So I’m listening to the radio on my way to work this morning and the show I listen to is doing a bit where one of their team has gone to another city to give out t-shirts and meet the fans. Whilst there he’s asked to say a message from one of the fans which is that Mark and Simon are getting married this weekend and can everyone wish them well. Cue “Aaaaah, that’s nice. Congratulations Mark and Simon” from the rest of the team. Note, they said “married” even though in the UK we don’t have gay marriage, we have civil partnerships. But as far as virtually all people are concerned it’s the same as marriage, and given that the people who drafted the legislation to bring CPs into law were instructed to make it marriage in all but name that’s not really surprising.
I’ve heard CPs referred to as marriage by lots of people now, and to be honest I don’t think in anyone’s mind there is a distinction between the two. Gay people can now enter into a legally recognised committment that is in practical terms no different to marriage and thus people consider them the same. Sure they’re not conducted by religious institutions and are (as far as I know) exclusively held in registry offices, but forcing churches and other religious representatives to conduct these is beyond the scope of government’s power.
So, I wanted to ask all the US dopers who seem to feel that without gay marriage with the name gay marriage is not going far enough - why? Had we got stuck on this issue in the UK I suspect we still wouldn’t have reached the point we’re at now, and I’m extremely glad the government decided to sidestep the issue of the name for the sake of actually giving people what matters, the ability to actually get married with the same legal rights and protections even with a different name.
I agree with this - I feel that civil partnerships would be accepted by most people, while the nomenclature of marriage wouldn’t be. So moving ahead with them would be smart, and would get the ancillary benefits of marriage to people in nontraditional relationships fairly quickly, without replacing traditional marriage at all.
What you call your relationship on an informal basis is no business of mine, and I really don’t care about it one way or another.
I think the trouble is they don’t want a “separate but equal” system. The whole point of the defense of marriage is that they think homosexuality is sick and don’t want their holy and glorious union sullied by two guys that look like Freddy Mercury in buttless chaps fishooking each other while slathered in crisco.
The “defense of marriage” is all about homophobia and hate. I wouldn’t settle for a separate distinction either.
In fact now that I think of it, I’m married to someone of a different ethnic group than me… what if interracial marriages were “civil unions”. Would that be alright?
The law recognizes separate but equal situations all of the time - and these are generally perfectly fine. It was not fine in the specific case of segregated education because the educational systems were not in fact equal.
It would be better than nothing, wouldn’t it? Also after a while of people having marriages by another name and the world failing to end/society not breaking down then the need to protect marriage would surely be diminished.
Not a dig, or an attempt to be snarky, but what sort of separate but equal situations does the law recognize? And are any of these based on what seems to be bigotry?
It would be better than nothing, but it would also be buying into a system that’s telling you you’re doing something wrong. I wouldn’t have married my wife if that were the case. I’d just shack up in sin.
That’s all very well to say, but it’s not just having equality for the sake of it that’s at stake. In the case of marriage you gain significant benefits in regard to owning property, inheritance and adoption opportunities. There are numerous cases of gay couples where one person who died and willed their possessions/money to their gay partner and the family contested it and won because the gay relationship had no legal standing. That can’t happen now with CP.
I’d rather have those benefits without the full equality than not at all. It’s not just principles at stake, there are very practical considerations too.
I doubt it. Years of segregation didn’t reduce the “need” to keep blacks in a subordinate position.
Which leads to the fundamental problem of “separate but equal” in situations like this, which are really just about pandering to the bigots. They won’t be equal. That’s the point of creating a ghetto-version of marriage in the first place.
But my point is we HAVE a separate but equal version of marriage in the UK (and lots of other European countries) and it doesn’t feel in the least like a “ghettoisation of marriage”.
If we were talking purely in theoretical terms I could understand the points being made but we’re not, we have actual examples of countries where these parallel systems exist and it’s not seen as second class. So, again, what’s the problem? It really feels to me that the US is cutting its nose off to spite its face in this regard.
But if a gay civil union had exactly the same rights as straight marriage, why would the gays care? Personally, if I were gay, and I were in a union with somebody, I wouldn’t want to call it marriage, because of all the christian baggage that term automatically carries. In other words, why would you want to be exactly like the people who hate you and want to deprive you of your rights in the first place?
Why bother with a different name if not to give it a negative vibe? Christians get married, Hindus get married and atheists get married. How can Christian baggage be appended exclusively?
Restooms? That all you got? What legal segregation other than things like restrooms and prisions (fine, say I’m moving the goalposts. I didn’t realize that I had to spell out in this level of detail) is there? Is there a law somewhere that only certain types of people can enter into legal contracts? Are any rights contingent who someone is? Not age of consent laws or the like, but based on *who *someone is. anything like this? There might very well be, I just can’t think of any.
The problem there is that marriage is under state law - a state civil union may be given the full rights of marriage in that state, but it won’t necessarily carry the federal rights attached to marriage. The state simply can’t give some benefits, such as immigration rights, for example.
So as far as I can see, as long as the benefits are defined everywhere in terms of marriage, there is a benefit of pushing for same sex marriage. Ideally I think everyone should get a civil union, but that sure as hell isn’t going to happen.
Knowing very nearly nothing about UK law, is it really equal? One of the problems that I’ve read with civil partnerships is that here, civil unions have been “mostly equal - but not really equal.” And the states where same sex marriage is legal are doing a better job protecting couples’ legal interest than states where same sex civil unions are legal (even though the civil union states have been doing it longer).
One of the problems -and admittedly, probably a fairly inconsequential one - with stopping short and insisting that they’re called nothing more than civil unions is that it can lead people to argue that heterosexual marriages ought to be similarly restricted then, with the term ‘marriage’ being deprecated or left as a purely religious/ceremonial term.
And the reason that’s a problem is that it can lend false weight to the argument: ‘gay marriage is an assault on the sanctity/concept of marriage between a man and a woman’. Not a big problem, I guess, but there it is.
There isn’t a problem for me, but there appears to be a problem for a large portion of the American population. My point if the name is the sticking point then why not just bypass it by calling it something else (assuming that the practical upshot is the same)?
And, as I said, in the UK it’s technically civil partnership but most people think of and refer to it as gay marriage.