…Accepting that, how can we craft the best, fairest society for all?
At the suggestion of magellan01, I invite debate on a hypothetical situation in which an unnamed country has for whatever reason firmly and permanently decided that legal marriage will never be extended to homosexuals. That country has, however, allowed for the concept of “civil union” which in magellan’s hypothetical, is exactly identical to marriage and cannot ever be made legally lesser or inferior as might be the concern for people who see an analogy to the “separate but equal” situation of segregated school.
My own take on this, if I wanted to craft the best, fairest society, is to make civil unions better than legal marriage - any tax benefit married couples get, civilly united couples get double. Any insurance premiums one might pay to cover one’s legally-married spouse - covering a civil union partner costs half of that. Pension benefits for surviving civil partners are twice those for surviving married spouses. I’m confident anyone who wants to put in the effort can find multiple marital benefits or expenses with some dollar value attached, or marital timeframes (i.e. if a married couple has to wait a year for a divorce). Any readily quantifiable aspect of marriage one can find; civilly united couples get twice as much, pay half as much, wait half as long, etc.
Citizens can still get “married” in the houses of worship of their choice in the religious traditions of their choice, but their religious “marriage” has no connection to their legal marriage (or legal civil union, as the case may be). I believe this situation already exists in most western countries, where the religious ceremony (assuming there is one) is distinct from the marriage license.
The likely result, as I see it, is that heterosexual couples will tend to prefer the civil union option (I’m assuming that although homosexuals are limited to this option, the option is not limited to them). Gradually, legal marriages will be outnumbered by legal civil unions, though legal marriage will remain on the books as a variant with additional restrictions, much like the “covenant marriage” version that currently exists in four U.S. states. Couples of any gender configuration will continue to “marry” in their various churches and whatnot; I’m assuming this hypothetical nation has some equivalent of protections for religion and free speech and thus no way to stop anyone from calling their arrangement a “marriage” in casual or ceremonial speech as long as there is no intent to defraud.
You don’t have to go that far. If you simply make civil unions equivalent to marriages in every way - but make civil unions not covered by the marriage penalty - you do just as well for less money.
Consider it a tax on the religious.
If politicians on the right really wanted to protect marriage for the sake of marriage, and were not homophobic, they could supported such a plan and taken the wind right out of the sails of the SSM movement - since no Democrat would vote against it and support for SSM for anything other than the right to be called married would be much smaller.
It can’t be done. The whole point of such a system is to persecute homosexuals, and by nature you can’t set up a fair system of persecution.
For example, you’d have to set up a nationwide enforcement program for the usage of the term marriage to ensure it isn’t used to refer to civil unions. Complete with punishments and intrusive monitoring of anyone in a civil union or who interacts with such a person. Segregation requires enforcement mechanisms, and this is a form of segregation.
Nor can you sweeten the deal by making civil unions better. Any benefit you add to it will soon be stripped away and they will then be further and further degraded. That is, again as seen in the history of segregation, inevitable. That’s what they are for; a society that wasn’t inclined to do such things wouldn’t create such a system in the first place.
There’s also the problem that you can’t get people to recognize a civil union even across state lines, much less out of the country. The nation of Homophobia (it does actually sort of work as a name of a county) won’t have the power to make civil unions recognized like marriages are, which even ignoring the effects of that on homosexuals will make them even less appealing to straight couples. Anyone who intends to cross a border will know that by doing so their SO ceases to have any legal relationship with them.
If the system was set up to be exactly equal, everyone is just going to call people who are civil-unioned “married”, anyway, and will call them “husbands” or “wives”. Because we already have all this language for long-term legally-recognized domestic partnerships, and “civil unioned” doesn’t roll off the tongue.
We have both SSM and civil partnerships in South Africa - but in practice we call everyone married no matter which route they go.
I don’t want gay people to have better rights than straight people or worse rights than straight people. Gay and straight people should have the same rights.
I don’t even think gays should have to settle for civil unions that are the legal equivalent of marriages. The very fact that some people are seeking to “protect” marriages indicates they feel there is a special significance to the term marriage - and by that they render their argument invalid. If there is some special significance to being married - even if it’s just a warm fuzzy feeling - then gay people are just as entitled to it as straight people are. Telling gay people they have to settle for the legal equivalent of marriage is a reintroduction of “separate but equal”.
Why? Legally married couples get a marriage certificate, civilly united couples get a civil union certificate. What’s to enforce, let alone punish? That said, I can vaguely imagine an intent-to-commit-fraud circumstance where a man says “I’m legally married to Terry” with the intent to imply that Terry is a woman since legal marriage is limited to heterosexuals. In fact the man is civilly united with Terry, who might be of either gender, but the fraudulent enterprise relies on the victim believing Terry was specifically female. I’m sure someone can write up a caper-film screenplay to that effect.
Well, in magellan’s words: “Failure of Proposal: not applicable”, so that’s taken care of.
Why are we assuming the nation of Homophobia has “state lines” ? The proposed hypothetical is very clearly not taking place in the current United States, since that country has already missed the nationwide civil union option (and doesn’t seem to have a Federal mechanism to enforce one, anyway, though the hypothetical country of Homophobia could and for the purposes of this discussion, does). What happens when one leaves the nation of Homophobia is outside of Homophobia’s purview anyway, so I don’t see the concern.
Everyone calling civil unions civil unions, and never ever calling them marriage. You can’t have segregation without some means of keeping people from crossing the line; without enforcement people will start calling civil unions marriages which defeats the purpose. It would be like having segregation without some means of forcing blacks to sit in the back of the bus, go to worse schools, drink from “colored” water fountains and all the rest; without the application of force it will just be ignored.
Of course it’s “applicable”, whatever he says. Any proposal like this based on the assumption of goodwill in the people implementing it will fail, because well meaning people would never implement it in the first place. Even if your goal is just to moderate the damage rather than to impossibly make it work well, in order to do so you need to take into account the inevitably homophobic and cruel attitudes of the people implementing your plan in order for your predictions of what they will do to have any resemblance to reality.
You were arguing that people would perhaps choose civil unions over marriage; that’s one of the ways they would inevitably be inferior.
What you’re describing is outside the control of any nation, so I don’t see why it need be a concern here. Within the borders of Homophobia, I propose civil unions carry a great many advantages over legal marriage. If someone wants to say they’re married, who cares? Unless there’s some kind of fraud intended, of course.
Anyway, you’ve made the “it’s segregation and oppression” argument at length in the original thread (and lots of others before it), so no need to drag it here, too.
France has an excellent model. The State only recognizes unions organised by the state on behalf of the state. Unions blessed in church happen but have no legal significance. People go first to the State, register their marriage, and are the free to celebrate it in any way.
I think the correct answer is simpler. Gay people can only get a civil union, forever and ever in this nation? Fine: do away with government marriage entirely.
This is still my slight favorite as a proposal, even better than SSM: once the issue came up, I started thinking about how it’s weird for the state to get involved in my love life, and also how it’s weird for the state to make judgments about relationships at all. I’d slightly prefer that “marriage” be something entirely in the private sphere, similar to birthday parties, and the state issue civil unions to any two unattached consenting adults who want one.
That plays straight into the hands of those who are insisting that homosexuals are trying to destroy the institution of marriage, which I think is at least some kind of problem.
Yeah, but you know that through simple social inertia, everyone with a “government recognized civil union” will be calling it a marriage.
That is what made me feel that it was cleaner to change “husband and wife” on the applications to “spouse” instead of crossing out Marriage and writing in Civil Union on all the applicable legislation.
Like others have said, ‘civil unions’ will, in short order, just be called ‘marriage’, and only a diminishing number of holdouts will resist this. It won’t be long before ‘civil unions’ are near-universally called marriage.
This isn’t a terrible place, but it’s still not as good as full legal marriage, in my view, and I see no reason to support this idea over full legal marriage. In my view, legalizing SSM strengthens marriage and makes it more attractive and more legitimate, and I think more young people agree with me than with the opposite view.
I’ve suggested for a while that religious folks who feel the need to protect the holy in holy matrimony can establish their own special religious covenant and all marriages done to fulfill state and federal legal requirements are simply civil unions that we have come to call married.