That doesn’t make any sense, the law “recognizing” certain relationships isn’t the same as purely acknowledging the existence and possibility of them for the purpose of laws like if there is a law against cheating on a partner.
Yeah is there some kind of trap card thing in Chinese law where as soon as a court recognizes that two women had a relationship it immediately makes gay marriage legal?
Hmm, the person tweeting this (as far as I can tell, they’re not living in China currently, and is some 1st gen Chinese Canadian YA author who writes Chinese history-inspired fantasy/SF) provided some “elaboration” on the alleged situation:-
The source is from a Chinese lawyer. The law about “ruining a military marriage” specifies committing bigamy or cohabitating with a military spouse, and cohabitation is currently defined as “living as if husband and wife”
If the court wants to charge these women they are then recognizing that two women can legally have a relationship as serious as that of a husband and wife
(responding question whether the cheating couple is being imprisoned) No the soldier is threatening to sue the women unless they give him 200k RMB (27k USD) but they are threatening to counter-sue him for extortion. So right now it’s just threats. Even the lawyer I saw this from doesn’t know how a court would rule in this case.
Not sure about the anonymous “Chinese lawyer” source that they’re relying on, and I can’t find a news source reporting on this case; elsewhere in the thread they posted an SCMP article, but it was about a “coventional” heterosexual jody case from earlier this year). Be that as it may, on first glance, the purpoted legal logic doesn’t seem to be completely without legs to me? If cohabitation is legally defined as “living as if husband and wife”, it seems at least arguable (not saying that it’s an argument that Chinese courts will definitely accept) that the court cannot legally recognise a “lesbian cohabitation” situation without first recognising the concept of a marriage/legally-recognised union between two women?
I think it’s a really flimsy argument tbh.
Say for example a wife of a PLA soldier has an affair with a married man and they live together, eat together, go on dates together, fuck, etc. The male adulterer would not be able to actually marry the soldier’s wife because bigamy is illegal. I don’t think it would fly for a second to argue that the male adulterer can’t be convicted because the Court would be recognizing bigamy.
I’m not a trained Chinese lawyer or anything, but if the English translation of “as if” is accurate then there’s a ton of leeway for interpretation.
(as far as I can tell, she’s not living in China currently, and is some 1st gen Chinese Canadian YA author who writes Chinese history-inspired fantasy/SF)
Not living there currently. She They was born and spent their childhood there and speaks the language natively.
The SCMP article does imply that the law serves both to try to keep a soldier’s mind on the job as well as some legal consequences for anybody specifically targeting a soldier’s spouse who is living alone during a deployment.
I kinda wonder if the law was created to be used in this particular way or if it was written broadly enough that it can be used in spiteful ways, as this instance seems to indicate. If you’re asked for a divorce by your spouse and the first thing you do is start checking security camera footage/cell phone records for evidence of infidelity, that says more about you than your spouse.
It’d be interesting to know the specifics of the law (which does not seem to be quoted anywhere in the article) and if there was any specific history behind its creation and application in court.
The tweet is the dumbest legal take I’ve seen since I stopped tutoring Law 101.
Please share some of the dumbest takes you’ve heard from that’s experience! It sounds rife with humor potential.
I won’t tell on the first years because university is a time where you can have dumb takes and be forgiven as long as you learn from them.
Instead I will tell you about the time I was sued by a sov cit who filed a petition they wrote themselves. It laboriously detailed all the ways in which “I” (he had the wrong person) violated his constitutional rights - how I trampled on his freedom of speech, denied him a fair hearing, seized his property, etc etc - all with detailed references to the US constitution. The problem? We were not in the US, none of the stuff at dispute was in the US, and neither of us were American anyway. Dude straight up did his own research on a different legal system and just assumed it would apply where we were.