And you fall right into the trap I’ve mentioned
(above directed at Cheeseteak)
Lets try this:
Sucky arguement sucks because its sucky. Not because sucky people (that are sucky for other reasons) use it too.
I don’t think this needs to be complicated. Marriage is a major, important social institution. There are many financial considerations that differentiate married and single people. There may also be dependent children involved – natural or adopted – with consequent financial obligations and tax considerations. And if the marriage ends, there could be major issues of property rights at stake. Beyond all that, the very act of marriage itself is for most of us a major ceremonial and symbolic rite of passage, and banning SSM is a form of human rights discrimination that deliberately relegates gays to the excluded status of shunned second-class citizens – outcasts from society.
That’s why the government is involved. Those are the kinds of basic reasons we have government in the first place.
Really? It used to come up on the boards all the time from strong gay rights advocates, as a way around what appeared, at the time, to be intractable opposition to SSM from mainstream America. The actual homophobes at the time didn’t back the idea at all, because they didn’t need to: it was a compromise position on an issue they appeared to be winning handily.
This was all of maybe five years ago. Crazy how quickly things have reversed themselves. Anyway, it was a stupid idea regardless of why the person was promoting it, so I’m just as happy to see it getting tarred by association with the genuine bigots.
I don’t think it’s invariably homophobic, because it’s my position.
If government MUST be involved in marriage, then it should be available to gays as well as straights. I just don’t think government should be involved in the first place except to prevent abuse – a pedophile marrying his child (or any child), say. But as long as all parties involved are human and over the age of 18, government should say out of it.
What is it you think government is doing?
Intruding into stuff that’s not any of their fricking business.
Let me be clear. I absolutely support the legalization of same-sex marriage, because as things are now the state is so involved in marriage that keeping SSM illegal is an egregious violation of civil rights. I just think that, if we were starting a new country from scratch, I wouldn’t want the government involved in solemnizing marriage, except to prohibit unions between adults and children or humans and non-humans. Marriage should be treated as a contract, restricted to parties who have reached their majority. The government should have no say in who may and may not marry beyond ordinary contract law.
Answer the question. What do you think the government’s purpose is in litigating marriage? What do you think the government does for married couples? Let me give you a hint - if the government was litigating relationships we’d have a problem, but there’s something fundamentally different in play here.
@Miller: well, there goes my premise. Rats.
When I have heard the “no government intrusion into marriage” argument, it almost always goes far beyond Skald the Rhymer’s position to say that the government should have no say whatsoever in marriage. The acts of authorizing, solemnizing, and recording marriages are properly the responsibility of the church in this viewpoint (and they usually specify the church, not the synagogue or the mosque, much less any non-Judeo-Christian institutionJ. The government doesn’t even get to say that adults can’t marry children, because the church will take care of that. I’ve even heard the claim that the act of issuing a marriage license isn’t a proper function of government: it is the minister and congregation who decides who can marry or who is to be considered married.
However, marriage is so integrally connected with various legal rights and benefits that I don’t see how you could ever make this viewpoint work in a society of any complexity. Take, for example, one trivial example: inheritance. If you die without a will, the law in your jurisdiction specifies who inherits, and your spouse is at or near the top of the list. So who is your spouse, if there is no governmental record? The person who was living with you at your death? The person who was married to you in such-and-such a church 20 years ago? The person identified by the Rev. Minister So-and-so? Some random person who pops up out of the woodwork? It seems that would result in many more lengthy and expensive court battles.
Exactly. Legal marriage is all about how the people are now related to one another, and what their default rights and responsibilities are. That makes things easier both on the outside world and on the couple.
If marriage didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.
But “law” is the government’s purview and rather than have a zillion different contracts that vary who knows how there is some sense in having certain things established (legally) upon getting married (things such as inheritance, medical power of attorney, equitable division of property upon a splitting up and so on).
Please note that I said that my ideal isn’t practical. Matters of inheritance and so forth have been so bound up with marriage for so long that it would be far, far more trouble than it’s worth to change. It would be like shifting to a duodecimal number system. When I say that I want government to have no say in marriage, I mean that I don’t want government to have the authority to say that any adult can’t marry any other adult, or any two other adults, and so forth (I will make an exception for fraud).
If marriage were just the purview of religious institutions, we’d have a problem. The RCC doesn’t recognize divorce, so people married in that church are married for life. However, if one of the is Catholic, and one is Jewish by birth (whether or not the person converted to Catholicism), and the couple later lives separately, then the Jewish person wants to marry anothyer Jewish person. This person is not considered Jewishly married, and can marry another Jew in the synagogue. If this person does so, and let’s say to make it more interesting, is a man, and give his Catholic wife a “get,” making him divorced, just for good measure, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary, the situation is going to be very interesting if he dies and has to women who claim to be married to him. Both of them can make very good arguments, as both of them have satisfied all the requirements of their respective religions, and the government cannot hold one religion over another. To make it more interesting, let’s say both weddings took place in the same state where the man died.
If he has children, his estate can go to them. If he has parents, to them, but what about commonly held property, which may be the house where his second wife lives?
There really needs to be one standard for marriage, so the government needs to be involved, unless someone thinks we can actually get representatives of every religion in the US to sit down and agree on a standard.
It’s not an inherently homophobic argument, but it is inherently stupid. It’s not even a Libertarian argument - if you’ve got an extremely common form of contract between two people, writing it up from scratch every time is far more work and far more prone to error or fraud than just letting them pick Standard Contract A and fill in the names.
Besides, how do you make third parties recognize your homemade contract?
Contact signatory at hospital: “Section 4, paragraph C, subsection IV clearly grants me the right to make medical decisions for my co-signatory under the conditions specified I’m Section 4, paragraph B.”
Doctor: “Well, *I *didn’t sign it, so fuck off.”
It’s not inherently homophobic to want to abolish marriage. In my experience, most of the people advancing that position are doing it for homophobic reasons, but I’m sure there are people out there who genuinely think marriage is unnecessary.
I don’t quite understand why they couch it in terms of protecting marriage, though. They never actually say “abolish marriage.” It’s always something like “getting the government out of marriage” or not having the government “regulating marriage.”
Could the OP please provide us with some links to said arguments? Because to the best of my knowledge, every time I’ve seen the proposition that government should get out of marriage, in the context of an SSM discussion, it’s been in rebuttal to the proposition that government should prohibit same-sex marriage.
No problem - I was just trying to be honest in my response.
My Minister is fine with it, I don’t like it personally. The holy relationship is good, signing as an agent of the State bothers me. I don’t know if I am subconsciously concerned about the State adding more rules, or asking wether we are running a Christian ceremony or a Californian one, or what. It is just a gentle uneasiness in my gut is all.
There should be a separation between anything relating to the religious marriage ceremony and the concept of legal civil marriage. Right now they are significantly intertwined in many States.
I don’t think there should be any form of tax benefit to married versus single.
It would seem inefficient to not have government involved in marriage since it has to adjudicate division of assets when they end and has to be involved in things like benefit handling for survivors.
Pick the comments section of any given article on gay marriage, or any thread about it on any less-enlightened forum. Although at this point I suppose the premise has been sufficiently refuted.
Because the fig leaf might convince people that it’s slightly less stupid an idea. It’s like if someone wanted to abolish all parental rights and responsibilities, and presented it as “getting the government out of the family.”