If you had actually read the entirety of MEBuckner’s post 143, and if you had then understood the words that you had read, then you would have realized that “the meaning” of this “clearly defined relationship” has already changed in the United States. It has, in fact, changed repeatedly, as demonstrated by Chrono’s post number 115.
Despite your repeated claims to the contrary, marriage was not “originally” a union between a single man and a single woman. It was a union between a man and a woman of the same race. Another difference from the “original” definition is that the man was in charge of the marriage. This is not longer the case.
These things have changed. The legal definition of “marriage” has changed. The definition is not the same as it originally was. It is different. Legal definitions often change with time. This includes the definition of marriage, which has changed repeatedly. This means that if you compare the “original” definition and the current definition, you will find that they are somewhat dissimilar. This is because the definition has changed.
Please note also that society did not fall apart when blacks and whites were allowed to be married, which happened after the definition of marriage changed.
Why was the first word ever proposed for this type of relationship “marriage”? Because “marriage” is the most accurate word to describe it! If a gay guy comes in to work and says “Me and Mike are getting married this weekend”, everyone knows exactly what they are talking about. I know what kinds of promises they are making, what the legal and religious aspects are, what I should bring them as a present…
If a gay guy comes into work and says “Mike and I are have a civil union this weekend”, everyone is probably going to ask “Uh…what exactly does that mean?” Not clear at all.
So really, it’s the other side that wants to change the meaning of words. It wants to prevent people from using the clearest, most reasonable word to describe a relationship.
No, it didn’t work because the the only reason to go the “separate but equal” route is if you think those other people, the ones you need to be separate from, aren’t really equal. And if two legal rights are separate and have distinct names, it should be pretty easy to change one later on without affecting the other. They might start out essentially equal, but what’s the point in keeping them separate if the intent is to have them remain so?
Not as simple as just letting same-sex couples get married under the currently existing system, though. If simplicity were the major issue here, there wouldn’t have been so many recent laws passed for the sole purpose of keeping same-sex couples from marrying or to deny legal recognition to same-sex couples married elsewhere.
From the National Conference of State Legislatures page on same-sex marriage: “Forty-one states currently have statutory Defense of Marriage Acts. Three of those states have statutory language that pre-dates DOMA (enacted before 1996) defining marriage as between a man and a woman.”
So both the federal government and the governments of 38 US states have spent plenty of time and effort these past 12 years on making things more complicated, and not for the sake of change but just to preserve the status quo! And with only a few exceptions, they did this instead of passing those “very simple” laws that would have granted civil unions to gay couples. Gosh, it’s almost as if they have no interest at all in keeping things simple or providing equal rights to homosexuals!
No, it isn’t, and if you think it is then you don’t know much about history or world culture. Even if we limit our discussion to the US, if it was so clear why did we need DOMA in the first place? The federal government obviously felt that existing law was not sufficiently clear on this point.
Women are allowed to control their own property after marriage. That’s a pretty big break from tradition.
Let’s not kid ourselves here, control of property has always been the primary reason for having legally (as opposed to religiously) recognized marriages. People obviously do not need to be married to have sex or produce children. The notion that love should come into it is quite modern – for much of history and in parts of the world even today many marriages have been between people who barely knew each other. Most of the legal rights associated with marriage today have to do with property or financial benefits.
That isn’t an answer. It’s been nearly 40 years since Stonewall. You say gay people can have full rights short of the right to call their marriages “marriages”. I think an awful lot of homosexuals would jump at the chance to have everything but the name “marriage”, but I don’t see that such an offer is actually on the table at the federal level or in most states.
No, it doesn’t. If we were going to preserve “traditional” marriage with all the “traditional” gender roles that go along with that then there’d be good reason to limit it to only men and women. After all, a man could hardly be expected to give up his rights as an independent citizen in order to allow another man to be his “lord and master”! And if two women wanted to be married, how could they ever get a mortgage or even a credit card? Who would be the breadwinner? Who would take care of the house? The whole thing would be absurd!
But if we accept, as most modern Americans do, that men and women are entitled to equal rights as citizens and equal rights within the framework of marriage, there isn’t any compelling legal reason why every marriage needs to consist of a mixed male/female pair. If both sexes are truly equal then the law shouldn’t care if a marriage is man/woman, man/man, or woman/woman. It’s a matter that should rightfully be left up to individuals who want to marry to decide based on their own preferences and beliefs.
I don’t want it to be confusing at all. That’s why your plan sucks: it’s confusing and impractical. We already have a word that means “marriage:” marriage. Everyone knows what it means already, so we don’t have to bother with your step 2 or your step 2. See how much simpler that makes everything?
Allowing gays to marry does not, in any way, take that word away from heterosexuals. That’s a patently absurd argument. It will still describe traditional marriages. It’s not as if we allow gay marriage, and the next day you introduce someone as your wife and people are all confused because you’re different genders. The old meaning will still apply to the full extent that it does now. It will simply also apply to a (very) slightly larger number of relationships, relationships which are functionally identical to the one you have with your wife.
And it’s not about gaining “immediate acceptance.” That would be a ridiculous expectation for a gay marriage law. A lot of people don’t want gays to get married because they hate gays. Getting a marriage law passed isn’t going to change their mind at all. What it’s about is gaining immediate legal protection. Pursuing a separate but equal policy means fighting a thousand different battles over every facet of marriage law, as the actual extent of a “civil union” is defined in the polls and in the courts. And it means constant battles to retain the rights we’ve won, because if we’re in a separate system, there’s nothing to stop the genuine homophobes out there from working to make the systems unequal. If we go straight for marriage, we only need to win one legal/political fight, and we only need to defend ourselves on that one front. Once we’ve got marriage, the James Dobsons of the world won’t be able to chisel away at our rights without harming their own rights, as well.
I don’t want to “grab onto the coattails” of marriage. I want to be part of marriage. It’s clear you place enormous sentimental value on the concept of “marriage.” Here’s the thing: so do I. That’s why I want to be able to partake of the institution. There’s no end of practical reasons why it makes sense to open up the institution to gays (most of which, I note, you have ignored in this thread) but there’s also a very simple emotional argument. Marriage has a meaning that’s much deeper and more important than “civil union,” and I want access to that meaning almost as much as I want access to the attendant rights.
I agree with you there. That’s why I think you’re whole “invent a new word,” scheme is so ill-advised. Marriage is much too important to dilute the meaning with a boat-load of useless homonyms. Marriage is marriage. We don’t need new words to describe identical relationships. That just trivializes the meaning of the term as a whole.
Why do you think we need to maintain distinctions between gay and straight relationships? What purpose, in law or in society, is served by the distinction?
This would be an excellent analogy if you ever find yourself in an argument with someone who wants to abolish the word “gay.” For this particular debate, I’m afraid it’s a bit self-defeating for you to put it forward, because it illustrates a previous civil rights movement where a disenfranchised minority sought social and political equality, and, by winning it, did not damage those institutions they sought to access, but rather, made them stronger. In which regard, women’s suffrage is an excellent analogy for gay marriage.
And it would be simple, if everyone were okay with the idea of equality for gays. Just like separate but equal would have worked great for blacks if everyone had been okay with the idea of racial equality. But if there weren’t any bigots out there, we wouldn’t need separate but equal in the first place. The laws said schools for blacks had to be equal to schools for whites. But the practice was, since there were two institutions, the way you treated one institution had no effect on the other. So if you slashed funding for black schools, you didn’t hurt the white students. If you built a new school for white students, the black students were still stuck in their old one. In theory, you can have separate and equal. In practice, you only get separate, and never equal.
We don’t have arranged marriages anymore. Women are considered equal partners in their marriages, as opposed to be subservient to their husbands. Women don’t give up their property rights when they marry. Ending a marriage is much easier, and can be initiated by either spouse.
Even if they are two separate issues, they’re clearly two issues that have had enormous influence on each other. Previous conceptions of marriage may have been based on broadly misogynistic attitudes in society, but that does not change the fact that as those attitudes evolved, they resulted in fundamental shifts in how society defined marriage. Much like the current conception of marriage is based on broadly homophobic attitudes in society, and why the current definition of marriage is shifting along with those attitudes.
Your response had little to nothing to do what he said. He said women didn’t try to be called men, they just asked for the vote to be expanded to include women. The parallel to this example would be for one partner of a gay couple to ask to be called the opposite sex so as to qualify for marriage.
Your example also included the bolded section, which you’ve repeated and yet consistently refused to answer exactly what the process for damage is. How does enfranchising more and perfectly decent people into an institution damage it?
So, you admit that separate but equal can, in fact, be equal. But the fear is that that might change over time. I’d argue that if it can be made equal, and in this case it easily can, then it can be made to stay equal.
I agree you it would be somewhat simpler. But does does not mean the alternative is also simple. Regardless, simplicity is not the metric I’m using.
I’m not surprised and do not blame them one iota. I applaud it. There was/is a desire afoot to contort and alter the meaning of a word and concept that is foundational. This leaves aside those people who have strong religious beliefs about the sacrament of marriage. That is not my argument, by I do not begrudge them wanting to protect something they feel is profoundly important to them.
I maintain that the best thing to do is to demand the “rights”, and not seek to appropriate the word “marriage”. It’s as if I’d be champing at the bit to get a job that wants to pay me $10 million dollars a year and we’re hung up on a title. I want to be called Chief Muckitymuck and they want to call me Top Muckitymuck, explaining that the term Chief means something slightly different in their organization. I want the job badly. And I want the the “Chief” title. But when I look at the big picture I see that I can get 99.9% of what I want and at the same time show the company that I want to fit into their existing structure, not alter or confuse it.
Why everyone cannot adopt this sensible attitude is beyond me. Why must you insist on the .1% when you can have what you claim you want: equal rights? It leads me believe that it’s not about rights after all, that all this talk about visiting people in hospitals and insurance and inheritances is all bullshit. A smokescreen. For what, I can’t fathom. But I’m tired of fucking hearing it.
You’re right. And that’s because when the laws were written no one thought the concept of marriage needed protecting. It would be like protecting the concept of “up”. It assumed a degree of simple common sense that, sadly, is not there. When the threat to the institution appeared, the meaning was shored up. The fact that this was even needed is a trip to Bizarro World.
You’re changing the argument here. It is about what constituted marriage, not what rights women had individually. IIRC, they couldn’t even own property in some states.
I agree with that. So what? I already agreed that gays should have those equal rights.
I think it’s the best answer. Really. If I were King, maybe I could give you a date. But I’m not. Yet.
Well, maybe they should take my advice: Find a new term, embrace it, respect the traditional meaning of the old one, and fight for the rights they claimed to have wanted. Lamia, I think I have a better handle on this than you. I’m one of the people you need to convince. I’m telling you its an obstacle. I’m much further along the spectrum than a lot of people, and if you can’t sway me you don’t have a chance with what I think is a monolithic group. Respect what is there. Concentrate on equal rights. It will be amazingly helpful. Really.
Kind of begs the question. While you’re right as far as who you fall in love with and who you want to spend the rest of your life with, the marriage issue is unsettled. You’re insistence in not acknowledging and difference between the sexes is, to me, exceedingly strange. Honestly. It’s akin to wanting to ignore any differences between male and female completely. And I find that notion both strange and unhelpful. We are not the same. Again, it’s simply a fact.
Seperate but equal didn’t work because people didn’t want duplicate that complete system well. There were people who took advantage of every opportunity to either proactively ensure the system was poorer for black people or simply created an imbalance that stopped equality. The problem was that there were people around who didn’t want equality.
The same is true in this case - i’m sure you’d agree that there are many people, organised people at that, who do not want gay marriage. They, like those in the past, will take every opportunity, every possible method of ensuring that it fails or is otherwise unequal and run with it. And creating seperate institutions is a whole new bag of tricks they can pull from. Your plan is only “extremely simple” if we assume no one will be interested in trying to take those rights away, which is, unfortunetly, not the case.
Seperate but equal failed because it gave possibilities for ensuring inequality. Seperate but equal civil unions does precisely the same thing. *That *seems very simple to me.
A rather vast amount of things are deeply ingrained in culture and brains. Being deeply ingrained in and of itself is not a value - it’s what led to it* being *deeply ingrained that has value. You may disagree, but I rather suspect that what led to it being deeply ingrained is that it’s based on love and respect. That’s what we like about marriage; that’s why we consider it good. Not that it’s lasted for ages. I mean, smallpox has lasted for ages too, and that’s deeply ingrained in our culture and brains - and not for a good reason. Tradition alone is a neutral value.
That was tried in Vermont. They call it civil unions. Except it doesn’t exactly give the same rights as being married. And those that oppose gay relationships STILL fight to have it taken away. Or in MI (I think it was) where they simply tried to extend insurance benefits to the partners of gay state employees, the right wing came along and said “No! That’s only for married couples!”. Your suggestion has been tried and still people fight us on it.
To use Bosstone’s example, I’d agree that in theory rather than giving the vote to women the government could have invented a new term, “woting”, to apply to a new separate but equal right that would be defined as “just like voting, only performed by women instead of men”.
The problem is, this is stupid. No one would propose such a thing if they really and truly intended “woting” to be just as good as “voting”. It’s a scam. If I as a woman had to choose between woting and nothing then I’d take woting, but I wouldn’t believe that true equality had been won.
Uh, no, I can’t. It’s pretty clear that neither my state, many other states, nor the federal government are going to extend full equal rights to homosexuals in the immediate future. The state where I live has a constitutional amendment prohibiting not just gay marriage but the recognition of any non-marriage union (for anyone, not just same-sex couples) that even approximates marriage. The law as it stands is that it’s either marriage or nothing, and that gay couples get nothing.
*And since you are not King, why do you keep promising full equal rights for homosexuals if they’ll all just consent to your preference for having their marriages called something other than “marriages”?
No, I don’t. It is to my benefit to persuade other people to adopt my position on this issue, but convincing you personally is not a necessity. Not King, remember?
I am willing to take you at your word as to why you object to same-sex marriage, but I do not believe that there exists a large group of people who also object on purely semantic grounds. Most people who object to gay marriage do so because they don’t want same-sex couples to have equal rights (hence the objection to even marriage-like unions), not because they share your peculiar hangup about the word “marriage” itself.
I didn’t say there were no differences at all between the sexes, I said that the law does not recognize that men and women have different rights as citizens or as partners in a marriage. Current marriage law doesn’t say “Once a marriage has occurred, the man must do this and the woman must do that” or “Within a marriage a man has this set of rights, and a woman has this different set of rights.” The way things work out in a particular marriage depends on all kinds of other factors like personal preference, social mores, and religious and cultural values, but none of that matters to the IRS. So why should the IRS be concerned with whether the “Married, filing jointly” box is checked by a heterosexual couple or a homosexual one? What is it about having one man and one woman that makes a couple’s taxes different than those of a couple consisting of two men or two women?
All this business about protecting the word is bullshit. The fact that we’ve been consistently calling it “same-sex marriage” or “gay marriage” or just “marriage” throughout the entire thread, with no confusion whatsoever, shows that the word already encompasses same-sex couplings and this causes no problem.
The only thing advocates of SSM are advocating changing is the law. Feel free to keep speaking however you want, though you’d be insane, whether or not the law changes, if you didn’t recognize that the word “marriage” covered an awful lot of territory.
And the only reason advocates of SSM want to use the same legal terminology for same-sex and opposite-sex couplings is because they want them to be the same legal institution, so that they are guaranteed the same protections. You can call that hijacking onto coattails of respectability if you want, but what reason is there for opposition to it? Why should the two institutions be kept separate? (As has been pointed out many times now, when woman gained the vote, the institution of voting was not split into two separate but equal ones. Rather, woman simply gained access to the existing, unsplit institution.)
If you agree that same-sex couplings should be given all the same rights and privileges as opposite-sex ones in this regard, then why not give them access to the same legal contract? Why on earth would you make them jump through these hoops and contortions? Once you’ve agreed that they should be given the same legal protections, there hardly seems to be a moral duty incumbent upon them of still having to slowly and painfully demonstrate that they have earned this right; that task has already been done, as evidenced by your willingness to give them those legal rights and privileges. Just hand it to them quickly and conveniently, the most easy way possible, and in the way that guarantees the most protection against such abuse as would render it nearly worthless.
What, still? You may not agree with our arguments, but surely you understand them? I mean, what part of “We don’t think that separate but equal would, in fact, be equal,” can’t you fathom? Yes, I know that you think it’s possible. But you haven’t really made much of a case for that position. You say that you’d support that sort of situation, but you’re just one guy, and God love ya, but you’re not exactly representative of the mainstream. You’re a conservative atheist who’s pro-choice, and pro-gay rights, but anti-SSM. That’s not exactly a gigantic voting block.
What it comes down to it that most people oppose gay marriage because they’re opposed to gay rights. And most people oppose gay rights because they’re opposed to homosexuality in general. If we want to change the way gays are treated in this country, we have to convince the majority of people who are opposed to homosexuality, to not oppose homosexuality. Amazingly enough, we’re actually doing a pretty good job of it. And for most people, when you convince them that gays deserve equal rights, they tend to come over whole hog. They don’t hold on to this vestigial prejudice over defending the meaning of the word “marriage.” Once they accept the idea that gays deserve equal rights, that’s pretty much the end of the story. With only a few exception like yourself, the people who talk about defending the institution of marriage from homosexuals are opposed to the entire concept of gay rights in any real sense of the term. You aren’t the person we need to convince in this debate, because there really aren’t that many people like you.
But you seem to be forgetting that our system of government is not supposed to be a simple tyranny of the majority. The judiciary is supposed to restrain the other branches from undue intrusion into citizens’ personal lives, although obviously the line between undue intrusiveness and prudent regulation in the interest of public order is a thin and controversial one.
German Dopers, will somebody please let me into your country to live? Pleeeese?? Canadians, how about you?/ Canadiens, et vous?
Sorry I haven’t been back to respond to anything that’s been posted - was camping for the weekend!
In my reading of the quite excellent conversation that’s been going on, I have not yet seen a single cogent rationale for the statement “marriage is between a man and a woman” other than “because I want the word to mean that and nothing else.”
Really? Then thank you for exposing the fact that when people make this statement, they have nothing better than their own prejudices and fear to back it up.
I truly was hoping that someone against same-sex marriage would at least TRY to justify the statement in the thread title with something other than “because I said so.” I wanted to understand the thought process. All I’ve seen is an argument about word meaning rather than the concept of marriage itself.
I’ve also learned a lot about keeping a cool head in a heated discussion
We do not “lose” the word. It’ll still be around, its meaning inarguably clear to all.
So, uh, you’re just going to ignore all the other things to which this particular word has pointed and currently points? And insist, in spite of the fact that every dictionary in existence disagrees with you, that the above is the only definition of the word “marriage?”
That’s incredibly silly, because it’s not the same at all. The actualy equivalent to the above would be if gay Americans wanted to redefine the word “straight” to include “people who have sexual interest in the same gender,” which of course would be a senseless idea.
The real equivalent to the current debate would have been if, way back when, instead of giving women the right to vote [marry], the country had offered them the right to “declare a preference” [engage in civil union].
If such a “declaration of preference” had been proposed at the time, by your own logic you’d have had to support it, because after all, for hundreds of years the word “vote” had specifically pointed toward a special right and duty given to white male citizens. The association of voting with white males was no less firmly established than your (supposed) association of marriage with straight couples.
But of course, aside from being insulting and paternalistic, establishing a “declaration of preference” that was functionally identical to a “vote” in order to avoid sullying the precious integrity of the word “vote” would have been, lingustically speaking, ludicrous; it gains nothing and subtracts from clarity (imagine explaining our voting system to an alien: “Well, Kevin’s going to vote; Susan’s going to declare her preference. Then all the votes and all the preference declarations will be added together and we’ll determine a winner”).
If you say so. But no one has come even close to convincing me it’s not possible. Easy, even. And since it is you (pl) who seek the change, I think it falls to you to prove to me that a less disruptive solution would NOT work before I should be asked to accept the greater change you want. I just see a kneejerk reaction for hardliners to not want to even entertain the notion that leaving “marriage” off the table might work because their minds are already made up. So the exasperation you feel is felt by me, as well.
You may very well be correct. In which case, we can leave it alone and both become less exasperated. It may also be the case that my strategy would erode the the contentiousness of those that oppose gay rights. I think they’d be much more open to a fair-minded argument if they felt something they hold as precious is not being threatened (changed). People aren’t so inclined to grant other people what is in their power to grant them when they feel their views aren’t respected and the other side simply insists on shoving change down their throats. Seems rather basic psychology to me.
