Brand new poll from Massachussetts, which is on the front line of the gay marriage dispute:
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/02/21/massachusetts/index.html
All that poll shows is that the good people of MA have no idea what they want. They don’t want SSM, but they don’t support any extant amendment to ban SSM.
The way I read the poll, the opposition was to any amendment that defined marriage as opposite sex and also left open the possibility of civil unions. Which seems to me like Mass citizens are even more opposed to state recognition of gay relationships then one would suspect given it is a pretty liberal state. But it’s not like the poll is exactly clear on what people really want.
Except that according to the poll 60% were in favor of “Vermont-style civil unions.” I think what they want is an amendment banning SSM and a law establishing civil unions, but for the most part I think they’re probably just sick of hearing about it.
Oh, and fuck the Catholic Church, whose campaign against SSM has solidified opposition among its membership. How about an amendment pulling the church’s tax-exempt status in response to its continued interference in secular politics?
Well, that’s a cute little soundbite about The Terminator, and it’s a handy little strawman that was put out for consumption. No one is arguing that this is an issue of public safety, but of upholding the rule of law. I’d prefer to hear the AJ address that matter instead of spouting inane non sequiturs.
The AG said, as soon as his office was involved in the matter by SF suing the state, that his office would “defend the laws of the state of California.” The “public safety” comment is not a strawman; the whack-jobs suing to stop SF from issuing licenses have been seeking an emergency injunction based on the supposed “irreparable harm” issuing the licenses would cause.
Do you have a cite for that? I’ve never seen him on record on the matter in any definitive way, unless that lame “gay marriage should be between a man and a woman” nonsense is what you’re talking about.
TeaElle:
It’s not like gay marriage has been an issue that people weighed in on other than in the last couple years. I’ve never seen him say he was ever in favor of it, but if you think he did I believe it’s your responsibility to show us a cite.
Otto:
Something can cause irreparable harm w/o being a public safety issue. If the AG thought the irreparable harm claim was incorrect, he should have addressed that specifically. Since no one is claiming this is a public safety issue, that is a strawman argument by definition-- raising and refuting an argument that no one has made in the debate.
Okay, I just read through the thread in which Northern Piper offered a (very limited but still interesting) review of part of the role religion and marriage have had with one another in English history. Now time for some comments and rebuttals.
First, Bricker, when you endorsed my plan, I had no idea that you’d suggested the exact same plan five months ago. No wonder you liked it! 
Second, I withdraw what I said about religion being intimately bound up with marriage throughout history; I was wrong, and I appreciate being corrected on this point. HOWEVER, I maintain that in Western society, the two have been intimately entwined at least since Paul wrote, in Ephesians,
Paul’s influences on Western thought, on Western religion, are of course immeasurable, and he clearly stated that marriage joined two people in Christ.
At different times, Western government has regarded man-woman-marriage as more or less religiously-based; but since Paul, I maintain, religious folks have regarded marriage as religiously-based.
So we’ve got two thousand years, at least, of Western tradition that:
- Marriage is between a man and a woman; and
- Marriage joins two people in Christ.
Obviously, the government can’t recognize the second point; we all agree on this. We all know that atheists, Jews, Pagans, Satanists, and Hindus are allowed to marry in our society.
At the same time, the strongest opposition to the change in the law comes from religious folks, Christians specifically, who view marriage as a practice tied intimately up with religion. By removing the first requirement, they believe marriage is diluted.
My point is that marriage is a personal matter, one in which one’s own family and friends and (perhaps) church should be involved; I see no compelling state interest in having the state know about it.
By changing the state’s issuance of marriage licenses to a state issuance of civil union licenses, we wouldn’t stop anyone from gettng married. I got married outside of a church, without any religious trappings on the ceremony; what made it a marriage for me was that my family and friends, the people I loved, were there to witness my vows. It was a community event, not a legal one or a religious one.
Separately, I got the little piece of paper from the state that says I’m married. The state’s paper could’ve said, “Living Out of Sin License” for all I cared: the word doesn’t matter there, but only the bundle of rights it confers.
By removing the word “marriage” from that bundle of rights, you remove all the religious connotations from that bundle of rights, and you remove the man-woman tradition from that bundle of rights. That can only be a good thing.
Hamish continues to raise what I see as the only relevant argument against this plan: comity. Specifically, he suggests it would be messy to require all sorts of new comity agreements across country lines. To this, I have three answers:
- You can bet that if the US immediately stopped issuing marriage licenses and began issuing civl union licenses to everyone instead, those comity agreements would go up posthaste with other countries.
- I think these would be EASIER to go through than same-sex marriage license agreements would be, in countries that don’t currently have provisions for SSM: such countries would have specific reasons to reject SSM, but they’d have far less reason to reject civil unions between SSC.
- If we’re looking at messiness, surely we have to look at the relative messiness at home of setting up civil unions for everyone vs. setting up SSM. I suggest the former would be a helluva lot easier.
Lilairen, you say:
So what? Neither does mine, yet I got married, and the significant part didn’t involve the courts. The significant part involved my wife, our family, our friends,
and an officiant (who is, technically, a reverend, but who happily agreed to excise all religious references from the ceremony; if we’d wanted, we could’ve gotten our actor friend Willy to do the ceremony).
And that’s my point: marriage as a commitment to one another should not involve the courts. Marriage as a bundle of rights related to the state could be called anything at all, and it’d still be the same bundle.
Daniel
From the first time Arnold was asked about his opinion on SSM he said marriage should be restricted to mixed-sex couples. Thus, from the moment there was a record, he’s always been on it as opposed to SSM.
He has since clarified his position, likening SSM to assault rifles and illegal drug trafficking.
All we did was have the paper signed by a JP. The only witnesses were the cats. (We didn’t have the python at the time we got married, but if we had, he’d have been a witness too; his tank’s in the living room.)
We’re still married. After all, the state can act as the representative of the community in legal marriage.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17876 talks about the importance of the word, itself, by the way. Someone cited it to me recently.
What I see is that “marriage” has a multi-thousand-year tradition of being the way that communities recognise families, and the state is considered by most to be an acceptable stand-in for the community. And I see some people want to claim that “marriage” belongs to them, and they’ll only allow access to such recognition to those people who form families that they like. Now, because of the lapse in frequency of arranged marriage, because ‘carrying on the family name’ is no longer a matter of such importance, and most centrally because romantic love is now most people’s centre of marriage, families are more frequently taking different forms than they used to.
These people who oppose the recognition of all families are appealing to their god to say that they own the tradition for recognising families, and for some incomprehensible-to-me reason people who don’t even follow that god are convinced by it.
If I started treating my religion as a reason that other people should give me what I want, would I magically become convincing too? Or is that a trick exclusively granted to a certain subset of Christians?
I am aware that the state can do that currently. I see no reason why it needs to have that power. Under my proposal, you could get married without any human witnesses at all: a marriage before a python and a cat would have the exact same binding legal power as one before two million people on live television, or one conducted by the Pope. The state’s only interest would be that you and your partner wanted the bundle of legal rights.
No; quite frankly, that’s a trick granted to the majority of people in a democracy. When the majority gets to define a word, I, descriptive grammarian that I am, am happy to let them use the word the way they want. I don’t care about the collection of letters and phonemes associated with that bundle of legal rights, as long as those rights are available to everyone.
Again, under my proposal, Christians would absolutely be able to define marriage however they wanted. So would atheists. So would Radical Hindus. So would Raellians. The government would not take a position on the word’s definition, ceding control of the word back to individuals, where it belongs. But the government would make the underlying rights available to everyone.
Daniel
Because it’s damn hard to get a room big enough to hold the entire population of the City of Lynn, let alone the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, let alone the United States, North America, or the world. Most folks seem to be willing to accept a representative, and the elected government is a neutral party that encompasses the entire community.
The underlying rights include the right to use the word; what’s the point in trying to pretend that that’s not the real thing of value that some people want denied to others?
That’s actually an argument against state-mandated gay marriage, and indeed against a lot of marriages. I do NOT want to be a party to Britney Spears’s latest drunken matrimonial matchup, but you’re saying that I gotta be, through the state. Get rid of state-run marriages, and I’m no longer a party to it.
It’s too bad that you can’t get a room big enough to invite everyone in the world to your wedding. Invite, instead, the folks you know that would actively approve of it; let them bear witness. Or ask them to send representatives. I don’t care, as long as I’m not forced to be represented through the state.
What? What? MY PROPOSAL LETS EVERYONE USE THE WORD! MY PROPOSAL PREVENTS ANYONE’S USE FROM HAVING ANY MORE LEGAL POWER THAN ANYONE ELSE’S!
By removing the state from adjudicating the word, it’s left up to individuals to define it for themselves. Under my proposal, the group marriage of two gurus and three midwives and a zonked-out grandma in Poughkeepsie would have exactly the same legal standing as the marriage of John and Jane Doe, Virgin Members In Good Standing Of The Local Lutheran Church. The states doesn’t get involved in folks’ love lives.
Daniel
Your proposal also enables anyone to say “That’s not a marriage”. To feel free to dismiss any family from consideration because there’s no way of authoritatively saying “Actually, I am married.”
One of the major utilities of civil marriage in a pluralistic society is that it creates a way in which those private rituals are portable – it essentially establishes internal principles of comity. As a courtesy, my marriage is recognised by others; I do them the courtesy of recognising theirs. In the event of a dispute, there is the possibility of just going and looking for the thing called “Marriage Certificate” at the relevant office.
I have seen far too many people who would be entirely happy to refuse to acknowledge the existence of some other people’s marriages if they could get away with it. (I’ve encountered a few who would argue that I’m not married if it weren’t for the fact that I can document it, and more who would argue that officiants of some minority religions can’t preside over marriages if it weren’t for the fact that the paperwork is just as good.) The fact is, they can’t get away with it so long as it’s possible to blink mildly at them and say, “Well, won’t that be a surprise to the registry, then.”
Has anyone heard back from SnoopyFan yet?
How does waving a piece of paper issued by the state convince those people (who are generally religious) that you are “really” married? To them, the important part of marriage is the religious ceremony; you didn’t go through that particular ceremony (and may in fact be prohibited from doing so by the rules of that religion), so in their eyes you AREN’T married, regardless of what that paper says - you’re just living in sin with state sanction. They may be forced to recognize your “so-called marriage” when it comes to legal matters, because the state will back that piece of paper up with all the power of the law, but they won’t accept in their hearts that your relationship is equal to the one they have with their own spouse, no matter what’s printed on the top of the state-issued form.
For gays, winning the legal rights of civil marriage is the easy part. Gaining the whole-hearted acceptance of the ultra-religious or the very-squicked heterosexuals is going to be much harder. Insisting that the civil paperwork ALL couples, gay or straight, are issued be called a marriage certificate does nothing to change their views that your relationship is nothing of the sort; it only angers them further. Why pass up an option that might result in getting the legal protections faster, and that clearly distinguishes between the state institution and the religious ceremony (something the anti-gay-marriage crowd seems rather fuzzy on right now)?
Here’s the thing: Christian groups already can do this in a number of ways, even with state marriage, that they seem disinclined to complain about. I’ve never heard a Catholic complain that the state permits divorced people to marry, or an Orthodox Jew complain that the state permits a Jew to marry a Gentile. They don’t perform such marriages themselves, but they seem to tolerate the state doing so. But for some reason, queers are beyond the pale, and they use religion to justify this.
I have no idea why it is that the Catholic Church, in whom same-sex marriages and divorcé marriages are equally verboten, has no problem with the state recognizing one, but will not put up with the state recognizing the other.