Clan Dowry
The Cobalt Protectorate was founded among the Evermornan peoples and, to this day, retains some of the clan-based social and familial traditions that defined its formative years. Originally designed to foment the strong family ties across clan lines that help cement intranational peace, the practice of clans providing a stipend or dowry to those who marry their members now serves to promote exogamy in the Protectorate's colonies, discourage abuse and infidelity, and provide stable home environments for the children that result.
Participants
The clan dowry is a stipend or other benefit that increases in value over time based on the duration of the associated marriage. The husband recieves his remuneration from his wife's clan, while the wife recieves her remuneration from her husband's clan. Because every citizen immigrant is adopted into a clan as part of their induction into Protectorate society, their adoptive clan provides these benefits to their spouse as though they were a native son or daughter of that clan. The form that a clan dowry takes can be a direct monetary contribution, but takes a variety of forms based on the clan providing it. For example:
The spacer-majority Clan Mackinnon provides stipends for groceries, transportation, and energy costs.
The more growth-oriented Clan Anikokeuri provides stipends towards child care, fertility services, family medical care, and elder care.
The development-oriented Clan Harukiin provides stipends earmarked for the purchase of residential plots and structures, home goods, transportation, and education.
Certain behaviors are not conducive to the persistence of marriage (i.e. infidelity) or the development of the young Protectorate citizens growing up within it (i.e. abuse or neglect). Protectorate law does not feature 'no fault' divorce, but any of these aggregious behaviors may serve as cause for dissolution and, thus, cause a clan dowry to be rescinded. In cases where a marriage dissolves as a result of a substantiated claim of one of these, any responsible party, aside from any criminal liability they might face for related crimes against persons, also loses all access to clan dowries for 10 Evermornan years. Children still recieve the beneifts of their parents' first dowries until they come of age; the goal of the clan dowry is to promote healthy families, not extend the effects of quarrelsome parents' selfishness to their offspring. In old times, the clan dowry was designed to help foster ties between occasionally warring clans. An exchange of clan members for the purposes of marriage established bonds of family and, thus, made it harder to justify going to war. In modern times, where colony vessels ply their way across the stars with tiny populations of human and human-adjacent species in tow, the clan dowry serves a new purpose: the promotion of exogamy to prevent inbreeding. A couple can only benefit from a clan dowry of a specific clan once; for maximum effect, the couple must hail from separate clans, and clan affiliation is patrilineal in nature. The one exception to the 'single heritage' rule is where a spouse is a citizen immigrant who does not hail from a recognized bloodline of the clan, as in the case with near-humans, in which case the stipend is proportionally increased.
Certain behaviors are not conducive to the persistence of marriage (i.e. infidelity) or the development of the young Protectorate citizens growing up within it (i.e. abuse or neglect). Protectorate law does not feature 'no fault' divorce, but any of these aggregious behaviors may serve as cause for dissolution and, thus, cause a clan dowry to be rescinded. In cases where a marriage dissolves as a result of a substantiated claim of one of these, any responsible party, aside from any criminal liability they might face for related crimes against persons, also loses all access to clan dowries for 10 Evermornan years. Children still recieve the beneifts of their parents' first dowries until they come of age; the goal of the clan dowry is to promote healthy families, not extend the effects of quarrelsome parents' selfishness to their offspring. In old times, the clan dowry was designed to help foster ties between occasionally warring clans. An exchange of clan members for the purposes of marriage established bonds of family and, thus, made it harder to justify going to war. In modern times, where colony vessels ply their way across the stars with tiny populations of human and human-adjacent species in tow, the clan dowry serves a new purpose: the promotion of exogamy to prevent inbreeding. A couple can only benefit from a clan dowry of a specific clan once; for maximum effect, the couple must hail from separate clans, and clan affiliation is patrilineal in nature. The one exception to the 'single heritage' rule is where a spouse is a citizen immigrant who does not hail from a recognized bloodline of the clan, as in the case with near-humans, in which case the stipend is proportionally increased.
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