“the_camp_commandant” writes:
This BBC news article (link) appears to have swallowed completely the line the government is pushing about “giving more rights to cohabitees”.
There has been a suggestion from liberal lawyers that cohabiting couples should have the same “rights” on separation as divorcing couples. The BBC article buys completely the canard that this proposed interference in people’s lives is somehow in pursuit of giving them rights. It completely fails to state the obvious intellectual challenge to this proposal, which is that imposing the same terms on cohabiting couples by default actually *removes* rights from them.
Oh yes it does. At present, cohabitees have the right to live together without a lifelong financial commitment to each other, if that’s what they want. If they decide they do want to make such a commitment, they can always go and get married. At present they have complete freedom of choice.
If this mooted law ever happened, it would mean the *removal* from people of the right to live together in an informal way and a reduction of freedom. what would happen is that by default, and after some wholly arbitrary period of time, they would be forcibly connected financially. They have thus lost the freedom to live the way they do now, and would instead be forced to live in a way the Government decrees.
Nowhere in his article does the writer confront this. Instead, he cravenly accepts all the guff he has been spoonfed. ‘What legal protection do cohabitees currently have?’ worries Mr. Silverman. But wait: ‘On separation,’ he goes on, ‘a claim to a share of property can be exercised only by using complicated trust law. By contrast, married couples can go to court to “divide the spoils”‘. Well spotted, Jon! I think you just answered your own question there! That’s right – the legal protection they have is that at any time they like, they can choose to become one of those married couples. Then there’s no nasty trust law, see?
So if the BBC put two and two together it would work out that the answer here is for cohabiting couples who want a finacial piece of each other to get married. Meanwhile, those who don’t, don’t.
Oh but wait. That last suggestion – well, that’s how things are now. And that sounds a bit, well, pro-marriage, doesn’t it? And we can’t have any of that mucky talk on the BBC.
I could go on. For example, when someone lives with a family member who dies, what rights do they have to stay in the property? Answer: none at all if they can’t pay the inheritance tax without selling it – a problem that has been solved for same-sex couples and is about to be forcibly solved (even though no problem may exist) for unmarried couples. Yet somehow, it isn’t on the BBC radar at all as an issue for, say, maiden aunts sharing a house, or for children looking after elderly parents in their own home.
There is also a story arc embedded in this about the instability of the Left’s attitudes to, well, everything really, but the family in particular. It was the left that pushed for the abolition of the family unit as the basic building block of society; it was the Left which thought it was somehow liberating for people not to have to get married before they had children. Now the Left seems to have decided that anybody who does will be forcibly treated as though they had got married. Now if you’re the BBC, what to do, what to do? Should it agree with this (it’s more “rights” after all, so it’s right-on), or should it object to it because it’s pushing marriage?
There follows a similar take on another BBC story about proposed changes to the legal position of cohabiting couples. The author, “SteveNewton” has made some excellent points – but I am just going to take this opportunity of saying to him (and some other correspondents) that he needs to lower his expectations of the speed with which amateur websites operate.
The BBC has recently had great fun discussing all aspects of proposed new legislation which will allow unmarried couples to claim the assets of people they are living with, even if they have exchanged no contractual obligations such as with a marriage.
Well, some aspects anyway, assuming they happen to align with the BBC’s own agenda. They report this story from their own selected gender specific point of view, giving direct links to people who think it’s a good idea and having Barbara Simpson (‘a deputy district judge in the family division and leading family law expert’) rubber stamp the proposed new law as “…long overdue.”
Further, unnamed lawyers the BBC tells us, have suggested, ‘…the entitlements should apply after couples have lived together for two years…’ You see the BBC is quite happy to refine the specifics of the new law itself even if the Law Commission who originated these proposals is not.
Of course the BBC being publicly funded has an obligation beyond mere independant broadcasting standards to be fair, impartial and complete in it’s coverage of any social legislation and so we do get to hear the ‘other side’ of the story. Right at the end, in the last 3 paragraphs of the story we get a little input from Melanie Philips, a Daily Mail columnist to whom the BBC, we assume, has had to outsource their journalism when it lurches dangerously away from the loony-left.
What else could we possibly require to balance out the previous 22 paragraphs of unidentified lawyers, deputy district judges an unfortunate lady called Rose Green who was left in a “vulnerable position” because her partner died without updating his will to her satisfaction and numerous links and quotes showing how this law will address a, “…terrible unfairness…”
Of course, before Ms Philips is quoted directly we have a BBC filtered summation of her position, just so as we know what her agenda is, the BBC say: “…Melanie Philips told the BBC changing the law would undermine marriage.”
That you see is the only reason we are offered as to why anyone might consider this legislation in anyway controversial. Those crazy people who value the sanctity of marriage; you never know they might even be religiously motivated!
These few paragraphs, however, are about as close as the BBC comes to discussing any other aspects of this legislation that might in anyway contradict or pollute the BBC’s favoured interpretation.
Of course this purity of source doesn’t stop them drawing parallels with other legislation which are not the subject of this legislation but which they think might be in support of it
In fact they make a point of paralleling this new legislation with Civil Partnerships; the image at the very top of this article shows two grooms on top of a cake with the staggeringly crazy piece of associated text: “The Civil Partnership offers similar protections to gay couples.”
How a piece of law which was designed to involve a formal contract between same sex couples is similar to a proposed piece of law which will enforce a ‘contract’ between heterosexual couples even if they refuse to enter into such a contract, isn’t of course explained futher.
This piece of proposed new law represents everything that Civil Partnerships are not. It is an assault on our very rights to freely associate! Unlike Civil Partnerships or their heterosexual equivalent (called Marriage) this new piece of proposed legislation would mean simply residing in the same building as someone for a period of time (determined by unidentified BBC legal sources as 2 years), constitutes an agreement to support them, share your property and income even as far as being forced to supply maintenance payments after separation, all without entering into any formal contract; indeed regardless of the fact that the couples involved may have actively avoided a contract of dependency between them.
Does the impartial BBC consider any of this an injustice or even a point worthy of consideration as injustice? Not a chance, in fact in all of the BBC’s feministic fury to promote this law they have overlooked the greatest and most tragic consequence of the break-up of couples who cohabit without a formal contract. That is the fact that by default a father and his child have no automatic right of contact if the couple are not married and the mother has chosen not to have his name appear on the birth certificate.
This new law which has obviously been thought out to address a disparity between married and non contractually bound heterosexual couples only looks at the mostly female, financial benefits, disregarding what might reasonably considered the most vital area of cohabitational injustice, child custody!
The only mention the BBC makes of children in this report is of course financial when the say: “Cohabitees can currently claim maintenance for a child but not for themselves.”
Barbara Simpson sums up the importance the BBC places on the rights of fathers and their children when she is described in the article as stating that:‘the new rights would recognise there is little difference between living with a partner for years and looking after children – and doing the same as husband and wife.’
Well. ‘little’ unless you are a man in which case you will still be denied responsibility for your own children and have enforced responsibility for any adult women you live with. Too ‘little’ a difference to make a fuss about as far as BBC journalism is concerned of course.