How about the fact that no civil government has failed to recognize and sanction marriage?
Does everyone here realize that marriage today in the United States can be completely divorced (ha ha) from religious ceremony? No state or county government that I’m aware of requires people to be married in a ceremony presided over by a priest, a rabbi, or a Buddhist monk with kung-fu grip. Marriage is both a secular and religious institution. Feel free to make it as religious as you like.
Unless you are gay of course.
-XT
Years ago I was surprised to learn that in the US (and other places) it was possible to be married without a civil union. I mean, besides the religious bows that the parts may wish to carry, marriage sets up a framework for different areas of civil law to apply to the involved persons in a different way than to unmarried people. Inheritance laws, child care, and others; all that is civil law stuff, and it should be up to the state to grant or require those rights and obligations.
You know, talking about marriages and who can perform them, if a same sex couple wants to get married on a ship out in international waters, the captain can do that? would be legal or recognized? 
There is a legal institution of marriage and there are religious institutions of marriage. In the United States, the two are completely separate.* It wasn’t always like this, but it’s been this way for a really long time now. Usually, states require some type of witnessed ceremony to create a legal marriage. And these states have decided to allow a religious ceremony to fulfill this requirement. But that doesn’t mean the two are the same thing. You can have a valid religious marriage and not have a valid legal marriage at the same time, or vice-versa. The two are completely distinct entities.
All this proposal does, it seems to me, is change the name of the legal institution of marriage to “civil union.” That’s great and all, if you want to provide a lot of work to lawyers, since that kind of change is going to be fraught with mistakes. That’s just the nature of things. So, I don’t see the purpose of it. You haven’t actually done anything but change the name of the legal institution.
*There may be some tribal governments for which this isn’t the case. I haven’t studied tribal law, so I don’t know.
What I don’t like is the government being involved in what is a purely emotional endeavor. The Government can protect my property rights, but should stay the hell away from my emotional compact with my wife.
I would actually personally like the government to get out of marriage completely. The gay marriage issue for me only indicated the problem that already existed. The government simply should not have an opinion about marriage one way or the other.
I am straight, and married to a woman, not legally married. I am married but have no civil union involved. We didn’t involve the government, but I am married…period.
For me this isn’t just about gay rights but about the limits of government, and when people start mucking with state constitutions to enshrine their sentimentality as written law, it pisses me the fuck off.
Maybe if I get passionate enough about it I’ll start a straight organization for the removal of government from the institution of marriage, and expressly ban gay membership. Then when we get sued by some gay idiot for discrimination, our fringe movement will be catapulted into the spotlight and the idea will get tons of press.
I’ve been in agreement with the OPs premise for a long time. It’s the reason that I can’t get all riled up over the SSM issue. Marriage is a religious issue and should remain one. If you want to have a ceremony to celebrate you marriage, religious or secular, that’s between you and your caterer.
I don’t think that the government should be offering tax benefits to married couples. I don’t think married people should receive any benefits whatsoever from being married and I find it appalling that the Church has a hand in something that carries any weight at all with the government. Separation of Church and State and all.
If you took away the financial benefit of being married then people would stop caring who was married and who wasn’t, and that should be the whole point. People buying rings and having ceremonies and introducing themselves as married should be nothing more than symbolic.
When you choose to live together with someone you should sign a contract to do so, and if you “divorce” then it reverts to the contract law. Marriage or not, it should be irrelevant.
I’m less pissed at the discrimination against Same Sex Couples as I am against the discrimination against Single people.
That’s great for you. But some people get married, and they have children, and they mix property. And then they decide to break up. And then they start fighting about the children and the property. And then they go to court and ask the court to make a decision about how to split the property and the children.
Or, some people get married, and then one spouse goes out and borrows money. And then he doesn’t pay it back. So, the creditor comes after the other spouse. And then they all go to court and ask the court to make a decision about who owes what.
Or, one spouse dies without a will. And the other spouse and the children start fighting over the estate. And then they all go to court and ask the court to make a decision about who gets what.
What the legal institution of marriage does is that it creates a default set of rules around the marriage. These rules govern how the individuals in the marriage are allowed to deal with each other and how people outside the marriage deal with the marriage.
If you are never, ever going to get into a dispute with anyone about things you do in your marriage, and you are scrupulous about signing contracts for every little thing that crops up in a marriage, I guess you don’t need one. But for most people, this isn’t the case.
And why should marriage be singled out? There are a ton of legal institutions that cover all manner of human activity: estates, conservatorships, corporations, partnerships, joint ventures, etc. What is so special about marriage that government shouldn’t be involved in it?
Separation of Church and State is one of the reasons that the legal institution of marriage is already wholly separate from the religious institution of marriage. It’s already been done.
Now explain how that isn’t resolved by a civil union? Everything you mentioned has one thing in common, the protection of private property. That’s what a civil union is for.
I agree with you except for one thing. You get special tax exemptions for being incorporated. Let Civil Unions just be a simple form of incorporation.
No it isn’t. All manner of societies, Christian and pagan and atheistic, have had some version of the institution of marriage.
Not remotely. Not all traditions are equal. I want to change the traditions in marriage that are discriminatory and divisive, and keep the ones that are positive and unifying.
Well, why does that matter to you? If a Civil Union protects your property like a marriage, and YOU consider it a marriage, then why does it matter?
It’s equally symbolic on both ends of this debate and that’s what’s interesting about it.
That’s why I would take marriage out of the hands of the state. The state should have no opinion on cultural ritual symbolism.
As I’ve explained, multiple times on this board, and previously in this thread, the legal institution of marriage is completely wholly distinct from the religious institution, they just have the same name. If you want to call it a “civil union”, you haven’t done anything different then what we are already doing.
Yea I know I understood you the first time.
What is done in this case is remove the ritualistic cockfight over symbolism between the LGBT community and the Fundies. If it’s separate and distinct give it a separate and distinct name.
If we lived in some theoretical world where everybody does everything perfectly, I’d say ok. But this isn’t the way the law works. You can’t just do a find and replace and change the word “marriage” to read “civil union.”
A lot of the rules governing marriage come from court rulings. The legislature can’t just go rewrite court rulings. What they have to do is pass a new law that says “this particular court ruling, this now applies to civil unions.” Maybe they’ll do a great job and get every single court ruling out there. But my guess is that they’ll make a lot of mistakes, and you’ll get a ton of litigation over those mistakes. It would be far easier if everyone would just accept that two different things can have the same name. But hey, if you want to spend a lot of money on lawyers, go for it.
That a civil authority makes laws about something doesn’t make it a “civil institution.”
To my mind what would make something a civil institution is if it were instituted by a civil authority for civil purposes. But (as far as I know) marriage was instituted by religious authorities for religious purposes, and for most people (I’d hazard to guess even most non-religious people) continues to connote religious norms.
-FrL-
But why must the civil authorities rename it. Let the bloody theists call it grondling, or what the hell they like. We already have a word for it. We’ve had it longer than they have, too.
Looking for information about this.
-FrL-