Dang, I missed this and I looked. I just opened a similar, but celebratory thread in IMHO.
NJ has joined the ‘axis of evil’ on rights for same-sex couples.
I think overall that this is a big blow to the Protect Marriage people and it is worth noting that:
PharmBoy, why would even polygamy lead to the end of the US? I do not follow your reasoning. Not for me, mind you, but who cares if some people form larger family units? I really do not see how Gay marriage hurts anyone.
Jim
That’s exactly the reason that Mr. Daffyd II and I moved from California to Toronto. It was as if we weren’t American - we were only Californian… That was the only place we had some rights…
And even then - when hubby got injured and we went to the hospital in the Bay Area, even though we were registered with the state as Domestic Partners, they still told us we would have to bring a copy of our Power of Attorney… So much for the Domestic Partner rights…
While we were driving from California to Toronto to our new life, in the back of my mind I kept thinking “Please, if we’re going to have an accident, wait til we cross the border into Canada where they’ll recognize our marriage”…
That was in June, and it’s really cool to deal with things like crossing the border, setting up banking, getting benefits at work, etc., where you just have to say you’re married and there’s no issue…
No, it’s like arguing that the state won’t let you marry a white person because you’re black. An arbitrary restriction with absolutely no basis beyond a general feeling of “eww” that some people get when they think about homosexuals.
Driving at 150 miles an hour presents a clear and present danger (of squishage) to the public at large. Two dudes moving in together is not going to result in you or anyone else being squished, or harmed in any way I can think of.
It certainly doesn’t represent a “blow” to the traditional family, any more than the choice some individuals make never to marry does.
Are you going to tell the crazy cat lady down the street that remaining a spinster all her life is a blow against the traditional family? Good luck with that.
Someone explain this “traditional family” to me, and tell me how long it has been in place. As far as I know, its fluid and this just may be another change. Granted, all I know I learned from my Sociology of the Family class, and growing up perfectly fine in a single-parent family w/ 3 divorces.
I find it interesting that, in your view, two men who are in love and deeply committed to each other is not a real marriage, but a man married to a woman he does not and cannot ever find attractive, let alone love in the romantic sense, is just fine. How is the latter healthier for the institution of marriage than the former? How does a sham marriage preformed under false pretenses protect your precious “traditional” family?
How would polygamy or gay marriage cause any harm to the country? I mean how is that even possible? Your claim makes no sense on its face.
No, it’s like saying you’re allowed to be Jewish, but you only get to go to church, not synagogue.
Last Sunday, on a day trip to the mountains, the people sitting behind me were arguing about whether “de facto unions” should have the same right as “marriages”.
Follow me for a bit, ok? Dates are, of course, approximations.
40 years ago: In Spain, religious marriage pretty much equals civil marriage. A couple being married in a church fills in one piece of paper that’s brought to the civil registry by their relatives to be filed there. The notion of “same sex marriage” exists only in a few minds, everybody else is busy claiming that tourists in bikinis will be the death of our morals, I tell you, the death of our morals.
30 years ago: divorce will be the death of family, I tell you, the death of family! And civil marriage without a real wedding, don’t get me started!
20 years ago: The Socialist government declares that marriages celebrated in a church are not valid for civil purposes: this backfires on them, as it brings about a mini-wave of church-only marriages for people (either very-high or very-low income) who want to be married but whose tax and income situation is better as singles. Of course you have to do the civil paperwork on a weekday: most people handle the civil paperwork first without any celebration and hold the wedding on the weekend. After a couple years, the guv’mint grudgingly created a registry of “other institutions” (including the Catholic Church and others) where people can get married and fill a form that can be taken to the civil registry by their relatives…
10 years ago: some leftist city halls open “de facto couple” registries. In theory, they are supposed to be a way for “domestic partnerships, otherwise unmarriable” to have proof of partnership. But, because we’re more Roman than Rome…
Nowadays: we have same-sex civil marriage (haven’t heard of any churches celebrating same-sex marriages yet), we have divorce in a week after a six month absence (could be because s/he has been away for work, the reasons don’t matter: all that matters is, s/he hasn’t been home for 6 months and her/his spouse wants a divorce)… and we have people who claim that they don’t want to be married, but do want to register as “de factos” and of course want the same right as the married people.
OK. So, you want to have the same rights and duties as the married people, and you want to be inscribed in a national register, but you don’t want to be “married”?
Right!
Got news for you: if it includes the same rights and duties as marriage, it’s a marriage. A rose is a rose by any other name, ok?
(They shut the hell up and let me zleep, which iz the one thing you oughta do while in a bus at 7am, dang’zzzzZZZzzz…)
Best wishes to everybody who wants to get married and can’t. That totally sucks, but also, remember: a rose is a rose…
I dunno, when I saw ‘I hate being a political football’ it was immediately clear to me what the OP was gonna talk about. But then I do follow the Dope and its dissection of American politics waaaay too much. 
Wrong. Heath care proxies are acceptable in Ohio. Do you have a cite to the contary?
As a clearing house for this popular issue: Four threads concerning it in three forums.
NJ Supreme Court allows gay marriage by **Oakminster ** in Great Debates
NJ has joined the ‘axis of evil’ on rights for same-sex couples. by What Exit? in IMHO.
I hate being a political football. by **Jeeves ** in MPSIMS.
NJ Supreme court approves gay marriages by **Antinor01 ** in MPSIMS
Jim
Depends on what sort of paperwork it is. If it’s a simple POA for health care then it’s probably fine. If it’s a certificate of domestic partnership or whatever CA calls its same-sex union scheme which, in CA, would establish Jeeves as next of kin to make health care decisions, then Ohio and Virginia would in all likelihood ignore it because of their expansive anti-SSM amendments.
I’ve edited the title to help make it more distinctive, and I’m moving this over to Great Debates. There’s already a thread over there dealing with the legal aspects of the recent decision, but this thread has switched directions toward discussing the acceptance of gay marriage as a social norm. 'Tis good Great Debates fodder.
That’s right. Jeeves has every right to marry a person he finds sexually unappealing for social and economic reasons so that he can spend the rest of his life taking lovers while his wife is doomed to a life of feeling like she has failed as a woman because her husband doesn’t find her desirable. Or doomed to a life attached to someone she doesn’t respect.
If it was good enough for my Great-Aunt in the fifties and sixties, it should be good enough for the future Mrs. Jeeves
I’d think this would be reasonably robust, since the relationship it asserts is power of attorney, with no reference to any other relationship the people may or may not share. In fact, if my wife isn’t available, my sister is the next person listed on the form. What they have in common is that, in sequence, they hold my POA for medical decision making, and they have copies of my directives
If every state in the union allowed for civil unions so that you could have all the rights that married couples have but we just didn’t call it marriage, would that satisfy the gay community or would it also have to be called marriage?
I can’t speak for the Gay community, not being gay or a community. However, you are talking about a large diverse group. I believe it would satisfy most, but still leave many unhappy. You cannot please everyone. As just someone on the sidelines, so to speak, I think it would be enough. That is all most people would ask for. Some will not be happy until both the government and their church recognize it however.
Jim
Almost but not quite. The federal rules would have to change also, which essentially would mean striking down DOMA. At least for me, I do not claim to speak for every gay person in this country.
If the government were to decide tomorrow that attorneys were no longer to be called citizens, but would still have all the rights of citizens, would that work for you?
I’m surprised to see that you have attorney listed as your profession and would consider this to be a usable suggestion. It seems to me that in the law, wording has even more power than it does in our day to day life.
I don’t think it would actually be possible for civil unions to be completely legally equal to marriage. As I understand our legal system, it relies very heavily on precedent. I’m not convinced that civil unions would enjoy all the protections established for marriage by centuries of precedent. Civil unions would always be more vulnerable than marriage because of this reason. Additionally, I do not think that this scenario is remotely likely. The vast majority (if not the totality) of opposition to gay marriage is rooted in simple bigotry against gays. They don’t want to let us marry because they don’t want us to have all the rights and protections straight people have. Civil unions are a compromise in more than just name: they’re a middle ground between people who want us to have all the rights, and people who want us to have none of the rights. If we were actually able to move the country into a position where the majority of the country wanted us to have all the rights, we would be in a position to simply legalize gay marriage, and there would be no need of a middle ground.
However, running with your hypothetical, no, I would not be satisfied with anything short of marriage. Civil unions would be an acceptable stop gap, but they will never be an adequate replacement for marriage, no matter how many rights are appended. I addressed this point in one of the concurrent threads on this subject, and rather than crossposting it, I’ll simply link to it here.
As a non-gay person, I think this could be a very satisfactory interim solution, if the “civil union” thingy was open to heterosexual couples as well as homosexual ones.
Then straight couples who don’t approve of discriminatory marriage laws could get civil unions instead of marriages, as a point of principle. But of course everybody would still refer to them as “married”, which would end up irretrievably blurring the whole silly distinction between “marriage” and “civil union”.
Eventually, everybody would realize that the distinction was meaningless, and civil marriage would become legally available for all couples, gay or straight. (Religious marriage, of course, would still be subject to whatever conditions or restrictions religious groups chose to apply to it.)
That’s more or less how it worked out in the Netherlands: first there was no legal recognition of gay couples, then they constructed a sort of gender-neutral “civil-union” status that was legally equivalent to marriage, then they legalized gay marriage. Seems to be working fine.