It’s about hundreds of legal rights/protections, not just the word.
I doubt he ever cared about SSMs as a personal opinion. But politicians live in the crazy world where they redefine everything in political terms. So his views on whether SSM is good politics have been evolving.
A cite? Seriously? When you couch language with “speculation” you’re admitted that you don’t have a cite. This whole line of argument from you is nothing but putting words in my mouth.
And I note that you completely ignored my point.
Yup. You’re such an honest debater that I can’t imagine why he hasn’t come in to defend his hill.
If he was against civil unions, yes. But since he’s for civil unions and against gay marriage, the main difference is the word and the symbolism. The marginal gain of going from civil union to gay marriage is very little in terms of concrete advantages.
Unless I am ignorant about the major legal rights and protections which are afforded to marriages but not civil unions.
I don’t expect President Obama to take a strong pro SSM position before the election, since this is not a popular issue with Blacks. I doubt that a significant number of Blacks would vote against him on this issue but some might stay home on election day and if we have a close election like 2000 and 2004 he is going to need all those votes.
Shucks, the AME church has come out strongly against SSM and that is 2.5 million members right there.
This.
My impression is that BHO is a wily MF who is exceptionally good at eminating compassion. Maybe because he’s a psycho, or maybe because he’s both wily and compassionate. Like any of his predecessors, he’s at least verbally compromised some of his lesser principles that greater ones might endure. If this means he waffles his true beliefs and intentions on the matter at hand, so be it. If I had to guess about his true feelings, based on what little I really know about the guy, I’d say he’s separated the concepts of “marriage” as an homophobic religious institution, and “civil union” which is a much more pragmatic approach which addresses the real civil liberties issues of legally-recognized homosexual relationships. So, yeah: marriage, if that’s what you’re into = boy+girl; and civil-union, which allows joint tax returns and all the other goodies = nongenderspecific human + nongenderspecific human.
And I think it’s acceptable for this issue to be pretty far down on his list of priorities in his first term and given the other earth-shattering messes that require his attention. If he’d taken over where Clinton left things I think it would be very appropriate for him to press the issue. But instead he got an already badly fractured nation on the bring of economic collapse.
Sorry, you had a point? It was hard to tell. I’m not being dishonest.
Whether BigT believes that Obama converted from Muslim I don’t know, but he certainly implied it. He also implied that he was inculcated with Muslim beliefs (or values) while in Indonesia, which was a well publicized lie. Why else would he mention a “Muslim school”, why not mention the Catholic school? Catholics don’t seem to be fond of gays either.
The theory is that the right to civil unions can be taken away again, while the right to marry could not. Plus, laws governing marriage are well settled; with civil unions, there will be a hundred years of legal wrangling over which ones apply to civil union and which do not.
It seems a thin bargain to me, but I’m not gay and I don’t have to worry about whether my marriage comes with the same rights and privileges as everyone else’s.
Here’s another thing. Being raised in a non-religious household and professing Christianity as an adult is not a textbook definition of conversion.
Obama has never claimed to be anything other than Christian. He admitted his mother wasn’t fond of organized religion, but he also said that she exposed him to the views of multiple faiths and their cultural importance. She also sent him to Catholic school (primarily for a good education in the fundamentals–not religious inculcation), so I don’t think you can assume she was proactively raising him to be atheist or agnostic. So, what is all this about conversion, anyway? He’s been exposed to Christian values since he was a young boy, and it’s not a stretch of the imagination to assume he had some belief in God as a child.
So, what did Obama convert to Christianity from?
If he was against civil unions, yes. But since he’s for civil unions and against gay marriage, the main difference is the word and the symbolism. The marginal gain of going from civil union to gay marriage is very little in terms of concrete advantages.
Unless I am ignorant about the major legal rights and protections which are afforded to marriages but not civil unions.
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Pretty much all of them, since a civil union can be defined as narrowly as you like, and even if it was defined as identical to marriage when written rights can be stripped away with it later without touching marriage. Nor is it likely to be recognized anywhere outside where it is performed. Civil unions are the ghetto version of marriage, the equivalent of segregation. And just like segregation they aren’t equal and aren’t meant to be equal; they are just a means of codifying the second class citizenship of a group of people into law and enforcing it.
He’s against SSM because he is a bigot, or willing to cater to bigots which for most purposes might as well be the same thing.
I believe that Obama opposes gay marriage but not civil unions. I also believe his stance is dishonorable.
I tend to believe that he’s probably - privately - pro gay-marriage, but that’s really only based on me expecting people even slightly left-of-centre to feel that way. Well, that and personal experience where the only people I’ve know who are anti gay marriage are right of centre.
I can understand him being in favour of same-sex civil unions and not marriage, for the time being at least; that’s got a lot more chance of actually being made law and would (or at least could) give all the same rights, without alienating some religious voters. Is that his position now?
In the UK it took about five years before civil partnerships had all the rights that marriage does. I don’t see how it being a separate law would make it easier to get rid of than allowing same-sex couples to be included in marriage law; how would that work?
If it’s all marriage, then you can’t strip away rights without stripping them away from the much more numerous straight couples too. But if they are civil unions you can gut them without affecting straight couples at all, and handwave away any complaints with “Hey, they got civil unions, what are they complaining about?!”
And the whole point of segregation like this is the enforcement of bigotry.
I would agree it is not a priority of Obama - and that sort of pisses me off - but I can understand his tepid support at this stage. Pushing for Federal Legislation at this point would probably not be a prudent political move. He still has to work on Immigration reform, an equally unpopular social change in many areas of the US.
That said, I think he WOULD sign any Gay marriage legislation that comes across his desk, and most likely would work behind the scenes to get those last votes if it came to that.
Wimp - maybe, but I seriously doubt he is against it. I hope after he gets re-elected in 2012 that he will push harder for legislation that might not be all that popular - but of course, then he will be a lame-duck President and will have to work a tad harder to get some things accomplished.
Brown Eyed Girl and Munch, while it’s flattering that you guys are discussing what I think*, Munch has it right, probably because he’s talked to me before and knows that I would never imply what you think I am implying.
Obama clearly registered as Muslim at those Catholic schools he mentioned, and then later went to a public school that was mostly Muslim. I do not think it is inherently unfair to simplify this as having went to a Muslim school. However, that is not what I thought, and, due to the political nature of the claim, I should have checked instead of making myself sound like an idiot. I should have taken the time to be more exact rather than use the half remembered information from a couple years ago.
I can remove the claim, but it doesn’t change the thrust of my argument–he went to schools as a child that would likely have taught that homosexuality was wrong. Catholic schools still teach it to this day. And, although the other school was a multi-faith school, it had a very high Muslim population, and little of the “Separation of Church and State” that we have today. He very likely was taught at least the basics of Muslim morality, which, like Catholicism, would have included anti-homosexual creeds.
Seeing as he registered for the Catholic schools as a Muslim when Christianity was a choice, he clearly did not identify as a Christian at that time. I am perfectly willing to accept that he was not a Muslim either, but to claim he was a Christian all his life is silly.
He even said it himself:
“My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn’t raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life.”
Furthermore, he talked about his conversion in his 9/23/2007 address to the United Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut:
Until that point, he was, by the standards of most Protestant denominations, not a Christian. It was when he was introduced to Christ and submitted himself to Him that he became a Christian. What he was before that he has not said, and perhaps it doesn’t have a label. But he did convert.
*That’s a joke, people.
I see your line of thinking. But it would be as easy to remove gay people from the marriage law as it would be to remove rights from civil partnerships - neither of which would actually be that easy at all. ‘What are they complaining about’ wouldn’t work if you were giving them something clear to complain about by removing their rights.
I’m coming at this from the perspective of a gay person who lives in a country where civil partnerships do give all the same rights as marriages (oh, except one - the wedding can’t be conducted solely by a religious minister - that has to be a separate part of the service).
I’ve seen people be helped by civil partnerships, lives have been changed. That is worth more than the word ‘marriage.’
Both would be equally difficult, in the sense that both would require overcoming social inertia in the direction of greater acceptance of homosexuality. But that could still happen: we like to think that social equality is constantly moving towards greater acceptance, but the fact is, sometimes prejudice in a society grows, instead of shrinks. The importance of marriage rights, as opposed to civil unions, comes in the increased difficulty of reversing marriage rights legislatively. If gay marriage is kept segregated under a “civil unions” law, it’s trivially easy (from a legislative viewpoint) to reverse the law: you simply dissolve the legal institution known as “civil union,” and you’ve undone every gay marriage in the country at the stroke of a pen.
If same sex and opposite sex marriages are bundled together under the same law, this becomes much more difficult, because it’s not immediately clear which marriages are same sex, and which are opposite sex. Certainly, this is not an insurmountable obstacle, but it’s an additional hurdle that must be cleared before anti-gay prejudice can be restored to the legal system, and every such hurdle helps protect us.
The real concern, however, is not so much a complete rollback of gay marriage rights, but a piecemeal one. If there are two bodies of law controlling marriages, one for straights, and one for gays, then it’s possible to make legislative changes to one group without making changes to the other. Under a dual legal system, it would be possible for a homophobic lawmaker to craft a law that, say, restricts the amount of federal benefits one can receive in a civil union, without affecting marriages at all.
Things may be different in the UK, but in the US, this is a very real concern, as there’s a significant sentiment in the states that gays should have some rights, but need to be reminded that they are ultimately secondary to heterosexuals. This is, in fact, precisely the driving sentiment between the disparity of support for civil unions, which is fairly high, versus the support for marriage, which until very recently, was a decidedly minority position in the states.
There are also a variety of issues that attach specifically because of our federal system of government, that simply don’t apply to the UK. There is no national civil union law in the US, and many states have passed laws explicitly forbidding the recognition of civil unions, or any similar relationship designed to mimic marriage. These states represent an entrenched political opposition to same sex marriage (and gay rights in general) that I do not believe has a proper analogue in the UK, and this bloc is going to actively work to stiffle and weaken gay rights legislation on the national level. If we were able to hammer out a national-level civil union law, these are precisely the people who would be actively working to undermine that sort of legislation. As such, there’s a much higher premium in the US on crafting the law in such a way that it is as impervious as possible to future interference from this demographic.
And American posters are, of course, coming at this from the perspective of living in a society that has a long history of creating parallel legal systems with the specific intent of discriminating against minorities.
Certainly, which is why you’ll find very few gays or gay right supporters in the states who are out right opposed to civil unions. They’re a valuable stop gap on the road to equality, but, at least in our society, they absolutely cannot be trusted as an equitable solution to the issue.