If the religious right wants to define marriage, than any two people shacking up should be able to receive the benefits of a legally recognized union. That’s biblical marriage right there.
And what’s the point of your proposal, if it isn’t to be more appealing to the other side than our current goal (gay marriage) is? Just to make our side less happy? To score a meaningless rhetorical point against the other side (“You said you didn’t want the government to recognize gay marriage and it doesn’t! But we still won, mostly! Ha ha! In your face!”)?
[/QUOTE]
From your quote:
We don’t have to make them embrace gay marriage. Just accept the fact that the government will not take part in your religious agenda.
It’s a compromise. I know it leaves a bad taste in our mouths to compromise with bigotry, but if it helps, neither side usually gets 100% of what they want in a compromise.
I will say the same thing to Shakes, Aruqvan, and anybody else who is after this utterly ridiculous semantic business – if you do not want to be ‘married’ then don’t enter into a ‘marriage’. But don’t deprive those for whom the word has meaning of using it for whatever silly reason you have. So far, I’ve seen Shakse insult Miller, an atheist gay man who wishes to enter into a marriage, by accusing him of wanting to placate a 'nonexistent sky wizzard [sic]"
And I am getting very uncivil, and fairly ionized, in wishing to defend my marriage, and those of atheists, gay coupies, and all and sundry, from people who cannot grasp the idea that language is meaningful to people, that words carry connotations that matter to people.
Further, just “running global search and replace” and “slapping stickers on things” without amending each and every one of the thousands of statutes that reference marriages, surviving spouses, etc., and promulgating and holding hearings on the regulations that authorize those forms, is quite literally a criminal act.
That is how it is done in the Netherlands.
The courthouse offers some marriage venues that offer the festivity and practicality of a church. In my hometown Maastricht, the county official can perform the marriage ceremony in either the old county hall, the modern City Hall, (the ceremony is done for free on Monday mornings) a theater, an resort, a museum, a castleor another castle. . For a small additional fee, the county marriage offical will come to another venue of the couple’s choice.
The county marraige offical will do the stuff a priest wil usually do, like meeting with the couple beforehand and holding a little festive speech at the ceremony tailored to the couples histories and circumstances.
If it wasn’t going to take part in their religious agenda, it would simple let homosexuals get married and be done with it.
Bigotry shouldn’t be compromised with, ever. Both from a moral perspective, and because it just doesn’t work. This idea will strengthen the bigots, not weaken them. Pushing it would be more likely to result in something like an anti-same-sex marriage Amendment to the Constitution than it would be to give same sex couples anything they want.
It’s not clear to me why bigots should get more than 0% of what they want.
I’m not arguing semantics. I’m saying that rewriting (rephrasing) every state and federal law is not necessary.
It took the Church a 1,000 years to make up it’s mind whether marriage was a divine sacrament, a civil contract, or just a way for fornicators who couldn’t stand celibacy to channel their urges. The Western wold’s concept of marriage owes alot more to Roman civil law than it does the Bible.
Yeah, there’s the distict possiblity, however remote, that this might put heterosexual Americans traveling abroud in the same nasty situtations that same-sex couples can find themselves in.
The OP’s suggestion is completely idiotic and without merit. It’s playing in to every insane reactionary argument that the gays are trying to destroy marriage. It solves nothing, there’s no possibilty of any jurisdiciton on the planet adopting it, and if one did somehow it would probally result widespread ostracism and violence against gays & lesbians.
From your quote:
We don’t have to make them embrace gay marriage. Just accept the fact that the government will not take part in your religious agenda.
It’s a compromise. I know it leaves a bad taste in our mouths to compromise with bigotry, but if it helps, neither side usually gets 100% of what they want in a compromise.
[/QUOTE]
I can see the point of compromise if it gets you something you wouldn’t otherwise get. What do non-bigots get out of this that they don’t get by sticking to their guns? I’ve repeatedly pointed out that the answer is “nothing” and you haven’t argued the point, yet you keep calling this a compromise. A “compromise” that doesn’t gain your side anything isn’t a compromise, it’s a unilateral concession. Why suggest that?
Not that remote; I’ve already heard complaints about their relationship not being recognized by people in civil unions traveling internationally.
When Blacks were emancipated, how many hurdles did they have to leap before they got all the rights that they have today? I could ask the same question about women’s rights.
Or heck, how about gays being able to serve openly in the military? Did we just go from ‘No openly gays in the military’ to ‘OK, it’s cool. Openly gays in the military’? No we did not, first we had to go through that whole stupid phase of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’
It was stupid, but look where it got us. Gays can now openly serve in the military. And as far as I can tell, the bigots were NOT empowered by DADT. In fact, they were weakened by it.
How many billions of dollars will be spent on ballot measures as this issue see-saws back and forth? No one is going to just “get over” themselves just because it is the sane thing to do. Time for the government to get out of the marriage business altogether.
Which demonstrates my point. All “compromises” ever did was write discrimination into law, so the fight had to start all over again. It just drew out the oppression and tyranny. “Compromise” often meant they lost rights, not gained them.
What it “got us” was many years of worse treatment for gays in the military. It was a speedbump, not a stepping stone; it was put there to slow progress, and it succeeded.
Hardly; it gave them greater power to drive military gays into hiding and ruin their careers if caught. It gave them many years of fun tormenting their victims, and did irreparable damage to the lives of thousands of people.
Why should everyone else suffer in a futile attempt to placate the bigots? If anything it’s religion that should get out of the marriage business, since it’s so addicted to using it as a weapon.
Can you not understand this is segregation?
My Big, Fat Civil-Union.
How does getting government out of the marriage business hurt anyone?
Perhaps if you stamp you foot harder.
I couldn’t disagree with you more. You see them as speed bumps, I see them as a necessarry process of the evolution of equal rights.
It forces people to give up being married, which is what they want, for a “civil union” that they don’t want and which will be inferior. It demonizes homosexuals even more than they already are, inflames the homophobes even more than they are, and solves nothing.
[QUOTE=Shakes]
Great. Why are we arguing semantics?
[/QUOTE]
Because that’s all there is.
Either a civil union is less than a marriage, or it isn’t. [ul]
[li]If it is less, then the anti-SSM people are correct that SSM proponents want to denigrate marriage by degrading it into a civil union.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]If a civil union is the same as a marriage, then it doesn’t do any harm to have “marriage” for heterosexual couples, and “civil union” for gay couples.[/li][/ul]ISTM that the insistence by SSM proponents on the term “marriage” to refer to SSM is based on two things -
[ol]
[li]An attempt to get SSM thru the back door by pretending that SSM is in the law already, and[/li][li]An attempt to force everyone to agree that SSM is just as good as heterosexual marriage by forcing them to use the same term[/li][/ol]
Regards,
Shodan
N/M, too easy.