Downside: God will punish us by raising the global temperature, causing more hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and burying coastal areas. See if that doesn’t happen. The only way to prevent that is to burn more coal; God loves CO2.
For the worse: Gay clutter.
It depends on how the change came about. If it was mandated by the SCOTUS, then Democrats are going to have a more difficult time keeping the presidency. I guess that’s either good or bad depending on your political beliefs.
I could be one of those people . . . except that I’m not. As I said before, SSM will not be the end of homophobia, and in fact never was the “institutional barrier” than it has been in the last few years. There have always been other issues, and there will continue to be in the near future. Political solutions are the result of cultural changes, not the cause.
How about ‘Scenario:’ or ‘Suppose’ or ‘Hypothetical:’ instead of ‘Fact:’ ?
I opened this thread expecting a defense of a claim that due to various court decisions, SSM is or will shortly be effectively legal across the U.S.
Hypothetical lame downside: The door is now open for people to start work on legalizing polygamous marriages, which would upset a great many legal situations concerning ownership of property, parental rights and inheritance, and it would really piss off the Mormons.
There have been a couple like this lately; I think people are using this as shorthand for “Hey, I’ve got an idea for something to discuss and I’d REALLY like it if people didn’t just fight the hypothetical like we always do, so let’s just take it as a given that…”
Plus, you’d think if all 50 states had suddenly decided to legalize SSM, it would be on CNN or something like that.
One very minor downside: there were some situations in which the not-quite-marriage civil unions/domestic partnerships came in handy for opposite sex couples. For example, widows with pensions or other survivor benefits that would expire in the case of remarriage could enter into a domestic partnership and get the benefits of medical visitation, end-of-life decisions, etc without losing those survivor benefits.
In at least some states, the domestic partnerships/civil unions have just been automatically converted to marriages, so I’m not sure exactly what happened to opposite sex couples who took advantage of them.
Not CNN. They’re too busy looking for that plane.
Noticeable downside: Many long-term SSM relationships would breakup. It seems that when many gays are allowed to marry, they either don’t or the relationship that they have seems to end within a few years. Not certain why this occurs.
Perhaps the “chase” is better than the “kill.”
Do you have a cite for this? The bolded part especially seems difficult to justify, particularly since “a few years” is longer than almost all gays have been allowed to marry.
I don’t think that they automatically converted in any states. Couples would have to actually get a marriage license regardless of whether or not they had a domestic partnership. In CA at least, the other kind of domestic partnership will stay in place for the reasons that you gave (pension issues) and have nothing to do with SSM anyway.
Yeah, and some people use ‘literally’ where they mean ‘figuratively’ but eroding the distinction doesn’t exactly help people communicate clearly.
Maybe you should read my post again?
ETA: The part that goes “due to various court decisions, SSM is or will shortly be effectively legal across the U.S.” (Bolding added.)
Given the way court decisions have been running lately, it would be a defensible claim.
I know Washington State did, but looking at the notice here,it looks like only same-sex ones are getting converted automatically. I hadn’t realized that the law only allowed for opposite sex domestic partnerships if one of the people was over 62. It looks like that will also still remain an option, but I’m not sure if that’s the case in every state, though.
I just looked it up. WA same sex domestic partnerships are treated the same legally as same sex marriages within the State but weren’t converted to actual marriages. I don’t think that this is a distinction without a difference because an actual marriage would have to happen in order to get Federal benefits.
BTW, it’s the same in CA for opposite sex domestic partnerships. One of the couple has to be older than a certain age. I suppose that there can also still be a same sex domestic partnership with one of them over 62 for the same reason.
Better: More equality and rights for people
Worse: We don’t get to have these scintillating conversations with people debating gay marriage which is pretty much a given. Its kind of fun to debate from the position of knowing your side is right and I’m going to miss that for this topic. Oh well, I suppose there’s always robot masturbation
You’d think. But there were places fifty years ago that shut down their schools rather than integrate them.
A few of the high profile couples did divorce within a few years. I would attribute that more to the stress of multi-year legislation and being thrust into the limelight than just ‘oh, the chase is over’.
On the contrary, it’s next to impossible to dissolve a union that never existed in the first place. All that stuff currently has to be resolved by detailed and protracted negotiations between people who by definition aren’t getting along all that well. Divorce has processes and precedents. Divorce is one of the benefits of marriage.
I’ve been saying “ponytail” on the rare occasion that I need such a term, though I realize men can have ponytails too.
And I think people who aren’t on board with SSM like to point to same-sex divorce and say “see, they divorced, so they shouldn’t have been allowed to marry in the first place”
Human nature being what it is, I imagine some of the couples knew they shouldn’t get married, but by the time all of the hullaballoo was over, they felt in a sense obligated.
You could call them “Subarus”, but maybe that’s a Berkeley thing.