Nope, the incentives exist to entice the best formative environment for children. This question will be argued at SCOTUS when the split in the lower courts is addressed this year. The entire marriage argument is going to shift from "what is best for adults" to "what is best for kids".
Then why allow infertile couples to marry? Why allow your grandparents to stay married? Why allow those who never have children by choice to remain married?
There are exceptions to this supposed 'purpose' by the millions. Holes you could drive mack trucks through. Yet allowing gays and lesbians to join the millions upon millions of straight couples to marry or remain married is somehow a violation of the purpose of the union?
If there are tens of millions of exceptions for straights, there can be a few million exceptions for gays. Even assuming your 'incentive' idea worked. Which it doesn't. As the requirements of marriage have little to nothing to do with children.
If children were the purpose of marriage, then the 'incentives' would kick in upon the birth of kids. It doesn't, nor ever has. And yes, the State can check to see if a couple is fertile. Medical testing as a prerequisite for marriage has a long tradition, as the 'blood test' requirements of the present and past and the requirements to prove infertility for some marriages in some states today demonstrates.
There is no requirement to have children or be able to have children to be married. Absolutely none. Why then would we forbid gays and lesbians from marrying based on their failure to meet a standard that doesn't exist and applies to no one?
There is no rational reason.
It will be about the future, not now, since marriage is the unforeseeable future and the bedrock and nucleus of any society. SCOTUS will have no choice but to remove their focus from the violin strings of "think about the kids involved in gay relationships" of "now" and will focus it instead on "how will our decision affect untold millions or even billions of children (and the core of society itself) into the distant future?" So pivotal is this proposed change to what "marriage" means...
Oh, the USSC has plenty of choices and aren't limited in any way to your assessments of what they must do. As remember, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Remember your inane babble about how the court's granting of a stay for Utah of implementation of a lower court ruling mandating gay marriage was a message from the courts that they supported gay marriage bans? You waxed eloquent telling us what the court 'really meant' by granting the stay, how gay marriage was no banned across the country, and again banned in California.
Until the stay was lifted. And every other stay barring the implementation of gay marriage was denied.
You keep projecting upon the courts your
own beliefs. Your own made up pseudo-legal gibberish. And your personal opinions are gloriously irrelevant to the court's rulings. As they don't keep your counsel. They keep their own.
The lower courts are split.
We have 6 courts in one direction and 1 in the other. While split, the overwhelming majority of legal precedent sides with marriage equality. With the USSC preserving every single lower court ruling overturning gay marriage bans, along with overturning DOMA's restrictions on gay marriage bans.
The lower court ruling affirming such bans remains unpreserved.
The question will sit before SCOTUS. At that moment SCOTUS will have to decide to overturn Windsor's "states' choice" Ruling or not.
The actual states choice rulingor your imaginary version of it where you ignore the 'subject to certain constitutional guarantees' portion of that ruling and pretend it doesn't exist? The highlighted portion is the relevant bit that you keep ignoring......but no rational person ever would:
Subject to certain constitutional guarantees, see , e.g., Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, “regulation of domestic relations” is “an area that has long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States,” Sosna v.
Iowa, 419 U. S. 393, 404.
Windsor v. US
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-307_6j37.pdf
So no, they courts don't have to overturn their 'states choice' ruling. As their 'states choice' ruling has ALWAYS been subject to certain constitutional guarantees. And if the states violate those guarantees, the courts have the authority to overrule such laws.
They need merely determine that the States laws are a violation of constitutional guarantees (as they did in Lawrence and Romer) and poof, gay marriage is legal everywhere. Just as interracial marrriage was legal everywhere after the Loving decision.
It will have to decide whether or not the majority of each state has a right to define a cultural shift of such magnitude that affects all citizens within into the far far future.
You routinely predict universal calamity to an almost hysteric degree. You predicted the collapse of civilization, nuclear melt downs and economic Armageddon because we treated Ebola patients in the US. You predicted riots over the USSC lifting a stay on gay marriage. You simply don't know what you're talking about
Gay marriage has already been legal for 10 years in some states. And society didn't collapse. Society was forced by the courts to come to terms with its occasionally faulty 'right to define a cultural shift' with interracial marriage. With majority public sentiment not reached on the issue until 30 years AFTER the ruling.
If society can survive that shift, it can survive this one. Especially since society has largely embraced gay marriage, with support out pacing opposition by 12 to 19 points. With a firm majority in favor of gay marriage already;
Support for same-sex marriage has hit a new high, according to a recent Gallup
poll. Fifty-five percent of survey respondents think gay marriages should be recognized by law as valid while 42 percent disagree.
Gallup Support for Gay Marriage at All-Time High RealClearPolitics
So the impact you posit, we've already survived beautifully. And this 'impact' is poised to be far less egregious, as public support precedes universal legal recognition. Where it lagged interracial marriage by 30 years.
It will have to decide once and for all if it can act as a dictating body to the various states, ordering them to incentivize THE formative environment for childraising to mandate environments where those children will be guaranteed to be missing one of the complimentary genders as role model and one of the blood parents 100% of the time.
Marriage is irrelevant to these questions, as gays and lesbians will still have children regardless of whether or not they get married. Just as straight couples do. Through adoption, invetro fertilization, surrogacy, etc.. The courts aren't making the decision you posit. I
ts making the decision on whether or not the children of gay and lesbians parents will benefit from their parents being married.
And an even casual review of the Windsor ruling makes it clear that the court has definitely taken a position on that question:
And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family
and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.....
....DOMA also brings financial harm to children of same-sex couples. It raises the cost of health care for families by taxing health benefits provided by employers to their workers’ same-sex spouses. See 26 U. S. C. §106; Treas. Reg. §1.106–1, 26 CFR §1.106–1 (2012); IRS Private Letter Ruling 9850011 (Sept. 10, 1998). And it denies or reduces benefits allowed to families upon the loss of a spouseand parent, benefits that are an integral part of familysecurity. See Social Security Administration, Social Security Survivors Benefits 5 (2012) (benefits available to asurviving spouse caring for the couple’s child), online at
http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10084.pdf
Windsor V. US
www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-307_6j37.pdf
Its unlikely that the author of this ruling, Justice Kennedy, is going to ignore his own judgment in favor of yours
