Actually, your proposal is much more akin to the post Plessy v Ferguson ruling when the Supreme Court had just ruled that the states could, indeed, set up one separate but equal set of laws that applied separately but (purportedly) equally to two groups of people.
I realize that you want to believe that your “separate but equal” is different than the 1896 “separate but equal,” but you have provided no reason for anyone to believe that it would actually work that way.
OK so can we call this one set of laws marriage? If not why not?
As everyone else has said, magellan, your proposal only comprises one set of laws if there’s no legal difference between the mutual legal contracts set up for a same-sex couple and the ones set up for an opposite-sex couple. If that truly is your proposal–if you’ve given up the two-set-solution of marriage for straights, civil union for gays–then I’m delighted to have you come around.
But if you’re maintaining your proposal, then you’ve got a legal difference, namely, the different names. And that’s precisely the legal difference I described in my analogy.
Except that the one school has only one name over the door, and both blacks and whites can equally lay claim to being students there, with no distinction drawn between them. But *not *in your “logical” version of marriage.
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Not if you reflect on the power that words hold. By using a different word for gays than straights, one can maintain the image that they’re different (a point magellan01 insists on, that they’re different), i.e. not normal, not entitled to be thought the same as everyone else. By insisting on the terminology, one reminds oneself, if not them, of their place. It’s entirely possible to believe intellectually in nondiscrimination, but resist it on a visceral level, and such a person reaches that visceral level when there is no longer any tool to exercise the viscera. Which gets us back to the words in the thread title.
More semantic games. Marriage laws are not all the same from state to state right now. You’re simply trying to create a technicality so you can declare they are legally equal. It still requires states to create a new legal institution , and for what purpose? Why all that extra effort? To protect tradition, or the definition of a word? You seem to be claiming that separate but equal can work if only we go to the extra effort to make it work. The obvious question is , why that effort? Why didn’t separate but equal work before.
I suggest that the reason it didn’t work then and can’t work now is because the very thing in people that makes them see the need to keep separate from people in their own society is contrary to equality. If you truly in your heart and mind want others to be equal, then there’s no need for them to be separate. If you maintain they should be separate, then you are deciding that true equality is secondary to your own personal preferences. This is demonstrated by examining the arguments and realizing that there are no rational fact based arguments to support the need for separation.
I think you’re kidding yourself.
That past is not the present. There used to be the idea that gay marriages were bad for kids and other such stuff, but that’s been disproven now. Just like, back when “science” said that black people were inferior, I wouldn’t hold people to believing said “science.”
Furthermore, these are politicians, saying what they say to get elected. I do have tolerance to the occasional lie when the result is that you will be able to do more good. Cathy has no reason to say what he said than genuine belief.
This, finally, is a legitimate complaint about what I propose. Finally.
No. I am well aware of what my ideas are and are not.
There is no difference worth worrying about between opposing gay marriage for any reason and going out with a baseball bat looking for queers; it all requires a denial that sexual minorities are people, and one goes hand in hand with the other in terms of the mentality it creates and condones.
As I’m not a Democrat, I’m not bound to engage in ridiculous contortions to apologize for Barack Obama’s generally loathsome attitudes on this issue so I’m free to recognize the truth of the above.
Of course, sane people will disagree with this. :rolleyes:
A complaint which is unanswered.
To say your idea does not resemble the separate but equal of the Brown case…at all. Seems vastly overstated and more semantic wrangling.
Of course there is. We don’t prosecute people for verbal assault in the same way we do assault with a deadly weapon.
The people doing the one are the same people doing the other. Legalities of free speech should be protected, but morally a scumbag is a scumbag.
No, actually–the people voting against SSM aren’t the same as the people beating up gay people with baseball bats. Both are immoral bigots, but the latter is a lot worse, and it’s bizarre to say otherwise.
Well, not all of them; but I’d expect a substantial overlap. Most anti- voters presumably don’t personally beat gays, but I’d expect that any gay basher who votes is an anti-SSMer.
Certainly so. The portion of actual gay bashers who vote, I suspect, is very small. And in any case I’m responding to someone who said there’s “no difference worth worrying about between opposing gay marriage for any reason and going out with a baseball bat looking for queers,” who equated the two actions, not simply saying the same people do both actions.
Your ridiculous attempts to be “civil” to inhuman monsters will look as ridiculous in 50 years as drawing moral distinctions between people who raped their slaves, people who owned slaves but didn’t rape them, and people who just defended slavery in the press does now. Either you believe gays are people or you don’t; distinctions beyond that are pure metaphysical masturbation.
This is untrue. On the contrary, it’s hard to think of anything less metaphysical than the difference between having a baseball bat applied to your head, and not having a baseball bat applied to your head.
Actually, that seems like a perfectly valid moral distinction to me.
I agree. I, for example, don’t believe that robots, condescending or not, should be able to get married; however, I don’t approve of this. Maybe that’ll help him understand the difference.
I call bullshit.
That may be philosophically and ideally true , but we as humans are not ideal, and by that standard, we all are scumbags. How does one scumbag judge another scumbag so harshly.
