It’s gotten attention. It’s gotten lots of attention. It’s the most-frequently-suggested alternative to either the status quo or full gay marriage.
Unfortunately, as I’ve said on this board before, it doesn’t work. It’s not just a semantics game. The word marriage has a legal weight that civil unions and private contracts will not have.
For example, marriage is portable across borders. Currently, the Province of Quebec in Canada has civil unions, while Ontario has full gay marriage. If I get married in Ontario, it’s still a full marriage in the Netherlands. If I get civil-unioned in Quebec, my partner and I are strangers in Alberta.
As more and more governments recognize gay marriage, and as working abroad becomes more and more common, this distinction becomes more and more crucial. Traditionally, states recognize marriages from other countries. I seriously doubt they’ll recognize a civil union.
Of course, this is a best-case scenario, assuming the civil union has all the same rights as marriage. It might not. Will the civil-union-partner still really be first in line for inheritance? Will they be able to sponsor partners for immigration? These are important rights that can’t necessarily be granted by contract.
Has the Supreme Court actually ruled on Polygamous marriage-- ie, ruled that there is a rational basis for disallowing it? I agree that it hasn’t ruled on gay marriage, yet.
What, exactly, is that even supposed to mean? How would we not have the same rights and priveldges? Would we have more? Less? Which ones? What does this even have to do with arguing that SSM should be legal now? It’s not like we’re arguing that someone should build a time machine, go back to the Continental Congress, and try to get gay marriage written into the bill of rights.
No one is arguing that that assumption doesn’t exsist. Clearly it does, hence the debate. The argument is, “Is there any rational basis for that assumption?” So far, no one has been able to present one.
Whaddya mean “we,” white man?
Why should your opinion have any weight? Seriously. There is a fair amount of evidence that SSM would make things easier for a large number of gay people in the country. There is no evidence that SSM would make anything worse for anybody, anywhere. So why not legalize it? If you want to prevent someone from doing something, the onus is on you to show why what they are doing is harmful or destructive.
This is the strawman that will not die. It is the Freddy Krueger of strawmen.
Look, to anyone who feels that marriage is about reproduction, go find some elderly couple who’ve found love in old age and have decided to marry – and go picket their wedding! Lobby your frickin’ member of congress for fertility tests for young heterosexual couples. If you think that marriage is really about reproduction – and that that aspect of it is so important as to deny loving couples the right to marry – then why don’t you go all the way out and deny it to heterosexual couples who can’t have children.
I never know whether this argument offends me more as a gay man, or as an envioronmentalist. Look, last time I checked, the world’s problem was not exactly underpopulation. We have 6 billion people on this planet and growing at an exponential rate. Our forests are vanishing, our cities are sprawling, we are pumping industrial and human waste into our water, polluting our air.
We do not need more people. We have enough. People are not on back-order. Supply exceeds demand. The world can take any more people.
You want to use marriage to regulate population for the greater good? Fine. Have it come with lots of benefits – far more than it has now – and offer it only to the infertile. Encourage vasectomies.
Or we could admit that marriage is not about reproduction, and that this is a silly sophistic argument meant to disguise one’s personal disgust towards the relationships of others.
What makes it a straman? All I said was that the historical context for why we have built the legal definition of marriage to what it is today has a lot to do with the idea of family and child rearing. I think that is pertinent to the discussion.
Now that is a strawman. No one (that I know of) is arguing that marriage should be used to regulatie population growth.
Or we could argue that when marriage now doesn’t mean what it has historically meant, and that we should stip it of all legal trappings for everyone, opposite sex pairings included. That would be my preference.
Now, I am not easily shocked.
I’ve always loved john Waters so its hard to shock me.
But this did.
I just read a “posting” by a “christian” who says that Matthew Shepherd went into that bar “acting swishy” so naturally he got beaten.
“If he had kept his mouth shut, he’d still be alive.”
:eek:
No more comments from me are necessary.
There are no words.
I dont have to be intimately familiar with necrophiliacs, pedaphiles and other non-hetreosexual acts to know ill be grossed out. So therefor i have no desire to meet with gay couples.
Sorry but im programmed to be repulsed by it. Yuk.
In regards to marriages. To me the sole true purpose of marriage was to create a family name for all its members. Since gay couples cant have children my question is why get married?
In NZ defacto laws offer the same legal protection as marriage.
I know people who are repulsed by oral sex, yet they don’t decide never to talk to any heterosexuals who have mouths and genitals ever in their entire lives because it’s icky. Fuck you.
The sole purpose of marriage is to give people the same last name? What are you smoking?
I don’t intend to have kids with Gunslinger. Should we not get married, then?
But that was based on 1st amendment free exercise of religion challenge, and Utah’s anti-polygamy law was found not to violate the 1st Amendment. Note the discussion of historical practices as to marriage in England and the US vs. in other countries. Interesting contrast to the way Lawrence came down (of course, Reynolds is an old case)
Marital rights require strict scrutiny, as marriage is considered a fundamental right. Given the anti-polygamy arguments articulated so far, seems unlikely anti-polygamy laws should survive strict scrutiny: don’t think “well the math of dividing up the property in divorce, and it might be hard to require an individual to designate a ‘decisionmaking spouse’ among multiple spouses” hurdle that standard.
So, a hetrosexual marriage isn’t vaild if the wife chooses to keep her maiden name? Or if the husband decides not to take his wife’s last name?
Or what about those radical types that choose to hyphenate their last name?
Conversely, if a one member of a gay couple took his/her partner’s last name, it would be ok in your book?
Why not? My great-uncle remarried, at the age of 81, 5 or 6 years after his wife died. And he remained married until his death at age 87. Obviously he wasn’t going to be fathering any children, so why get married? Ummm… maybe because he loved her?
Sure, and at one time I am sure that 60% of the population believed that the earth was flat and riding through the cosmos on the back of a giant turtle, that epilepsy was caused by demonic possession and that it was appropriate to burn off the female clitoris to prevent the evils of masturbation. Just because the majority holds an opinion doesn’t mean that it is not ignorant and stupid.
Also, as tempted and I am to drop the DNFTT bomb, I will actually point out something useful here. You are not programmed (as in via some inherited biological instinct) to feel these things; rather you have been conditioned to feel them. In regards to your attitudes towards homosexuality, it is clear that you have been conditioned by bigoted fucks.
I am so bone fucking weary of narrow-minded bigoted pieces of crap trying to debate homosexuality on the same plane as things like pedophilia, bestiality or necrophilia. Can’t you fuckers all just go away? The rest of the civilized world it tired of you.
*Spelling corrected in this loathsome quote because it made Word light up like a Christmas tree when I was composing my post.
John Mace didn’t say anything to the contrary. All he said was that the viewpoint in question is not particular to the “radical right,” and in fact is quite commonplace, contra to the claims of the prior poster.
In short, he just said the viewpoint was mainstream, not that it was correct.
All right then - I’m going to have to echo Binarydrone on this one. Belrick, if you’re going to post your 5th comment in 9 months on this board, you might want to consider not making a fucking fool of yourself. Lumping homosexuals with criminals and perverts is beyond idiotic. Do us all a favor, and contemplate your 6th post for the following 9 months. We’ll be waiting with bated breath.
Total aside, but I will point out and admit that this typo is particularly hilarious (in a Karma biting my ass sort of way) in light of the way that I was mocking another posters spelling in my earlier post.
I just pointed out that your reply to John Mace wasn’t responsive to the actual point he was making. JM was countering the claim that the mixed-sex view of marriage was peculiar to the “radical right” by showing that the viewpoint is commonplace. Unless you believe that 60% or so of the population is part of the “radical right,” it is a bit silly to treat opponents of gay marriage as endimic to that group.
You replied that just because a lot of people buy into something doesn’t make it right. Well, I agree, and I gather JM does, too. But that isn’t what JM was saying – he wasn’t claiming that popularity is the same as moral rectitude. Your reply therefore missed JM’s point entirely.
If you can explain how the above somehow equates to my “being an apologist for regressive and despicable points of view,” I’d love to hear it.
Yeah, how dare you intimate that the majority of Americans have the right to make decisions about the way we govern ourselves as a people! With that sort of thinking, we might have Al Gore as President!
Yeah, how dare you intimate that the majority of Americans have the right to make decisions about the way we govern ourselves as a people! With that sort of thinking, we might have had Al Gore as President!
Hate to break it to you, Belrick, but almost all pedophiles self-identify as hetero, even the men who molest little boys. Dunno about necrophiliacs, but I’ve yet to see anything to indicate that they’re all homosexual. In short, the stuff you’ve mentioned is most certainly NOT non-heterosexual, and it’s certainly nothing like a homosexual relationship between two consenting adults. Please, if you’re going to draw comparisons, draw them between things that are at least remotely comparable.
As for your views on marriage, well, let’s just say my husband will be greatly interested to learn that our little sham we call a marriage is doubly false. Dammit, I told him he needed to change his name so we’d really be married. Oh, well, the no-kids thing would have doomed us anyway, I guess. I suppose I’ll be the one who gets stuck telling my folks they shelled out for a wedding that was completely pointless, since shacking up was surely good enough for us. Unless maybe you want to tell them?
