Hypothetical: The year is 2026. The voters of every state in the U.S., including Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, etc., sigh a collective “Meh,” and vote to enact civil union guarantees for all LGBT people.
What’s the next immediate step for the anti-gay marriage folks? Will they give up and complain, “But OMG, GAY people are probably having sex next door right now!!!”? Will they redouble their efforts and try to have the state constitution amendments repealed? Or will they finally get the idea, “Hey, it looks like most people don’t give a damn what someone else does in their own home. Maybe it’s time to learn a little tolerance.”?
I’d guess their first step would be to start crafting laws that refer to “Marriage” only so they can begin marginalizing gays who enter into civil unions right away.
Unless it’s “marriage” for all, they will cling to whatever wedge they have available to them.
Yes. That is part of the point of civil unions after all. They are a ghetto version of marriage; separate from real marriage so they can be made inferior to the real thing. It’s the same principle are racial segregation; pretend to be “fair”, while creating a separate inferior version for the hated group in order to write bigotry into law.
You’ll see a duplication of the post Jim Crow South, but on an accelerated scale. There will still be discrimination, but it won’t be “legal.” Eventually attitudes change and things normalize a bit.
Well, if the very conservatives states voted for Civil Unions, that would mean that a large percentage of voters simply gave up the fight against “protecting marriage”. So, there wouldn’t be an electoral backlash except among a small minority. Now, they might continue to fight tooth and nail against the folks who want to actually call gay unions “marriage”, but that would be a far cry from where we are today.
No; civil unions are simply a different strategy for that, just as segregation was just a different strategy to oppress blacks. They are an attempt to prevent further progress by writing bigotry into the law.
Yeah, I should have phrased that better: It would mean a significant shift in the electorate of conservative states in favor of gay rights. The rest of my post stands as is.
Movement to give rights to “married” couples that are denied to “civil union” or “domestic partner” couples. Of course the rationale will be tradition and the sacred nature of marriage. Someone points out that Jesus was in a gay “civil union” with TWELVE other men. Chaos and hilarity ensues.
Most states are passing constitutional amendments barring the recognition of any marriage-like status for gays, which means your scenario is impossible. The Christians have made it clear that even separate-but-equal is not acceptable to them–the first principle of state government must be that gays are not equal in any way.
You also need to remember that a part of the furor around gay rights was kicked up because the Republicans expertly used it as a wedge issue in 2000 - 2008. Look around and ask how many times gay rights has been an issue du jour in 2010 or 2012. I honestly predict that by 2026 being against gay rights will be too much of a niche to be a useful political tool, and so you might get a couple states experimenting with things by chance, but for the most part nobody should care. The national parties will have moved on.
Gay people shouldn’t be satisfied with just civil unions (for reasons everyone else has stated) so I think they’d keep pressing for the word “marriage,” but maybe in your hypothetical world the government has backed down to just certifying civil unions for everyone.
State constitutions don’t mean very much to their respective states. Many of the amendments you’re referring to passed through simple majorities in referenda. Given a continuously more tolerant national view, a couple decades of cohort replacement, and the politerati moving on to the next controversy, I could see even Arkansas and Mississippi reversing their bans by 2026.
It does seem like SCOTUS or the feds won’t get involved. Maybe in 2050 we’ll be able to look back and compare the top-down civil rights progress with gay rights progress which swelled from localities on up. But I don’t really like making that comparison for many reasons, one of which being gay people are everywhere while Jim Crow was a regional stand.
I still don’t understand why the hell are you guys so fixated on dividing “the legal aspects of marriage” from “civil unions”. Just call them civil whatever for everybody damnit! (Well, something shorter than “civil whatever for everybody damnit”, plus I suspect the cussword wouldn’t pass muster in most Parliaments).
There are still prohibitionists out there that get enough support to appear on the Presidential ballot every cycle. I imagine the anti-gay marriage folks will follow the same long-term trajectory. An increasingly small but stubborn group keeping up the fight off at the fringes of the political world.
That, of course, should be “Those Christians on the political far right have made it clear that. . . ,” given that many Christians have adopted no anti-gay positions and a number of Christian churches have accepted gay unions even for their clergy.
The word marriage permeates the law. English Civil Law, (from which U.S. law descends), places a strong emphasis on precedent, meaning that the use of “Civil Unions,” being a change of wording, would result in continued fighting for many years to come.
The phrase “Civil Unions” is used by some proponents of same sex marriage as a way to bypass the wrangling over the use of the word marriage. It is also used by some opponents of same sex marriage to create a second tier of recognized relationships that would look like marriage, but be easier to treat separately from marriage.
Since, extending back at least to Republican Rome and possibly to Ancient Greece, marriage is a civil act under law, (not a religious action), the various arguments about relegating marriage to church ceremonies are based on a misconception of history. Religious unions are better described as matrimony.
“Civil Union” does not have the same burden of language in Europe, where various forces such as Napoleanic Law and the strong anti-clerical movements of the 19th and 20th centuries have already separated, (one might say divorced), the state registries of marriage from the religious acts of matrimony.
Given the passage of all those anti-SSM laws, it’s clearly more than a fringe. And it’s always overwhelmingly been the conservative Christians who are the real powers in Christianity, who control the collective efforts of the churches; it doesn’t matter much to the victims if some Christian supports rights for homosexuals or some other group if that same Christian hands their money (and often votes) over to a religious leadership that uses it to oppress that group.
Do you realize that there are entire denominations, including their leadership, who officially support and endorse full rights of homosexuals, right? The Episcopal Church, the Presbyterians (PCUSA), Lutherans (ELCA), the Disciples of Christ, the United Church of Christ, the Metropolitan Church…
You make it sound like there are some individual Christians standing out in the wilderness supporting LGBT issues, while giving money to organizations that oppress them. That’s pretty far from the truth. Many Christians are on the front line of LGBT rights issues, as was the case for civil rights, women’s suffrage and other justice issues. And yes, many Christians are on the other side too.
There will be plenty of new laws in the future, anything that benefits married people will be drafted to apply to ‘married’ people and not ‘civil union’ people. A separate (but equal) law will have to be drafted individually for them.
The entirety of the anti-gay movement is a Christian phenomenon. That a minority of defectors have adopted the less politically intrusive but equally obnoxious “we FORGIVE you for being gay and TOLERATE your great sin” position does not change the fact that this is a Christian problem. I have every right to expect Christians to clean up their own garbage, rather than be so thankful when some of them deign to do so.
Probably not the entirety, but certainly the great majority of it, I agree.
A minority right now, yes. The original abolitionists were a minority also. But “defectors”? from what?
That’s a enormous misrepresentation of the positions of the groups I listed. Most of them do not consider homosexuality to be sinful. The Episcpoal church, with which I am most familiar, just this summer approved liturgical rites for same-sex marriage - a literal celebration of gay and lesbian marriage.
Some of us are trying very hard to do just that. Your hostility toward those Christians who are on your side makes the job harder.
Four states have gay marriage votes on the ballot this year. Maine, Maryland, and Washington all have a vote to legalize it, and Minnesota has one to make it unconstitutional. So it’s still an issue.