What is so “blaringly” different about a gay marriage? C’mon, now, be specific. You’re talking about people’s lives, here. You’ve got to have some better rationale for fucking them voer like this than “Beacuse it just is!”
You want the real answer? People who oppose same sex marriage need to start dying. This isn’t going to be decided by rational argument, because one side of the debate simply isn’t rational. Look at magellan, who is normally a very smart, articulate poster. What has he posted in support of his position? Nothing. He’s got absolutely no argument, just a knee jerk desperation to keep things seperate with no perceivable justification, towards no understandable goal. How can you argue against that? What sort of lever do you use against such a fundamentally irrational stance? Ultimatly, there’s really nothing you can do but wait for him to die and hope his kids have more sense.
Yeah, I guess that’s the root of my objection. It seems like you’re trying to avoid one insurmountable obstacle by tackling an even more insurmountable obstacle. The anti-SSM crowd is objecting to the most minor change to the institution of marriage imaginable, and you’re answer to this is to make the largest change to the institution of marriage imaginable.
They, you, want to erase the meaning and substitute a new one. Do you deny that marriage has been the institution that has become synonymous with family? Do you deny that the family is has been virtually always and is today usually associated with procreation? Do you deny that that is a special situation allowed by one person being a male and the other a female?
Well, why do you need the term boyfriend at all? Or girfriend? Why not just friend? The reasons language has grown ofver the centuries is that we perceive differnces between things and we want to ba able to communicate clearly. You can kiss someone, but was it a peck, a smooch, or a makeout session. Why do we have distinguish between different types of trees, different shades of white, different breeds of dogs? Because as time as progressed we;ve felt the need to be more accurate in our communication. Congratulations in attempting to turn back the clock on human communication.
Yes, in a way, marriage is just a word. Like “cat” is just a word. We (society) can over time change the meaning of that word to include all qudrapeds: dogs, cows, armadillos, zebras, all of them. But that wouldn’t change the fact that there is a distinct and real difference among that particular group of qudrapeds that have the whiskers, sleep a lot, purr, and like to go after mice. So no sooner would have gotten rid of the label than we’d feel the need to devise a new one. So why don’t you save us all a lot of time and nonsense and just come up with your own term now?
I sincerely think this is bullshit. If it were all about rights and equality that’s what the efforts would be focused on. And I’d be fully in your corner. Do I think semantics are more important, no. I think common sense and reality are the most important guiding lights.
I understand that. I wish you could understand how offended I am at a minority of people thinking that they have the right to contort reality. Me nad women are different. Surely you get that. Then it follows that one man + one woman is not equal to one man = one man. This doesn’t say one is better than the other, just different. Insisting otherwise is like insisting red equals blue.
:rolleyes: As I said, if you were so concerned with your civil rights that’s what you would be fighting for.
More bullshit. You don’t care about fair and equal nearly as much about winning a battle to make you feel good about yourself. If you did you’d be fighting fior rights, not a word. You want to impose your view of how you think should thiings on me and the rest of society. It’s as simple as that.
Do you deny that many people grow up hanging on to the idea that someday, they will share their lives with someone in a state called marriage. Surprise! Tuns out that person is off the same sex as them. It’s still marriage. Also, do you realize that “is today usually associated with procreation?” brings nothing to the discussion, but the “Infertile couples get maried too!” arguement?
They can. My point was that they haven’t in the past. I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at here. Are you arguing for the word “family” to be expanded? I don’t think anyone has suggested otherwise.
I think it’s more a comment on the concept of religion. And what you discuss may be a problem for whatever church you’re talking about and religions in general. It may suggest the word is compromised, as well. In which case I’d be for strengthening it by tightening what the word means, not diluting it by expanding the definition.
Absolutely. What to so about it is another matter. Should it tried to be savalged or left to whither? Then the question is what would be the best means to accomplish that end.
You seem to be skipping several steps, Contra. I am not Lilairen, but I believe what she is saying has fuck-all to do with what you are saying. As I understood her, she was acknowledging that marriage most likely does not have it’s origins in religion. Doesn’t mean that she can’t have a church wedding, just that the church can not claim to have invented the idea.
On the latter point, I definitely do deny it. There is a very strong cultural tradition of marriage, worldwide, as a union of a male with more than one female. Over time, in most of Western society, we have changed the institution to mean specifically one person of each sex.
Have we thereby “erased” the former meaning of “marriage” and substituted a new one? Nope. When we speak of Leah and Rachel as the “wives” (plural) of Jacob in the Bible, we still understand their relationship as a “marriage”, even though it fundamentally differs from the strictly-monogamous marriages of today.
Similarly, when we speak of Joe and Bob being “married”, or Joe being Bob’s “husband” or vice versa, we recognize that there’s a difference between that relationship and the current monogamous-heterosexual convention of “marriage”. But we can still understand their relationship as a “marriage” too.
I think you’re assuming that current societal conventions somehow have some kind of fixed meaning that’s carved in stone for all time and can’t be altered. Our institutions are really much more flexible than that. We’ve changed the term “marriage” to exclude multiple spouses; we’ve changed the term “family” to exclude, e.g., servants, slaves, and apprentices; and so on. We aren’t going to have that much trouble changing the term “marriage” to include same-sex partners. Your great-grandchildren will take that wider meaning for granted.
We don’t want to erase the meaning of marriage, we want to alter it slightly to erase gross inequities in our society.
Yes, actually. I’m not married. I still have a family: parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, many of them adopted, plus a whole raft of technically unrelated people with whom I have a close, familial bond due to decades of friendship. Marriage being synonymous with family is an idea I have never in my life encountered outside of arguments designed to keep gays from getting married.
Of course I deny it. It’s an absurd statement, one that is quite simply factually inaccurate. If you don’t believe me, feel free to talk to Homebrew about it. Or lee and KellyM, just off the top of my head.
Okay, so why don’t we have a different word for marriage when its an interracial couple? Or people from different religious backgrounds? Why do we use the same word for marriage between Jews as marriage between Christians? Why do we use the same word for marriage between Americans as we do for marriage between Brits? Why do married couples with children get to use the same word as married couples without? What is it about gay marriage that requires an entirely seperate term for an otherwise identical institution?
What is the distinct and real difference between a heterosexual marriage and a homosexual marriage? What happens in a heterosexual marriage that cannot, by definition, happen in a homosexual marriage? Why is the gender of the participants so overwhelmingly important to you? What difference does it make to you? If gay people were married, how would it affect your life in the slightest?
What do you think this is about, then, if it’s not about rights and equality? Do you think I have some secret vendetta against the English language?
You’ve gone incoherent again, mags.
That is what I’m fighting for, and I’m fighting to get them as quickly and completely as possible. That’s why I’m fighting for marriage, not for civil unions. There are over a thousand associated perks with marriage. Over a thousand. Can you even conceive of how many laws would need to be ammended to address all of them? And we’d have to do this in every state in the union. And, considering how many hard core homophobes there are out there, every single one of these laws is going to be a fight. There’s no way we can possibly win every single one. And even those that pass, there’ll be challenges. It’ll all be new law, with no weight of precedent behind it like there is for marriage law. We’re talking decades of legal wrangling, at a cost of billions of dollars.
Or we could change one law: make marriage open to people of all orientations.
You tell me: which course of action makes the most sense?
Yes, you’re absolutely right. That is exactly what I want. I want society to treat me as an equal, not as a second class citizen. I want all the same rights, responsibilities, and respect that you get. I want my society to be free, fair, and just to all of its members, not just the ones with the most numbers of their side. I want this country to live up to its reputation as the bastion of liberty and equality.
Denied. They want to expand the existing legal meaning to correspond with the existing reality.
Yes. Or do you consider that the Cleveland Housing Authority was justified in evicting the grandmother raising two orphaned grandchildren because they didn’t meet the Authority’s marriage-based definition of “family”? Define to me, exhaustively, what does and doesn’t constitute a family. Is a widow with children still a family? A single aunt raising her nephew and niece after their parents’ death? An elderly widower who is cared for by his late wife’s daughter by a previous marriage, who think of each other as father and daughter but whose legal relation is step-father and -daughter? To take a really odd case from my own experience, how about a divorced woman making a home for her ex-husband’s young-adult daughter by his second marriage and her two little sons, with absolutely no legal relationship but a “family” feeling between them?
“Usually” does not equal “always.” And yes, I deny that. Many heterosexual married couples do not have children, by choice or by physical incapacity. Does that de-family-ize them?
Do you need an explanation of the ways in which a person can procreate other than in marriage? From casual sex to in vitro fertilization?
Is the only reason people get married, in your mind, is so they can fuck? Really?
So an electric guitar is not a guitar, an automatic transmission is not a transmission, a microwave oven is not an oven, just as gay marriage (in your mind) is not marriage? Seems to me the language is far more flexible than you give it credit for.
And, by the way, I can understand quite clearly the distinction that matt_mcl makes between his boyfriend Potter and his friend Hamish. Do you have difficulty in distinguishing it?
They did: “marriage” – meaning the covenanted relationship of two people to live together as one family and share their substance, caring for any children that may come to be a part of their family, whether by adoption or gestation. The only difference between that definition and yours is that we omitted the restrictive apposite from “…two people, one male and one female, to live…”
You do have a problem grasping the idea of equal rights, don’t you? Nobody told Rosa Parks to get off the bus, you know; in the view of the driver and the local courts, she was fully privileged to become a standee and continue her ride. To quote andygirl, who was in turn quoting someone from the 1960s I believe, “Separate but equal isn’t.”
[quote]
I understand that. I wish you could understand how offended I am at a minority of people thinking that they have the right to contort reality. Me nad women are different. Surely you get that. Then it follows that one man + one woman is not equal to one man = one man. This doesn’t say one is better than the other, just different. Insisting otherwise is like insisting red equals blue.[./quote]
So it’s perfectly OK to relegate women to an inferior role, because they’re different than men? They’re equal in the eyes of the law. And that’s precisely what is being said here. Two adult persons not otherwise incapacitated are free to contract a marriage. Because men and women are equal. That they may have obvious and interesting differences, does not obscure that equality. In all deference, it seems to me that you are the one attempting to contort reality.
Turn that around. Your ideas of how things should be are being imposed to quash their rights. Unless you have a legal vested interest, are in legal terms “an interested party,” in every other marriage contracted in America, it should make no difference to you who marries whom and for what reasons. It’s your view of “what marriage should be” that is being imposed on others whose rights you appear to give not two hoots about.
And that you see it the other way around, as them trying to impose something on you, is sad. As sad as Bull Connor and the anti-suffrage people feeling that their rights were being imposed on. I truly pity you, sir.
That whole sepperation of church and state amendment. Marriage is really a moral/religious issue which the state has no business in, so the state should come up with another word to represent the ‘union’ of 2 (or more) people.
Contrapuntal, I’ve been away at school, so this response is kind of late in coming. But after reading the thread, I still think I’m framing this issue in a way different than you are.
In the legal insitution of marriage as it exists, there is a list of requirements necessary for something to be called a marriage. Currently, most states have as one of these requirements some type of witnessed ceremony. So, they’ve allowed the religious ceremony to be one way to fulfill this requirement. However, the religious ceremony, say a Christian wedding, in and of itself does not create a marriage for legal purposes. You still have to fulfill all the other legal requirements to have a valid legal marriage. If you were to have a Christian ceremony and not do any of the other things which indicate you have a legal marriage, than a state may very well rule that there is no marriage for legal purposes. Now, it happens that many of the things people do in their religious marriages fulfill these additional requirements (for example, in states which recognize common law marriages, having the ceremony + living together + the wife taking the husband’s name, etc.) could be enough to create a legal institution. But at the same time, you can do nothing religious and create the exact same legal institution. It’s exactly the same, regardless of which ceremony you choose to kick it off.
So, it doesn’t matter what the state chooses to call a religious marriage, because a religious marriage is not an institution for legal purposes. That’s the distinction I’m drawing. There is no state recognition of a religious marriage currently. There is a state recognition of a legal institution called marriage, said institution needs certain things done to create it, and some of these things can be religious in nature if an individual so desires, but the religiousness is not what makes it a valid marriage.
So, once again, saying the state will only call religious marriages by the word “marriage” to me doesn’t say anything, because it is irrelevant what the state calls a religious institution which it doesn’t give legal recognition to in the first place.
Please tell me if I’m still misunderstanding you. I’m really having trouble following this debate properly, I think.
I just wanted to clarify that in my previous post I am speaking from a US-centric POV. There are countries which do have religious marriages, in the sense that there are different rights and duties which flow from the specific religion that the marriage takes place in. This is generally not the case in the US.
Further to Raja’s discussion of the institution, I believe it is the exchanging of vows (not necessarily specific vows, but vows indicating their intent to contract marriage) before witnesses including a licensed officiant that is the “ceremony” required. Hence a wedding in a Justice of the Peace’s living room, one conducted on skis atop a hill, etc., are valid marriages if they fulfill that (and other) requirements.
As for why clergymen conducting marriages is not a violation of the Establishment Clause, it is because they, in addition to their clerical capacity, are acting as agents of the state in accordance with statute law. Just as Vermont Town Clerks, Nebraska Mayors, Minnesota Notaries Public, etc., are agents of the state and not of their local government when they function as marriage officiants. A useful comparison was raised on another board: there is a state which uses outdoor-sports and bait-and-tackle shops as agents for the issuance of fishing licenses, providing staff training in what they need to know to validly issue such a license, requiring reports of licenses issued, and allowing the business to retain, IIRC, $1 from the license fee to perform the service. This does not constitute an endorsement of the sports shop but rather enlists them in performing a public service, i.e., making places where one may obtain a fishing license more accessible than requiring all fishermen to visit the town clerk’s office. Likewise, the clergyman is obliged to fulfill minimal state requirements for the validation of the marriage license, but is simply providing an alternative to requiring marriages to be contracted before a public official. (And is a drastic improvement over France, where religious couples wishing to marry must first contract their civil marriage before the prefet and then do it over again at the church before the priest or minister. America: land of one-stop shopping! :))
I was married in my living room by a justice of the peace, who then filed the certificate at City Hall.
I see no reason to seek out a completely different religion for purposes of marriage. It strikes me as fundamentally dishonest and disrespectful – not only to my own faith, which I would be denying, but to all people involved.
Now I’m pointing out that since my religion doesn’t conduct religious marriages, I can’t have a “church wedding” within my faith. I could lie and get a “church wedding” in someone else’s religion, but what would be the point?
I’m familiar with this kind of visceral revulsion, it’s the same reaction my grandma had when I wanted to invite one of my Black friends to stay overnight (and he wasn’t even my boyfriend). There was no way to discuss it, the thought of having a Black boy in her home just made her sick to her stomach. And yes, she was in most other ways a kind-hearted and loving grandparent.
I don’t really think that’ll help much. What it takes is seeing it weeknights on television. My grandma used to love Bill Cosby, maybe we just need some warm and cuddly gay TV families.
Seriously, I think cultural dilemmas like gay marriage can only be solved by a newborn generation. My generation, for example, could not solve the problem of racism that our parents’ generation laid on us. We conciously resented it but we couldn’t escape it. It’s taken a new generation to devise their own solution (Hip Hop culture) that can begin to level the playing field.
I think gay marriage will likely follow a similar progression. For today’s adult generation, it’s an insoluable problem and our children have no choice but to deal with the fallout. But by the time their children come of age, our generation’s great debates may no longer occupy center stage, and they may have a chance to come up with their own solution ( and very likely something that will appall us).
But in the spirit of mutual understanding, I’d like to propose a grand bargain to religious conservatives. How about if you’ll let us have gay marriage, we’ll vow not to have any more abortions. I think on that issue, I can truthfully speak for the vast majority of monogamous gays and lesbians. And as an added incentive, once you finish outlawing abortion for the straight folks as well, I think you can count on all the happily married gay couples to do our part and adopt the next bumper crop of orphan babies.
Absolutely. My non-religiously married heterosexual friends who sadly cannot have children are just as married as my wife and I, with our 8 week old son.
