Massachusetts city recognizes polyamorous ‘civil partnerships’

July 2, 2020 CNA Daily News News Briefs 2 Print

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 2, 2020 / 02:30 pm (CNA).- The city of Somerville, Massachusetts, has broadened its definition of domestic partnership to give polyamorous relationships the same rights as a married couple. 

Someone who is polyamorous is in a relationship with more than one domestic partner. 

City councilor J.T. Scott, quoted in the New York Times, said that he believes this to be the first ordinance of its kind in the United States. Scott was in favor of recognizing polyamorous relationships. 

“People have been living in families that include more than two adults forever,” said Scott, adding that “Here in Somerville, families sometimes look like one man and one woman, but sometimes it looks like two people everyone on the block thinks are sisters because they’ve lived together forever, or sometimes it’s an aunt and an uncle, or an aunt and two uncles, raising two kids.”

Scott was quoted as saying that the new ordinance would legally recognize someone as having more than one domestic partner, regardless of the nature of that relationship.  

“It has a legal bearing,” said Scott, “so when one of them is sick, they can both go to the hospital.”

The city councilor said he knew of at least two dozen people in Somerville who were engaged in polyamorous relationships, though he did not specify how many households they comprised. The city of Somerville has a population of about 80,000, and, until June, did not have any sort of domestic partnership ordinance. The original draft of the ordinance specified that a domestic partnership was between two persons, which was changed to allow for polyamorous relationships. 

“I don’t think it’s the place of the government to tell people what is or is not a family,” said city councilor Lance Davis, who drafted the domestic partnership ordinance. 

“Defining families is something that historically we’ve gotten quite wrong as a society, and we ought not to continue to try and undertake to do so,” said Davis. 

According to the New York Times, the ordinance means that city employees will be able to extend health insurance benefits to more than one partner. It is unclear if private companies will also allow for employees in polyamorous domestic partenrships to share health insurance plans to their multiple partners.

Davis said that he had been told by constituents that they were happy the city will be “legally recognizing and validating” the existence of polyamorous relationships. 

“That’s the first time this is happening,” said Davis. 

Ryan Anderson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told CNA that he was not surprised by the latest efforts to redefine marriage to include multiple people. 

“Of course it was never going to stop with same-sex couples,” Anderson told CNA. 

“Once you redefine marriage to eliminate the male-female component, what principle requires monogamy?”

The former cultural norm of marriage between one man and one woman, Anderon said, “was that only one man and one woman could unite as one flesh as husband and wife in the very same act that could produce new life, and then connect that new life with his or her own mother and father.”

“Once the law and culture says the male-female aspect of marriage violates justice and equality, we haven’t ‘expanded’ marriage, we’ve fundamentally redefined what it is. And those redefinitions have no principled stopping point,” he said.

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New study shows differences between male and female brains in utero

April 2, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Washington D.C., Apr 2, 2019 / 02:07 pm (CNA).- A new scientific study has found significant differences in the ways that the brains of male and female fetuses function prior to birth.

Researchers conducted MRI scans on human fetuses in the womb, studying the functional connectivity (FC), or the neurological connections between different areas of the brain, for both males and females. They found connections between parts of the female brains that were almost nonexistent in the male brains.

“The present study demonstrates for the first time that development of fetal brain FC varies with sex,” the researchers wrote, concluding that the fetal brain networks they observed likely lay the “building blocks” for brain development throughout rest of the baby’s life.

Dr. Leonard Sax, a family physician and author of the 2005 book “Why Gender Matters,” told CNA that the fact that there is a difference in brain function at all— at a stage of development when a baby has not yet been exposed to any societal influences— is significant in itself.

“I think the importance of this research is that it shows that the brain of a baby girl in her mother’s womb prior to birth is significantly different than the brain of a baby boy in the mother’s womb at the same stage prior to birth,” Sax told CNA.

“Exactly what those differences signify is controversial,” he noted.

Sax wrote a March 27 article for Psychology Today summarizing the study’s findings, in which he asked why the study had received relatively little media coverage. In some parts of the brain, the differences between males and females were “truly amazing,” he wrote.

“The human brain is gendered prior to birth. That may be politically incorrect, but it is an empirical reality,” Sax stated.

“Male and female are of God. The are hardwired, they are innate.”

He cautioned that it is not yet clear to neuroscientists what exactly the gender differences in brain function might mean, in terms of how activity in the brain relates to human emotion and experience.

“How does thinking happen? How does the brain mediate the process of thought or feeling? We don’t know the answers to those questions,” Sax said.

“In my article, I make no attempt to claim what that [brain function] difference signifies, because neuroscientists don’t know.”

He said while there are “plausible” interpretations that can be made based on the data, the researchers themselves “make no attempt to guess at the significance of their own findings.”

“The claim I’m making is girls and boys are different— that image strongly supports that claim,” he said.

Sax noted in his Psychology Today article that academics such as Judith Butler have pioneered popular theories that “male” and “female” are merely social constructs.

“The category of ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ are meaningful categories, they’re not a mere performance or a social construction as Judith Butler would have us believe. And they are clearly meaningful and real prior to birth,” he said.

Sax also pointed out that The New York Times published an op-ed April 1 in which Dr. Carol Hay, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, endorses Butler’s understanding of gender, calling gender “fundamentally a performance” based on and learned from social systems.

Sax posited that the author is unaware of “research showing that ‘male and female’ are present in the human brain prior to birth.”

“I wouldn’t say that she is lying, I would say that she is unaware of the relevant research,” he clarified.

CNA reached out to Hay for a reply. She told CNA in an interview that when it comes to gender, she tends “to be pretty critical of the science, because I think it’s often motivated by a particular political agenda, as all science is motivated by a particular political agenda.”

Despite this, Hay said that in her view, even if science can prove that there are innate biological differences in the male and female brains, “I’m not sure that would tell us anything about why boys and girls end up acting completely differently.”

“The question is whether those brain differences— if they do exist— the question is whether they then actually translate into the kind of gender differences that we’re used to associating with men and women and boys and girls,” she argued.

Sax, however, maintained that the data is meaningful, showing a concrete difference in brain function between males and females, even if it is not yet clear what that signifies.

“That claim that gender is meaningless, or gender as merely a ‘performance’ isn’t a true statement. It’s a false statement,” he said.

 

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2 Comments

  1. The city council in Somerville, Massachusetts? What a bunch of stragglers. Here’s some back story—and then some loose ends for the courts:

    FIRST, even before the 2015 Obergefell v Hodges ruling (gay “marriage”) there was already at least one case, in Brazil, of a marriage among three parties which has been given legal recognition. And then a failed application in the United States less than a week after the Obergefell.

    SECOND, earlier in 2012 a young woman in the Seattle area (of course!) donned the veil and “married” a beloved landmark brick building. After all, the only difference between a woman and a man is the plumbing, and even this can be remodeled like any kitchen.

    THIRD, more distant historical precedent had men with multiple wives (polygyny: the common form of polygamy) and likely the equal (!) and opposite case as well, of women with multiple husbands (polyandry).

    FOURTH, it’s been reported that gay “marriage” pre-nuptial agreements can allow polyamorous wandering so long as each party returns to the same permanent address. So, now in Somerville, the males all have the same mailing address, so to speak.

    BUTT NOW, as with the oxymoron gay “marriage,” there’s the pressing legal issue for polyamorous marriages—which party (or parties!) is/are the “husband(s)” and which is/are the “wife (wives)”! Once you trash binary sex and traditional marriage, what principle requires anything at all to be stable?

    Only the courts—and ultimately the United States Supreme Court—can get this quandary off our backs! And consider…if the Supreme Court can stretch constitutional law by footnoting European courts, then why not the above precedents or something else from ancient history? (After all, it is from some such dark place that swing(er)-vote Justice Kennedy fatwa-ed binary marriages as categorically “homophobic.”)

    So, today, perhaps something from second-century Germanic law? Mutual consent not required. Forced marriages by abduction permitted. Musical-chairs (polyamorous) marriages are already in! Who knows, someday by a split decision rape (or even “polyamorous” gang rape) might be redefined as “unilateral outreach” and even taught in grammar school sex-ed classes!

    Thank you, Somerville, for this invitation deeper into the swamp. So many loose ends!

    Reply

  2. Mr. Beaulieu,

    Perhaps you and many agree that it was folly for American states to have ignored the founding fathers in allowing the state to determine what qualified as “Marriage”, a previously religious sacrament.

    Had that not taken place. Civil unions of any kind would be of little interest to anyone but the participants. Weirdo churches that allowed anything other than monogamous hetero marriages could be dismissed as cults and we’d just move on with our lives. If gay marriage was relegated exclusively to Scientologists, would anyone care?

    Reply

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