I vehemently disagree though I would have agreed 10 years ago. A lot of progress has been made and don’t doubt that homosexual marriages will exist legally in this country within the next 5-10 years.
Marc
Since when was marriage ever a purly sexual liasion? Prostitutes have existed in most cultures and these days you don’t need marriage for sex.
Marc
So who’s talking about denying you the label of marriage? Read carefully here: all we’re saying is that the government would no longer make that determination. That doesn’t mean it becomes the exclusive property of churches; it means it becomes the exclusive property of the non-governmental sector.
Not religious? Cool. Get a few friends together, appoint one of them the supreme honcho, and have her say, “Poof! You’re married!” What do I care? As long as it’s meaningful to you and to your loved ones, that should be all that matters. Your marriage will then be just as valid, in the eyes of the state, as a marriage performed by the Pope.
You say that you do not seek government approval of your relationship; at the same time, you say that you want the government to say that you’re married, not that you’re civilly unioned. These two statement seem like a flat contradiction to me.
Daniel
Java Maven only sells espresso drinks.
But many cafes sell espresso drinks, and you don’t need to get espresso at Java Maven.
Therefore, Java Maven does not only sell espresso drinks.
Marc, you’re making a basic mistake here. Just because prostitution is also a type of sexual liaison and prostitution isn’t marriage doesn’t mean that marriage isn’t a sexual liaison. I’d draw you a Venn diagram, but I’m no 1337 ASCII master.
Furthermore, you’re missing the underlying point in favor of a fallacious nitpick: the underlying point is that marriage is traditionally understood to involve a sexual relationship, whereas a civil union wouldn’t necessarily do so, but would simply recognize a longterm living-together partnership. I’ve discussed the benefits of this change in my posts back on page 1; check it out.
Daniel
Speaking as someone who actually hypothetically considered the possibility of filing a lawsuit to obtain a heterosexual civil union rather than marriage (because I think it’s such blatant discrimination to give heterosexual and homosexual couples different official status), I’m absolutely all for this idea. All couples will have the same legal status of “civil union”; all religious bodies will retain the right to set the qualifications for what they define as “marriage” within their faith; all social conventions will go on considering couples who are formally, legally coupled as “married”.
For a while, there will be many assholes who will refuse to extend the courtesy of using the term “married” to refer to couples who consider themselves married but who don’t meet the assholes’ qualifications for their personal definition of “marriage”. (Just as there are still a few assholes who insist on drawing a verbal distinction between adopted children and “real” children, even when talking to parents who find such a distinction insulting.) This will be annoying, but eventually most of the people doing it will realize that it makes them seem like assholes and will stop doing it.
And if, as MGibson thinks, in 5–10 years’ time (IMHO more like 20–50) there is no longer strong opposition to homosexual marriage, then if we feel like it we can change the name back again. No biggie.
Here’s to civil unions for all, and here’s a suggested theme song for them: 
Gorsnak: *I’m merely pointing out that the anti-SSM pro-civil union people are muddled in their thinking. […] In other words, nothing is changed but the name, and suddenly people don’t object to it anymore. This is irrational. […] I’m talking about the irrationality of objecting to same-sex civil marriage as a moral abomination, but thinking that same-sex civil unions are just hunky dory. This is irrational […] *
Shhhhh, for heavens’ sake! We’re hoping they won’t figure that out till after we get the law passed. 
Well since marriage has been around longer than christianity, I suggest that they change their name for it. Marriage can remain a civil institution, and the xtians etc can call their version holy matrimony or zinking or whatever the hell they like.
I’m am simply disagreeing with the statement made that marriage was a purely sexual liason.
Marc
As I said, it was a fallacious nitpick. Fallacious because your prostitution analogy had nothing to do with the (correct) point that there’s more to most marriages than fucking. Nitpick because Zagadka pretty clearly meant that the proposal would change marriage from an always sexual relationship to a legal one than may or may not involve sex. And that’s true: marraige as commonly understood in our society is not about platonic love, but rather always involves some sexual undertone. The use of the word “purely” was unfortunate, perhaps, but the meaning was clear from context.
Daniel
I say: Civil unions for some, tiny American flags for others!
Thank you, that is what I meant, and yea, “purely” is a bit of a stretch.
Though you are correct; marriage implies sexuality. The example above of Bill and Amy is a good demonstration of why a civil union is different from a marriage.
I think that, however this issue turns out, we have to redefine our perception of marriage.
/“I want to get with you girl, and your sister, I think her name’s Deborah”
Marriage is a state of affairs created by the mutual commitment of two (or perhaps) more persons to a lifelong union, customarily involving sexual relations and dwelling together, but not necessarily those or anything else. Two people are married to each other when they deem themselves to be married to each other.
Civil marriage is the arrangement whereby the government licenses people to enter into such a relationship with its consent, and agrees to regard them as officially being married thereafter. Common law couples may regard themselves as married but are only legally deemed married in jurisdictions which preserve common law marriage.
Religious marriage is a ceremony, a sacrament in most churches which recognize sacraments, in which the couple makes their marriage vows before God, a chosen officiant who is a clergyman in faith communities which have them, and the assembled congregation. It produces a marriage regarded as valid by that faith community.
Any two people who take each other as spouses are in fact married by definition #1. Any legal jurisdiction has the right to define who may enter into civil marriages and be considered as married under its laws. And any faith community has the like right with regard to its administration of such ceremonies.
The problem arises here because in America it is customary to combine the acts which create a civil marriage and a religious marriage, whereby the clergyperson of a given established church, synagogue, mosque, temple, coven, or whatever is given the right by the state to solemnize marriages that will be regarded as legal marriages under the state’s civil marriage laws.
Religious couples in France see absolutely no confusion in having two ceremonies, one before the prevot or similar official to create a civil marriage, and one before the priest or minister to solemnize their marriage before God.
It should not be too difficult to conceive of situations when any combination of one, two, or all of the above three definitions might apply to a given relationship. (E.g., a Catholic couple obtaining a divorce not yet final would not regard themselves as actually married, but both church and state would deem them still married. A gay Christian couple attending a liberal church which has blessed their marriage would meet #1 and #3 but not #2. And so on.)
I’m with minty green. My wife and I are married – not because the Watertown City Clerk issued us a license, or because the minister of First United Methodist Church read us the marriage service and signed off on our license, but because we committed to each other to be a married couple for life. And that matters greatly to us.
If you don’t want a marriage, don’t get one. If you don’t agree with someone else’s marriage, keep your piehole shut – it’s their decision, not yours. And don’t decide that your opinions ought to be binding law on others.
That sounds well and wonderful and all, Polycarp, but in addition to combining the aspects of marriage in America, there are very real legal obligations that go along with a marriage in your government sense, and this is what the entire point of the civil union concept is about. The point is to make the legal attatchment something apart from the other definitions.
Nice to say you are married and believe that to be true; it is another thing to have legal rights to visitation etc.
Good point. How’s this, then: I am for two adults* who mutually agree to marry to have the right to do so and have the government recognize their marriage, on completion of whatever sort of registry it chooses to use to have such relationship legally recorded.
*“Adults” here means above the age deemed by the legislating jurisdiction to be sufficiently mature to give consent to such a relationship. If they think 17-year-olds know their mind sufficiently to give mature consent, so be it.
(This doesn’t rule out polyamorous covenanted relationships – it merely sets a standard for what the monogamous majority means by the term. Let them argue their own case for multi-person marital unions separately.)
And it carefully eliminates people marrying seven-year-olds, their cat, their BMW, or any of the other bizarre examples cited by anti-gay-marriage advocates.
If what you choose to have sounds better to you as a “civil union” – that’s your privilege. Marriage is a term with a meaning to the people who consider themselves married; let them have it. (But don’t let them delimit it to “whom I consider to be able to establish a valid marriage” – they can define themselves, not others.)
I don’t understand. It’s pretty clear to me that when the monogamous majority uses the term “marriage,” they’re talking about a heterosexual relationship, with the sexin’ and the inner and outer plumbing. Do you or do you not want to set the standard based on what the monogamous majority wants?
I don’t – but I also don’t think we can set the standard based on what the minority wants. So instead, I think we ought not have a standard.
As you wisely say, two people are married when they say they’re married. I entirely agree with that. That runs directly counter to the idea that two people are married when the government says they’re married.
The best way to do this is to not have the government define the boundaries of marriage, I think: have the government issue civil unions, which are only coincidentally related to marriages, and then have each individual decide what “marriage” means to themselves, free from state interference.
If we adopted the system I suggested, I wuld certainly still consider myself married. The state’s opinion about my love life is mostly irrelevant and a little bit offensive; I’d just as soon the state not have such an opinion.
Daniel
For the overwhelming majority of sexually mature human beings, the desire is for a relationship in which one exchanges a commitment of fidelity for the partner’s like commitment. That a fair percentage of the population engages in “open marriages” and/or adultery per se – extramarital sex without consent – does not contradict the first sentence – it merely states that human beings are quite capable of rationalizing away their own violation of something they wish to impose on another, or that “fidelity” may not require exclusivity, but rather a mutual agreement to return from any adventures. (I’m not discussing a religiously-based morality here, but rather a pragmatic analysis of the mores underlying Western culture.)
Opinion is roughly equally divided these days as to whether gay people should be permitted to join in unions equivalent to those that straight people do, on the basis of mutual personal choice. Insofar as I’m concerned, their marriages (or civil unions or Bananas, if you have to make up a new term to distance yourself from those awful people) require no real significant change to the formulary for marriages now – merely the minor detail that not all marriages are made up of one partner of each sex. I refuse to concede majority status to those who claim to be the voice of typical Americans but who IMO appear to have recently emerged from hermitages, insofar as their grasp of people whose attitudes and opinions are unlike their own is concerned. So no, I don’t presume that the “majority” view is in favor of exclusive one man/one woman marriage – but I do think that there is a majority in favor of two-person marriage as the standard, though they are divided on the sex-of-the-participants question.
I presume there is no real objection to the idea that adolescents below an age deemed suitable by judicious legislatures generally lack the maturity to make informed mature choices about what’s intended as a lifelong union – however much they may feel the urge to pair-bond.
Construction of relationships more complex than a monogamous marriage would require either individual or group contractual covenants, enforceable in the courts, or laws providing the same sorts of analyses of how such arrangements would work, be dissolved, etc., with custody and property questions to be resolved according to those covenants or laws. This does constitute a significant change, and while I’m not prepared to say that those wanting multi-person maital unions should not have the right to arrange them, I simply cut off the definition of marriage for purposes of arguing my point at monogamy, gay or straight, suggesting that arguments about such arrangements, the right to them, the problems they would raise (including, be it noted, the potential for a perpetual marriage, like the Davis family of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), were grist for another discussion altogether.
And you were missing my point, Left Hand, in saying “civil unions” – the condition we have presently is that the government licenses civil marriages, and those who wish religious weddings can have them solemnized in a religious ceremony, provided they meet the terms which that particular faith communion specifies (e.g., a divorced person cannot remarry in the Catholic Church without having his previous marriage annulled by the church – the civil termination fo the marriage is not acceptable to their rules). The simplest process is to say, “It’s not broke, so let’s not try to fix it” and simply add on the right for gay couples to marry civilly – or in church in those churches willing to solemnize their marriages, explicitly saying that, just as remarriages after divorces, no church is obliged to marry persons whom it considers cannot marry each other.
The Fourteenth Amendment could have provided that all qualifying white people were citizens of the United States, and all qualifying black people were legal denizens of the United States, and that all legal denizens were entitled to the same rights as all citizens. Fortunately for human rights, it decided to take the standard classification of “citizen” and extend those rights to a group previously and unjustly left out. Minty and his wife, and I and mine, are quite happy to be married, and IMO not interested in someone deciding to rewrite what works and has meaning for us in order to play word games to constitute two separate-but-equal classes. As andygirl is fond of saying: “Separate but equal … isn’t.”
It also means that the government can deny my “marriage” for any reason or no reason at all. This is not a solution I am willing to accept.