples is not equality.
People were routinely denied the right to stay with (or even visit) their partners in the hospital, couldn't extend health insurance coverage to those partners to pay for rising treatment costs, and had little control over those partners' estates after they died.
Hence John Boskovich's "Feel It Motherfuckers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Fan_(Feel_It_Motherfu...
Regardless of immigration, marriage should be "altered" to give everyone the same rights. If that means getting rid of the legal concept of marriage entirely, so be it.
I could be wrong, but I'm sensing some false advocacy here. It seems like you're using immigration as a red herring - don't "alter" marriage, alter immigration laws instead! How about both?
Or you could solve it by allowing same sex marriage. That sounds so much easier.
This is strictly my personal opinion, but I would be perfectly fine with renaming marriage to civil union as a whole in terms of law and giving the same rights to all couples independent of sex, leaving the term marriage for other uses outside of law.
However I understand the reasons why people would want to have same sex marriage named as so, I would also be perfectly fine with that.
So discussions are bound to be about the perks that have nothing to do with marriage per se, but are bundled with the marriage status, and are harder or impossible to get outside of it. Opening marriage to more people is a more reasonable proposition than rewriting every single marriage perk to be more open to everyone.
Bear in mind that the Japanese government's official rationale for allowing spouses to work freely is to allow foreigners in that position to support Japanese dependent family members. The fact that it applies to spouses of working adults without children is more of a legal accident than deliberate policy (the rules were set at a time when it was rare for women to have careers).
I think they're just stuck with the old japanese name and won't bother renaming it to something closer to reality.
That wouldn't allow a foreign husband to work to support a Japanese wife, which is an important function of the current rules. Gender discrimination may be nominally illegal in Japan, but it's still quite hard for a woman, especially a married woman, to have a full career and get promoted etc..
It absolutely is an intended feature - in part in order to make it easier for those women to have children, and in part so that they don't have to be supported by the state. Neither of those apply to OP's situation.
> It might also be that husband supporting such dependent family member is assumed to fall within the skilled labor category of immigrants.
It isn't. The visa deliberately allows doing any kind of work, including work for which it's impossible to get a work visa.
And the other question is: what is a marriage in legal terms in Japan? In Europe marriage was originally a religious thing, officiated by priests and managed by the church; then the states stole the term to use it for a civil contract, officiated by civil servants (usually the mayor) with laws and courts managing it. For Japan, which one is in the courts?
Previously, not originally. In ancient Greece it was a state matter: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_ancient_Greece>
So yes, the state stole the term. It's like tomorrow the state decides by law that everything that color red will be called color blue, that would be stealing the word "blue" and use it to define the color of red things. It is not a natural evolution of language.
But if you keep going back, you get to a time before the church controlled marriages in Europe.
Generally, marriage is a cultural thing, and it tends to be religious at any point in time to the extent the culture is religious at that time.
That's how it should be, unless you're cool with the idea of the possibility of some other religion becoming the law in your land.
Well, first the notion of marriage is a tad older than a thousand years, to claim it's only that old is remarkably ahistorical. Second, which church? Many religious and non-religious institutions have had some notion of marriage for quite a while. Which one gets to claim first rights and to have the proper definition and why do they get to keep making that distinction today for people who aren't members of their church/religion?
It didn't. Specially not the Christian church. The Christian bible was the basis for the christian religion. It was written before the religion existed. And it already mentions married people.
We have evidence of marriage going back to the 2300's BC. And it probably existed before that, we just didn't find the evidence yet.
It was purely legal/civil matter, because religious matters weren't written down. So marriage was in fact not religious originally.
I've gotten that from Peter Berresford Ellis' books, which contains much more than that, and paint Celts as a more refined society than the greco-roman one.
And unless you live in a world where words can be owned by an entity, nobody "stole" anything. Many marriages still get both the official paper (civil contract) and the sacrament. They mean a similar thing, and humans being humans means they use the same word.
(It's also not "usually the mayor", btw - that depends on the country. In Germany it's e.g usually the "Standesbeamte". A government official that does the job of a registrar. Mayors can only do the job if they've also been appointed to that role)
Also some of the comments on this are pretty sad, but I'm not really that surprised. Peeps are still plenty homophobic in 2024.