It needs to be called marriage in the text of the law because it already is, it would be a tremendous and error-prone undertaking to alter the vast body of law the way you describe, and there there is no reason whatsoever to make this effort - as far as the state is concerned, there is no confusion whatsoever between civil marriage and the declarations of various religions.
By the way, I consider it my sovereign right as an adult human being to simply announce that I’m married, if I can find some other person who is to my liking and who is foolish enough to do it with me. Of course, this would not be recognized by the state until I did their paperwork too, but is there any coherent reason why this marriage would not be as valid as any religious marriage*?
aside from the marriages of any religion which happens to actually be correct and backed by a god; in which case the pastafarians alone would have valid-before-god marriages, and me and the hindus and wiccans and christians would all remain exactly as married (or not) as each other.
So what are you going to do about all the laws (and civil contracts etc.) that use the terms “wife”, “husband”, “spouse” etc. ?
Businesses will love this - they won’t have to pay medical benefits, pensions etc. to someone’s “spouse” since there won’t (in legal terms) be any “spouses” anymore.
The problem again boils down to this, making everything a “civil union” degrades religion in the eyes of those who are religious. Furthermore there is the First Amendment to deal with. Could this be construded as interference with freedom to practice religion.
After all you’re taking away a right, (to marriage) people had before.
Now on the other hand, allowing gays ONLY civil unions says “you’re second class.” Would you ask blacks to sit on the back of the bus. Why not? It gets there the same time as the front of the bus.
So you’re going back to seperate but equal is OK. In some cases it IS OK, like in bathrooms. But the courts generally say if you’re going to say seperate but equal IS ok there has got to be a good reason for doing so.
I support the OP logic, but I can see why religious people would reject it.
But why do you want to change the generic term “marriage” just because it happens to be used in a religious context?
You (and many other people) seem to be under the impression that “marriage” is somehow a religious concept, or at least a religious word for the concept, but I see no reason to believe this. Of course people in the predominately Christian West have been religiously solemnizing their marriages in Christian ceremonies for a long time now, but that doesn’t make marriage an exclusively Christian or even necessarily religious idea (any more than christening babies or the metaphor “born again” means that non-Christians have to come up with some other word for the process of emerging from the mothers’ wombs).
“Marriage” seems to have come from (and after) the verb “to marry”, which seems to go back a Latin word of uncertain origin. I don’t see anything in there that makes it a necessarily religious concept.
Offhand, I’d say it’s foolish to propose anything that alters existing heterosexual marriage in any manner whatsoever, even in trivial/symbolic ways. That just guarantees you’ll never get gay marriage or some legal equivalent.
These are all good points. For now I won’t address how religious the word “marriage” has been throughout history. I will ask this: No matter how correct you may be about the origins of the word “marriage”, a large percentage of the US population does seem to attach a religious content to it and therefore cares how it is used in today’s society.
Consider the word “Negro”: “Prior to … the late 1960s, the appellation was accepted as a normal neutral formal term both by those of Black African descent as well as non-African blacks.”. So historically, it was not an ethnic slur. But just because it was not historically an ethnic slur doesn’t mean that it’s OK to go around calling people “negroes” and then claiming “But historically, it was a neutral word, so you should be fine with it”.
Similarly, just because marriage historically may not have been a religious concept hundreds of years ago does not mean that the majority of people in the US today don’t attach a religious meaning to it.
To summarize, what we have is, on one hand, the history of a word (“Negro” or “marriage”), and the current perception of the word by the population, and it’s not necessarily a good argument to tell people to alter their current reaction to a word, just because historically it had another meaning.
By what mechanism do you think that gays will be denied “civil unions” if all hetero marriages start being referred to in legal terms as “civil unions”?
I think it’s better to persuade people not to be offended at the state applying the word “marriage” to gays than it would be to cede control of a perfectly serviceable English word describing a near-universal (if not actually universal) human institution to a particular set of religious viewpoints.
If you look up the numbers on Prop 8 and other anti-gay initiatives, you’ll find that pretty much universally, in California and in conservative Bible belt states, even though those measures are still (lamentably) passing, there is a universal pattern that older voters break in opposition to gay marriage, usually by a healthy majority; but that anti-gay-marriage majority diminishes as you look at younger blocs of voters, generally becoming a majority in favor of gay marriage when you get to the youngest voters.
And I do not think this is a “liberal youngsters who will go on to become conservative curmudgeons when they get older” phenomenon. I think this is a permanent shift in attitude. Once they get to be 64, today’s Generation Y or Generation Z or Generation Alpha or whatever we’re up to now may very well bitch about property taxes and the stuff those kids call music these days, but they will no more be in favor of denying gays the right to marry than they would be in favor of denying women the right to vote. Opposition to SSM is going to literally die off.
The better analogy isn’t to the word “Negro”; the better analogy is to interracial marriage. Opposition to “race mixing” was once very strong and very widespread, but we didn’t need to abandon the word “marriage” to the segregationists and come up with some clumsy neologism to describe the relationship of Mildred and Richard Loving.
It seems to me that you are doing this as well. If you can’t tell people to alter their erroneous belief that the state has anything to do with their religious marriage, then how are you going to explain that they aren’t losing something when you change the name?
And your posts are still reading to me like you think that today in the US the legal institution of marriage is intertwined with the religious institution. If you are still approaching your argument from that framework, then you are incorrect.
By the mechanism of those who currently have hetero marriages digging in their heels in resistance to any proposed legislation that alters (or could be perceived to alter) what they already have. You’re not giving them an incentive to cooperate by saying they’re hardly notice the change. You’re better off supporting the legal battles of the recently-dismarried California couples who demand recognition of their then-legal unions, i.e. they want the right extended to them, they don’t want to redefine the right so they can sneak in.
I don’t follow you here. “Annullment” is a term that has specific religious meaning for some religious groups, notably the Catholic church. It means that a marriage was not properly formed according to the Church.
Since it has a religious meaning intimately tied to the equally religious term “marriage”, how can you justify keeping it is a secular legal term?
I have no problem with OP’s suggestion. I couldn’t care less if my marriage is officially called a marriage, a civil union, a domestic partnership etc - it’s just semantics AFAIC. But here is why I think the proposal won’t work: As soon as Mr and Mrs Redneck realize that the 2 queers down the street have the exact same “union” that they have, they’ll be up in arms about it. The Rednecks only endorsed ‘civil unions’ in that gallop poll when they thought they’d still have a “marriage” but gay people would get the “civil unions”. They won’t be happy with the equality.
That may turn out to be the only way to get the issue through in the U.S. Hetero marriage remains unchanged with a legal-equivalent gay civil union (though gays and gay-supporters unofficially call it “marriage”) and after a few years, linguistic evolution will demonstrate no need for two terms and “civil union” becomes extinct, to appear solely in legal documents only lawyers ever read.
The point being that the best way to mobilize anti-SSM voters is to scare them by saying “the government is going to invalidate your marriage!” If instead you make a point of avoiding anything that even hints hetero marriage will be altered in any way, you might get enough voter indifference to get the issue through.
Because marriage doesn’t just mean something to me as an individual, it means something to us all as a society. I don’t want the right to call whatever relationship I’m currently in a marriage. Fuck, I already have that right, and what good does it do me? I want access to the social institution we call “marriage,” not some bastard stepchild version of it that’s been created specifically to remind me that I’m a second class citizen. And I’m not willing to take the position that, because I can’t have it, I’m going to make it so no one can have it. That doesn’t do me any good, either, and as Bryan Ekers has astutely pointed out, it’ll alienize the fuck out of all the straight couples who suddenly find that their marriages have been dissolved in favor of some bullshit neologism.
*What *bastard stepchild? What second class citizen? Gays and straight people will both have access to “civil unions” under the law. Both can find a religion/organization that can recognize their relationship as “marriage”. Both can call themselves “married” even in the absence of a religion/organization that can recognize their relationship as “marriage”.
Where is the inequality? Where is the second class citizen status?
I don’t see how changing the legal term to “civil union”, will mean that “no one can have access to the social institution of marriage”. The social institution will still be there. It will just have a different name in the text of the law.