Professor Lee Carpenter is quoted in this article by the Legal Intelligencer about the seismic shifts in Pennsylvania marriage law over the past decade-plus, which have put courts in a difficult position as they encounter typical marital issues involving estates, survivor benefits and divorces. Read the Full Story
Obergefell v. Hodges is a historic decision that accomplishes the important task of requiring marriage equality across the nation. To many, the opinion’s romantic language gives particular poignancy to the historic moment when the long-recognized fundamental right to marry was finally extended to same-sex couples. However, what people see as the romance of the opinion masks a profoundly conservative decision, one that abandons meaningful equality analysis, and instead engages in a full-throated embrace of the conservative institution of marriage as an essential and necessary cornerstone of American society. In so doing, the decision advances a new and troubling doctrine of marital superiority that explicitly undercuts the dignity and worth of non-marital relationships. Much to the dismay of those who may have wished to allow states to experiment with other, more progressive relationship-recognition forms, Obergefell’s marital superiority rhetoric may guarantee that marriage will, for the foreseeable future, remain the only recognized relationship in town. Download the paper from the Georgetown Law Journal.
On marriage, people lose welfare benefits abruptly. It is devastating to them, diminishing and in some cases overwhelming any economic benefits of marriage. It makes marriage unattainable and a status for the rich alone. It is also a surprising and unintended outcome of policymakers, who since at least Reconstruction and with much fanfare in the 1996 welfare reform touted marriage for the poor as a self-help measure and poverty cure. It is these same government policy makers, however, who make marriage impossible. Low-income people tend to marry each other. Both incomes need to be brought into the home to raise people out of poverty. When people lose welfare on marrying, the family’s combined income is often lower than if they had stayed separated or chose to live together without marrying. They cannot survive. Unable to marry, they are statistically less likely to remain together as long. They lose out on statistically more long-term relationships, long-term spousal government and employee benefits, and legal protections on the dissolution of their relationships from divorce and estate laws. “When …
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