The same reason that some heterosexuals have wedding ceremonies instead of just filling out the paperwork at the courthouse.
The heteros still have to fill and file the paperwork in order to receive the legal status of what they otherwise perceive to be an actual marriage, though. (unless they live in a common-law state, etc.)
Edit: So, what’s that reason exactly? Is it perhaps because they don’t view their marriage as extant unless they have the ceremony?
I think most people would deem themselves “married” even if they had no formal ceremony and merely filled out the paperwork at the courthouse (presumably some may be so religious as to suppose they need a formalized religious ceremony).
Generally a wedding is considered a time of joy for family and friends of the couple. A ceremony is a public declaration to family, friends and perhaps community that two people have hitched their wagons together and committed themselves to each other. A same-sex couple may want to do this every bit as much as a hetero couple.
Unfortunately the same-sex couple cannot obtain all the legal trappings that the hetero couple gets for the same thing.
i would agree. but i dont think they would consider themselves any less married if the certificate they got from the county clerk said “civil union certificate”
i think it would also be a poignant and effective tool to illustrate to many “on the fence” voters how iniquitous denying homo couples (i don’t think this is an offensive term, but if it is i’ll start to use SS) the same set of legal rights. to me, it’s almost as if it’s a cognitive dissonance, that wont get resolved (on the side of fairness) until you separate out the legal benefits of coupling with a word that has a very serious meaning to people personally, but not necessarily serious in a legal sense.
(Repeat what **Whack-A-Mole **said here)
The ceremony has no legal relevance anyways. Common law marriages, for instance, which are legal in 11 states + DC, prove that fact.
no, it doesn’t have legal relevance. that’s my point. but many people see it with actual relevance to their status as being married (in the eyes of their social network).
common law marriages, however, actually do prove that ceremonies can have quasi-legal relevance*. not the opposite as you suggest.
(*read that as legal relevance born out of the fact that the law was forced to conform to what people conceived of as the social constructs and validity of marriage.)
Sorry, I wasn’t as clear as intended. Those who have common-law marriages due so without ceremonies typically, making the ceremonies a non-point in regards to the legality of their relationship.
But having a ceremony can be a major point in construing the existence of a common-law marriage
CLM is also, as per wikipedia, known as “de facto marriage, informal marriage or marriage by habit and repute”
it’s a clear example of the legal definition of marriage taking a back seat to the practical definitions - in effect, prior to the legal recognition of CLMs, many people thought of themselves as “married” regardless of what the law had to say about it. and i would suggest that it’s still the primary way that most people measure their marriage - by repute - instead of by mere legal status.
The whole point of the whole debate over SSM is the legal status.
You can pretend whatever you want. Go play house with your significant other and have fun.
I pretended I was married to my “girlfriend” when I was five (quotes because at 5-years old girlfriend is rather overstating the relationship). Everyone thought it was cute. It had zero meaning in our society.
yeah now as a legal adult try that in a common law state, or one with a putative spouse doctrine, and see what happens if your girlfriend (reasonably) thinks you’re serious.
again, i’m suggesting that you can re-name the legal status and most hetero couples won’t care about extending that status to homosexual couples. and then homosexual couples would be granted the same rights and responsibilities under the law.
I know you have me on ignore, but that’s a truly silly thing to believe. The point of opposition to SSM is to hurt homosexuals; no amount of word games is going to reduce that opposition. All your plan would do is add people who don’t want their marriage renamed to the list of angry people.
I think I know why you put me on ignore; I’m not willing to pretend the opposition is well meaning. You want to pretend that the anti-SSM people are decent, reasonable folk who can be compromised with; instead of being malignant homophobes who can only be overcome, not compromised with.
That demonstrates that marriage has meaning on multiple levels to most people, but it’s not evidence that the legal meaning of marriage can be easily discarded. Consider, any gay couple in the country can throw a party and call themselves married, and yet the legal recognition of the relationship remains the single largest issue in the gay rights movement. Clearly, this demonstrates that gays, at the very least, place a value on the government recognition of their marriage. I don’t see any reason to think that straights are less likely to put just as much value on that sphere of marriage. Indeed, the crux of the conflict on this issue is that both sides place tremendous value on the concept of marriage, and for exactly the same reasons - which is why neither side is willing to concede any ground on it. Both sides obviously have some sort of investment in marriage as a government recognized compact, which is why there’s no serious movement on either side of the debate to strip marriage of its legal meaning. As a solution, it’s equally unpalatable to everyone involved in the debate.
IIRC for a common law marriage to hold the couple has to present themselves to the world as spouses and both have to agree their relationship is a marriage. So, just living with your girlfriend will not see you waking up one morning all of a sudden married.
Still not understanding the re-naming thing. A rose is a rose by any other name right?
Perhaps as some strategy to get people silly enough to think it makes a difference it may see acceptance sooner (although that is uncertain). Better I think to educate people and do the far simpler measure of encompassing SSM into the existing marriage framework.
Just to re-iterate a point that’s been made several times now:
Plan A for guaranteeing full equality between gay and straight couples is to expand the legal definition of “marriage” to include same-sex couples.
Plan B for guaranteeing full equality between gay and straight couples is to “get government out of the marriage business”, or less radically, “let’s just call them all civil unions”.
Plan A has now been succesfully implemented or is being implemented by seven sovereign states on three continents, along with five sub-sovereign states and a couple of federal districts. (In some cases this has been the result of or in response to decisions by courts, but we now have several instances of elected legislative bodies implementing SSM all by themselves as part of the normal legislative process.)
Plan B…gets proposed a lot on the Internet. Maybe someone has a cite to the contrary, but I have never heard of any actual society resolving the “equal rights for gays” issue by any such course of action.
(There’s also Plan C–give nominally “separate but equal” rights to gays and straights, but call mixed-sex unions “marriage” and same-sex unions something other than marriage. This has also been pretty popular and fairly widely adopted. Supporters of SSM believe it doesn’t truly guarantee equal rights for all.)
Plan C is what a civilized country tries, realizes it’s stupid, and goes to Plan A.
You can suggest that until the cows come home, but if we look at it honestly, there is NO WAY that the folks that vote against same sex marriage would allow us to remove the term “marriage” and replace it with “civil union”. I’d say the vast majority of those folks voting against it are doing so because they think that if gays marry, it will somehow dilute the value of their own (and by said definition, the word) marriage.
It’s just not gonna happen.
Mark
When someone takes the position that the opposition is evil, any attempt at reasonable debate becomes pointless. But I don’t think that’s the reason you were put on ignore.
Just like everything else in this thread, Watkins spelled out his specific reasoning. He felt you were mischaracterizing his posts, and deliberately not understanding them. It is nearly impossible to argue with someone who says you said something that you didn’t say.
I think Watkins’s position was clear from his first post, but that doesn’t mean you found them as clear as I did. So I’m not agreeing with him, just trying to see if I can explain where he could not.
And, since I’m quoting this post, Watkins can more easily see if he wants to reply (and tell me if I got it wrong, too.)
BTW Don’t expect me to reply here. This a rare case where I respond to a debate where (indirect) insults have been flying. I doubt I’ll be back.
And? Sometimes the opposition IS evil. Sometimes the debate is just that one sided. Wasn’t the pro-segregation side evil? The pro-slavery side? The people who opposed giving women the vote, and supported the “right” of men to beat and rape their wives? Sometimes it’s bending over backwards pretending that the other side has a reasonable argument that is unreasonable.
And this is one such case; every time I’ve seen this issue come up, serious opposition sooner or later reduces the anti-SSM side to incoherence or open bigotry. They don’t have any good arguments, nor are they well meaning in any way.
If one didn’t want to extend marriage to gays, then one should actively lobby to have ‘separate but equal’ civil unions established asap. Ironically, it is the jurisdictions which don’t do that which will ultimately have to accept that gays are ‘married’.
My reasoning - reciprocity. Once there are enough gays with marriage-like relationships in one state, who aren’t getting their relationships recognised in other states, the the first state will eventually withdraw legal recognition of the second state’s marriages. And that really can’t happen - resistance to gay marriage will crumble first.
So, at some point a European on holiday in the US will suffer some unacceptable discrimination in a highly emotionally charged situation. In due course, reciprocity will then be denied by the EU. A short while later a deeply religious American will be fatally injured in a European country which has a presumption in favour of organ donation which his family is wholly against. His so called wife could have refused the harvesting of his organs, if only the hussy had been legally married in Europe. Only she wasn’t, so she couldn’t. And because of the legal situation, the hospital would have no choice but to take the organs. (Choose whatever example you find most illuminating, if you don’t like this one - it’s entirely hypothetical because it won’t come to this).
Too far fetched? Only for so long as gays can be discriminated against easily everywhere. Once they are married anywhere, then at some point they are going to be faced with a legal formality which HAS to be completed, which HAS to be completed by the legal next of kin, which they will HAVE to complete, in a jurisdiction which claims that gays can’t be married. When that irresistable force meets that imovable object, it will be the cute fiction that gays can’t be married which will have to give way. Hence the irony that it will be the places which don’t have recognition of civil unions to give them some wriggle room who will have to just come out and accept that gays are ‘married’.
“We” are now close to reaching that point.
You know what? I agree, because the notion of there being a “reasonable debate” about the existence of our human rights and equality is pretty insulting.