Such easy invalidation ain’t gonna fly. I’ve been talking this whole time about marriage as a social institution. All those points stand.
Requesting a benefit from society is not the same thing as being asked to be left alone. As I’ve said above, I think you should have those benefits. But your framing of the issue is all wrong.
Saying “Don’t get in the way of my use of medical marijuana” is asking to be left alone. Saying “Provide me medical marijuana as part of my Medicare package” is asking for a positive input from society.
The irony is that the marriage system, until very recently, was a huge restriction on sexuality, the only benefit of which was that society “allowed” you to have sex. Nowadays the only thing that makes it a benefit is the tax goodies, I suppose (and even then you sometimes have penalties, heck).
No they don’t, because your points about society’s “shared vision” of marriage—things like “You should have kids, you should not cheat, you should come over as a couple to our house and have dinner, etc. etc.”—are not codified in law as deal-breakers. Society doesn’t tell you that you can’t get married if you’re not going to have kids. If you cheat on your spouse, society doesn’t tell you that you can’t stay married, or that you can’t get married again. If you don’t visit people as a couple, you don’t get booted out of the institution of marriage.
Oh, fuck off.
For heterosexuals wanting to get married to one another, marriage is, for all intents and purposes, a right in western society. Can you think of any circumstance that would prevent a man and a woman getting married in the US? Hell, convicted murderers sometimes get married while they’re still in jail.
The so-called benefits you talk about are already given—it’s just tha they’re given to people who happen to be married. That decision has already been made. The simple act of getting married, however, requires nothing except the government and the bigoted moralizers getting out of the way. Hell, for all i care they can cut all the benefits that accrue to married couples, gay or straight.
And stop pretending that you give a fuck. You say " I think you should have those benefits." But when you accompany that claim with arguments about how the moralizers have the right to hold gay people hostage to their bigotry, then you’re no better than they are.
But this misses the thrust of much of my argument, namely that, too many detractors of SSM, everyone else is not completely unaffected.
What consenting adults want to do in their private lives is entirely their business, and anyone who wants to interfere with that is, quite frankly, an asshole deserving little or no regard. However, the institution of marriage brings with it an array of benefits and priveliges that do have effects throughout society.
Adultery is still illegal in some states, although, of course, it isn’t enforced. But how about some historical perspective?
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Society doesn’t tell you that you can’t get married if you’re not going to have kids.
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Your ignorance is showing, son. Didn’t you know that the Catholic Church won’t marry couples that say they don’t want kids? Again, I don’t know how much this is enforced any more, but it’s still “on the books.”
Society still has a big role, my friend, big! What do you think would happen to me in my Japanese family if my in-laws found out I was cheating on their daughter? What would my own parents say? Etc. etc.
Where is your usual civility?
Hey, guess what? You just made a point that makes sense–wow! Keep it up, big guy, and you might actually end up making a cogent argument.
To answer the point seriously, however, I must repeat my point about historical context: marriage was the restrictive gateway to sex in the past, not a bundle of goodies. Hence, the “right” to get married in the past (not that it was ever called a right, right?) was important insofar as, without it, you couldn’t get laid. But this wasn’t relevent to gays, since they would get laid without such permission, I assume. So you had the big restrictions with only a paltry few goodies attached, such as the right to inherit, etc.
I’m agreeing with you, however, that gay people should not be prevented from getting the goodies that exist today–I agree with you, got that?
Without the benefits, what the hell would marriage be worth?!
Your desire to see as an enemy anyone who does not agree with you 100% makes you ludicrous.
Amazingly enough, some people have managed to marry without any “sacred” aspect to it whatsoever.
But the point of this thread is not to prescribe or proscribe what types of union the Catholic Church should recognize. If the Catholic Church chooses not to marry gay couples, that’s up to the Church and its members.
The point of this thread to simply ask the government to recognize a marriage ceremony that has been performed (by whomever is licensed to perform marriage ceremonies) for a gay couple.
But the crucial question—indeed, the only relevant question for this debate—is what would the state do? Would you be forced to give up your marriage as a penalty for your infidelity? Would you be forced to give up your right to marry again, as a result of your infidelity? I thought not.
I guess it withers under the glare of constant ignorance.
Much of your argument in this thread seems to rely on an archaic notion of what marriage was meant to do and mean. Yet, at the same time you concede that most of those archaic restrictions have fallen by the wayside. If we, as a society, were able to let those restrictions fall by the wayside without destroying the institution of marriage, why not let another archaic restriction lapse also?
So why do you want to prevent them from calling their relationship “marriage”?
Oh, i don’t know. Maybe it would be, like, a symbol of a couple’s love for and commitment to one another. Just a guess.
No, i do not see as an enemy anyone who does not agree with me. As i’ve made clear in numerous previous posts, i don’t care if people oppose gay marriage.
Those i see as enemies are people who disagree with me AND who think that they have the right to tell gay people that they cannot get married.
My point was that those social pressures/strictures still apply.
I agree that the US should do so.
It is relevent to a lot of people, as they feel that the state supports the “true” version of marriage. You have to win these people over or beat them with brute legal (or other) force.
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I guess it withers under the glare of constant ignorance.
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Yuh huh.
Much of your argument in this thread seems to rely on an archaic notion of what marriage was meant to do and mean. Yet, at the same time you concede that most of those archaic restrictions have fallen by the wayside. If we, as a society, were able to let those restrictions fall by the wayside without destroying the institution of marriage, why not let another archaic restriction lapse also?
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It’s not a restriction in the same sense (I was talking about how the marriage system restricts sexuality both before and after the ceremony). But yeah, I agree.
Read me fookin’ posts, laddie. I said, “Call it marriage.” If gay couples are to get the same rights as hetero couples, then it’s semantic bullshit not to call it the same thing. (On the other hand, I think any two people should be able to get the same deal; so a mother-daughter combo, etc., might want to call it a “domestic partnership.” Perhaps one could have a choice of names. Also, don’t they have a kind of marriage junior or civil unions for heteros in a state out there? I think I read that somewhere.
Sounds like bullshit to me. I don’t see the state as being in the business of symbol provision. Completely irrelevent. Either there are concrete benefits at stake, or it’s worthless. Less than worthless, in fact, as one would have to go through the same hoops (divorce) in order to get out of the contract. Yuck. BTW, I am no big fan of marriage as it exists now anyway, and would never have done the formal legal deal without considerable social pressure (especially on the Japan side). So I’m mystified why gays are so interested in putting on these shackles. Except for the tax benefits, etc.
Then what’s our issue, dear friend?
After reading all this, here is some “stuff” I want to say. Personally, I am not too hung up on the marriage / vs. civil union thing. However, There are certain things that such a situation give you. Everyone gets sick and dies eventually. I for one want to have a say in who my money goes to. I want a say in who my house goes to. I want, if I am the guy in the hospital, to have my Other be able to visit me. I do not want some bureaucrat or relative crawling out of the woodwork, dictating what happens to any of the above mentioned things. I don’t care if it called marriage, union, partnership or cartel (or anything else). That’s the main thing. People are just trying to get some of the basic protections a lot of other people are entitled to and take for granted.
Lilairen, hear hear. And I believe you’re right in that the unconsummated marriages were Egyptian; I think that was fairly common in the royal line, at least.
Marriage, historically, was not about religion. Not about tying two souls together. Not about lifelong committments to partners. Nor even, at its base, about producing children (also, not like we need a lot more. Have you seen earth’s population stats lately?). It was about property.
The “marriage is religious, leave us our word!” argument seems very silly to me, for the reasons as stated above.
<insert obligatory mutual-masturbation joke here>
That’s very nice, honestly, but we are all talking about legalizing same-sex marriage, not the miscellaneous social aspects of marriage. If your argument is, in general, that marriage will not be sufficient to win social acceptance of homosexual unions all by itself, that’s perfectly true. We’re really just talking about legal equality here.
The social stuff will take time, and is very important, but it’s the legal stuff that’s the emergency. The social stuff will eventually help keep people from wanting to steal gay people’s partners from them after they die; the legal stuff will prevent them from doing so.
That’s an excellent point, matt.
At the moment, SSM is the great scary unknown. It hasn’t been done before here! Society will fall! Dogs and cats will sleep together!
The only way to combat that social fear is to HAVE widespread gay marriage, in the same way that the only way to combat social fear of homosexuals in general is to HAVE people come out of the closet everywhere, in all walks of life, in all geographic locations, in all churches. If we stand around waiting for people to accept us before we come out, we’ll never come out. If we stand around waiting for people to accept gay marriage before demanding equal treatment under the law, we’re never going to get equal treatment under the law.
And this array of benefits and privileges are extended with absolutely no question to most people in the United States. It is not extended to me, because I am a homosexual. I have yet to hear what it is exactly that is the difference between my marrying the person I love and my best friend (who is straight) marrying the person that he loves, other than that one causes a whole mess of problems because I am a homosexual. And people insist that this is so fundamentally different from “real” marriage that it warrants a completely different term. And then people would have me believe that they don’t have anything against homosexuals, and I’m being shrill and unreasonable for implying that they do.
How is everyone else affected by my marrying my boyfriend, in a way that doesn’t also apply to my friend marrying his girlfriend? Because they find it objectionable for “personal and religious reasons?” What are the personal, religious, and moral objections to two loving consenting adults getting married? Are there any?
Personally, I would have personal and religious and moral objections to the idea of the marriage between a man and a woman who have cheated on each other, been abusive to each other, and have shown themselves to be irresponsible. Yet the government would make no attempt to stop their marriage, and I acknowledge that, and that part of my tax money would go to support the benefits they would receive from their marriage.
That doesn’t mean I am supporting their marriage, or supporting adultery, spousal abuse, or irresponsibility. That only means that the institution of marriage exists and is extended to all people equally. Or at least, it should be.
Oh yeah, that bit had slipped my mind. (I’m spectacularly uninterested in Pharaonic history, which means it falls out of my head a lot.) It also happened in regular families that had property occasionally. (Probably in cases where there were no surviving/acceptable sons? Damn, my memory’s completely shot.)
Honestly, I think people who think that humans need to be encouraged to reproduce must all have sex drives like mine. 
It makes me very cranky, because my religion recognises marriage as a contract between individuals (and families) and thus stays the hell out of it.
These days, marriage is “about” getting a certain type of formally recognised familial relationship. It has a lot in common with adoption, which legally establishes a different type of familial relationship. (I know of gay couples who have adopted each other so as to have some sort of family tie recognised by the law.)
Recognition of familial relationships is one of those big societal deals. Different relationships have different rights and responsibilities (which are to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the culture, codified into the formal legal system of that culture). Even back in the old days before the Church got its claws into marriage, the poor would “jump the broom” to mark their relationships as binding in a social ritual – as did slaves in the American South. The biggest social ritual for declaring a spousal relationship is the marriage license. (I would note that even though Teine and I were married privately and they were not in attendance, and that we were not married religiously, my religious in-laws immediately changed their attitude towards the legitimacy of our relationship as soon as we had that license.)
So what happens when the primary form of social recognition of the familial relationship is not available to all such relationships? First of all, you get a factionalisation between people who will respect other declarations of those relationships and those who will not. Other forms of recognition of familial relationship develop – arguably, this is how the civil marriage license took over religious recognition of marriage in the United States with increase in religious plurality and non-religious folks – and the old methods begin to atrophy as people other than the affected group start using the alternate method. Some refuse to use the established method because of its discriminatory nature.
Eventually the established method either accomodates the groups in question or atrophies and dies due to disuse. This is not without a lot of messy factionalisation along the way as people get very heated about the whole thing, because traditions matter.
I’m conservative about marriage. I think it’s important to preserve it as a cultural institution, and for that matter restore it to its early states where “marriage” was something that individuals can do to each other of their own free will. I’ll bow to modernism a little and let the state get involved as a neutral witness, since it will have to handle the property disputes if the marriage doesn’t last, and to attempt to limit cases of contract fraud. But this whole some people get marriage and other people don’t thing is going to destroy marriage if it keeps up, and I’m flatly against that.
I can’t tell for sure, but you may be calling out me. If so, it’s because you labor under a misapprehension that I want to do anything to your marriage.
If your marriage consists primarily of a piece of paper in a courthouse, and if the most important thing about that piece of paper is the word “marriage” across the top of it, then sure, I’m wanting to fuck up your marriage.
But if your marriage is about a set of rights, coupled with a commitment you made in front of your loved ones, then the proposal that I (and Bricker) have advocated would have zero effect on your marriage.
I’m an atheist. I don’t like having the government involved in my love life, and I wish they’d issued me a civil union certificate instead of a marriage certificate. And I am firmly and happily and committedly married, because my marriage consists of the commitment I made.
Getting the government out of the marriage business would not change that commitment one whit.
I don’t suggest this as a way to get out of an argument. I suggest it because I think that, independently of the SSM issue, it’s the right thing to do; and I suggest it because I believe it’s a way to win equal rights for everyone, as described in other threads.
I may be wrong on this last point, and matt’s arguments against the comity issue have merit to them, which I’ve been considering. Even if I’m wrong on that, however, it is odious for folks to treat me like I’m looking to lessen anyone’s rights, simply because I want the government to use a different word for entwining folks’ legal rights; it is despicable for folks to twist my argument into something homophobic.
The struggle will succeed if there are many ideas out there, and if everyone keeps sight of the important issue: attaining for all couples the same rights currently granted to heterosexual sexual couples. Any idea that results in that end ought to be embraced as a viable alternative.
Daniel
This keeps getting proposed as if it were a realistic, reasonable, and fair compromise that would please everyone involved. We keep saying that it isn’t, and explaining why we think it isn’t.
You say the government has no place in determining what a “real” marriage is. Maybe that’s true. But the reality of the situation is that the government is doing that, and it has been doing that for centuries. It is completely unrealistic as well as just plain unfair to demand that everyone switch over to a new civil union status because from now on, the government’s not in the business of marriage. Even though your grandparents were “married” and your parents were “married,” you now have to be “joined” or “unioned” or some other made-up word. You have seen the outrage that comes just from expecting homosexuals to put up with this alternative, and that’s just 10% of the population according to the highest estimates. What would be the reaction if you tried to force this new enlightened definition of marriage on 100% of the population?
It’s simply not going to happen.
You say that you are an atheist. I am not. We have a term, we have an institution, we have relevant laws, ceremonies, titles, public perception, rights, tax arrangements, everything set up and in place for the kind of relationship I want to have. It’s called “marriage.” Why mess with a good thing? Why change something that works, and has been proven to work over and over again for centuries?
I keep hearing things like “but some people need civil unions” and “the government has no business determining marriage” as if they were counter-arguments to same-sex marriage. They’re not. If a Jewish person wanted to join a country club and asked why he couldn’t, and someone responded with, “Well, I don’t think there should be country clubs anyway,” that’s not answering his question. Saying, “some day there won’t be any country clubs, so calm down and don’t worry about it; you can play golf somewhere else and it’s just the same” isn’t helping him. Neither is telling him that if they let the jews in, then they’d have to also allow rapists and pedophiles and sheep-fuckers in, but that’s not relevant so much as it bugs the hell out of me.
The only counter-argument to same-sex marriage would be to explain exactly why two people who have fulfilled every single one of the requirements for the institution of marriage as it exists today are still not entitled to it, while just about any other two people would be let in with no question. And I’m not being unreasonable, I’m being frustrated, because I have yet to hear an explanation for that that isn’t rooted in homophobia.
SG: * It is completely unrealistic as well as just plain unfair to demand that everyone switch over to a new civil union status because from now on, the government’s not in the business of marriage. Even though your grandparents were “married” and your parents were “married,” you now have to be “joined” or “unioned” or some other made-up word. You have seen the outrage that comes just from expecting homosexuals to put up with this alternative, and that’s just 10% of the population according to the highest estimates. What would be the reaction if you tried to force this new enlightened definition of marriage on 100% of the population?
It’s simply not going to happen.
You say that you are an atheist. I am not. We have a term, we have an institution, we have relevant laws, ceremonies, titles, public perception, rights, tax arrangements, everything set up and in place for the kind of relationship I want to have. It’s called “marriage.” Why mess with a good thing? Why change something that works, and has been proven to work over and over again for centuries?*
I support SSM, but I don’t understand why you seem to think it would be more tolerable to the present general population than replacing civil marriage with civil unions.
I think the people who take “marriage” as a term most seriously tend to be the people who think of it as more than a civil contract, and therefore consider their religious ceremony as their “real” marriage pact. Many of them would probably be less outraged at having the civil contract called a “union” rather than a “marriage” than at having the legal term “marriage” applied to a same-sex union as well.
Face it, the legal and social meaning of “marriage” isn’t set in stone, and has been changing a lot over the past several decades and centuries. If we shifted the term “marriage” out of the public sector altogether and left it to private society and religious institutions, it wouldn’t be a much bigger change in the public concept of marriage than those produced by, say, legalizing divorce or allowing married women to own property. I certainly don’t think it would be a bigger change than extending the definition of legal marriage to cover SSM.
Aside from the question of public outrage levels, which is not the best criterion for implementing just laws anyway, I think you’re going in exactly the wrong direction in your approach to society’s views of marriage here. You’re trying to reinforce a traditional notion of marriage as an entrenched, monolithic “institution” with “everything set up and in place” that’s been “working for centuries”. I think that, on the contrary, marriage is actually becoming far more fluid, with wildly proliferating individual preferences on issues like living together, polyamory, divorce, adoption, long-distance marriages, common-law marriages, open marriages, what have you.
More than ever before, marriage now means what the people involved in it want it to mean, rather than some kind of blueprint that everybody’s supposed to follow. I think that’s a good thing, and I think that muddying the waters of convention further by introducing civil unions—either in addition to or instead of civil marriage, or perhaps the former first and eventually the latter—will actually be best in the long run, not only for gay rights but for society as a whole.
Precisely my OP. My marriage is something important to me – I’d venture to guess that on the order of 99% of married Dopers would say likewise. I do not want to hear that “legally it ought to be a civil union, because marriage is a religious institution” – Fuck that! Marriage is a religious institution – and a civil institution – and the two concepts overlap to the extent that up until recently only Catholics and Orthodox Christians, and a small handful of people of unusual beliefs, have had to worry about the difference.
I think it is possible to argue in favor of marriage being an institution calling for exclusively opposite-sex couples – but I haven’t yet heard a coherent argument not founded in religious beliefs or the perpetuation of long-standing custom. And neither of those are sound enough reasons to enact a law in America that appears to a fair proportion of the populace to be discriminatory in its effects.
So, the bottom line is – we are not going to abolish marriage, just to please a handful of people who aren’t interested in marriage anyway. And we may or may not enact same-sex marriage in the immediate future, or find it ruled into existence by a 14th Amendment or state constitution challenge to marriage laws. (And I know that the latter recourse is going to piss more than a few people off as “judicial activism” – which it is not, if the case can be made that the Constitutional guarantees of rights do enable it. – Oh, and by the way, anyone who cllaims that the only rights we have are the ones explicitly spelled out in law are encouraged to read the Ninth Amendment, the excerpts from the Federalist Papers and James Madison’s speeches that have been quoted around here a while, and then to permanently sign off this board and just talk to their computer – your freedom to speak to it is explicitly guaranteed; your freedom to post on Internet message boards is not, and is a bit of that “judicial activism” that you’re decrying. So if you sincerely believe you have no rights except those explicitly guaranteed, put your money where your mouth is, and quit the board.)
But ultimately the idea that what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for two ganders will prevail, and you’ll be seen in precisely the same light as Lester Maddox, Bull Connor, Cotton Ed Jones, Theodore Bilbo, and a few other celebrities of the last century. (But if you act soon, you could actually come up to the level of George Wallace! :))
Poly: * I haven’t yet heard a coherent argument not founded in religious beliefs or the perpetuation of long-standing custom.*
Well, Poly, if “religious beliefs or the perpetuation of long-standing custom” are not adequate reasons for refusing to alter marriage to include SSM, I don’t see why they would be adequate reasons for refusing to replace civil marriage with civil unions. And I haven’t heard yet heard a coherent argument against such a replacement not founded on one of those reasons.