Actually the vows you cited sound legalistic and barren to me. The more traditional Christian vows (and they aren’t technically Christian since most non-Christians would find them perfectly acceptable) are warmer and much more human to my ears. Granted maybe this is a problem in translation, but then again maybe French is such a beautiful language that everything sounds nice in it.

These vows express some of the highest ideals of the human spirit.

The question is, is this enough to make a marriage? Or do the five marriage vows, taken together, form a package, expressing what the legislature, the organ of the General Will, understands and means by marriage?

That is what the debate about SSM is all about.

http://www.weddingclipart.com/guide/wedding-vows/Traditional-Wedding-Vows.html reviews some standard vows used in civil weddings (presumably the US). Like the Christian ceremonies they are derived from, they do not mention children but instead a lifelong committment of the couple to each other.

There’s clearly a very limited set of people here who can speak about French marriage law with detailed knowledge, but then that shouldn’t be necessary. If we are talking about some universal aspect of marriage, we should be able to see it without having to read French or attend French law school.

For civil purposes, marriage establishes a family *before* children come along. In other words, children do not make the family, they are part of the family. You are correct that for many unmarried partners, the extended family considers them ‘real family’ upon the arrival of a child. This is logical given that the mother or father of your grandchild will have a lifelong connection to your grandchild whereas she or he may not have one to your adult child. What’s interesting, though, is that usually such people are considered unmarried parents! If the purpose of marriage is to secure parents for children then why not consider such parents to be married upon the arrival of a child?

The argument that marriage is for children and only children fails on the civil level that Michael presented. It also fails on the religious level and sociological level. As Jan likes to pester/remind me, words have meaning. Well if marriage’s primary and nearly only purpose was to create children (and note the people arguing this have also asserted that mutual love, romantic or otherwise, is not a primary purpose of marriage! then why have all the major Christian religions written their age old vows to spoke of what is essentialy the mutual love of the couple while leaving out any mention of children.

On the sociological level it’s pretty clear that people in the ways they typically behave and treat couples expect marriage to signify mutual love and lifelong committment to each other with children being a side benefit. This is clearly evidenced by the uncomfortableness many feel with marriages where the odds of children are great but the state of love is questionable (i.e. the ‘gold digger’ who marries an old rich man) and the support of marriages that are unlikely to produce children but love is more evident (the two 65 yr olds who find themselves in old age).

By your own admission 3/5 of the civil vows are non-child centered.

As to the ante-nuptial agreement [les conventions matrimoniales], the first question the mayor puts to the happy couple is “Has a marriage contract been made?” [A-t-il été fait un contrat de mariage ?], so that he can notarise it and his clerk can record it in the civil register. If not, the parties must select an off-the-shelf matrimonial regime from the Code – Separation of Goods, Universal Community of Goods or Community of Goods, limited to Acquisitions.

I understood pre-nuptial agreements were quite common in the US.

In any event, you must agree they are, taken as a whole, pretty child-centred and emphasize the role of the spouses as future parents.

- Spouses owe each other respect, fidelity, support and assistance.

- Spouses are responsible together for the material and moral guidance of the family. They shall provide for the education of the children and shall prepare their future.

- Where an ante-nuptial agreement does not regulate the contributions of the spouses to the marriage expenses, they shall contribute to them in proportion to their respective means.

- Spouses mutually oblige themselves to a community of living.

- Parental authority is a set of rights and duties whose finality is the welfare of the child. It is vested in the father and mother until the majority or emancipation of the child in order to protect him in his security, health and morality, to ensure his education and allow his development, showing regard to his person. Parents shall make a child a party to judgments relating to him, according to his age and degree of maturity.”

He then asks the parties for their consent.

If the family is only centered on the child, then the family is just a temporary arrangement for about two decades in order to get a child from the birth to adult stage. Traditional marriage vows, interestingly, say nothing about children but say a lot about a life long relationship.

Martine Segalen, author of “Historical Anthropology of the Family,” has observed, “Studies show that when a member of a family lives with a partner outside marriage, that person is considered to belong to the family only from the birth of a child on.” In the increasingly frequent absence of marriage, therefore, it is indeed the child that makes the family. In fact, by making the relationship between his/her parents irreversible, the child brings each of them into the other’s family, something a childless common-law relationship does not necessarily do.

In contrast, the US never had such titles and no need to worry as much about their legal status. The only thing US children inherit is money, property and so on….and as we have seen the law has little or no trouble with a parent who wants to leave their kids nothing.