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How many times do you suppose the word “marriage” or “married” or some other variant appears in federal, state and municipal regulations? If you could perform some kind of massive search-and-replace function and change every such reference to a more inclusive form that covered civil unions as well, fine.
Barring that, though, I think it entirely likely that some bureaucrat somewhere will flip though his big book of rules and decide that since Regulation 10-stroke-J-stroke-65, paragraph 6, subparagraph A only says “married”, the civil-union widow seeking to claim an inheritance will be out of luck. It’s not the bureaucrat’s faults - he’ll be following the strict letter of the law. The fact that he personally hates fags and dykes will be of no relevance, no sirree!
This would have seemed farfetched to me before I heard about the legal battle faced by Cairine Wilson and Emily Murphy among others, in which it took over ten years to get women recognized as “persons”. Dickheads are timeless.
That’s a practical objection and can be overcome. I’m sure every jurisdiction has something similiar to New York’s General Construction law.(This is where night time is defined as the period between sunset and sunrise) A simple statement in there that “The term ‘marriage’ shall include ‘civil union’” or something similar should take care of the dickheads.You may not agree, but I can understand your objection.
ascenray seems to have a less practical and more philosophical objection.That’s what I don’t understand.
On the contrary, by the wording you’ve just proposed a civil union is a marriage, so I’ve no objection at all.
What happens in foreign countries that don’t have civil unions? They won’t have any such law that would make the two interchangable. So couples would be treated differently abroad.
I’m married. I want to be recognized as married everywhere in the world.
Ed
Speak for yourself. Of the gay people I’ve talked with, some are fine with a separate “civil union”, some want “marriage” but only because straights have “marriage”. Very few people would care about calling it marriage if straight people’s legal unions weren’t referred to by the state as marriage either. It’s really only the straights that give a shit about making the government use the word marriage, and ensuring it excludes gays. Gays just want to be treated the same as straights, whatever the terminology we end up with.
This of course refers to the legal side of unions. Gays and straights alike can already have a spiritual union in any state and call it whatever they want already.
Frankly, I don’t trust the government (dominated by straight people (and sometimes religious extremists)) to keep “civil unions” equal. The only way to make sure they stay equal is to tie them together in a lockdown, and the only way to do that is to make them exactly the same thing, down to the name. I consider it safer to be included in the “marriage” tent than to have a “civil union” tent promised to be exactly the same down the street.
I don’t think even using the word “marriage” can guarantee that. We have no way to force foreign countries to treat all American married couples the same- especially since we don’t treat theirs the same. There are countries where same-sex marriage, plural marriage or child marriages are legal. The Federal and state governments
don’t have to recognize those , and there is no way to force Saudi Arabia or Italy to recognize any American marriages.
This is true. However, there are cases where a nation will treat a same-sex relationship differently under the law depending on whether it’s categorized as a civil union or a marriage. So if the justification for having civil unions rather than gay marriages is that they’re the same substantively, the fact that other nations treat them differently cuts against that argument.
For example, there are some nations that recognize foreign marriages, but not all foreign civil unions (such as new zealand–which doesn’t recognize gay marriage, but has civil unions–and automatically recognizes a valid foreign same-sex marriage as a civil union, but only recognizes some foreign civil unions as civil unions under their law), and others that do recognize foreign gay marriages (france), but (so far as I can tell-I’ve found nothing that suggests that they do) does not recognize foreign civil unions.
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Certainly not! My parents were secretely married by a Justice of the Peace. Later, it was solemnized by a rabbi, but that was completely unofficial.
In Switzerland, so I was told, you are married at the local city hall, town hall, whatever, and then you are married. If you want a religious wedding too, that is your business, but has no legal standing. The real problems begin when you allow authorize religious officials to act as officers of the state. That goes back to English common law when the established relgion made clergy officers of the state. That should have disappeared with disestablishment.
Simple solution - continue to recognize “marriage” as the civil legal status that is currently enshrined in umpteen laws, regulations, employment benefits, etc. The churches can continue to have “holy matrimony” for their rite (or equivalent depending on flavour of religion).
So what have I learned?
First of all, I wanted to test my notion that government should only respond to the testable; that is that two people aver they want to have certain rights, responsibilities, and liabilities assigned to them because they are a committed couple. After that, the couple could then decide if their relationship had some spiritual quality that should be confirmed and celebrated at a church, synagogue, mosque, or what-have-you.
The most obvious lesson of this thread is that the word “marriage” carries more baggage than I thought. (Once again I’m dumber than I used to be.) It seems that there is something extralegal about “being married” that atheists, agnostics, and religious all hold dear. Part of that seems to be a recognition of the relationship by either (and hopefully both) the government and some religious authority. I know by their doctrines that orthodox Christians (in the widest sense) view this extralegal baggage as a** symbol** of God’s love, and thus marriage as a rite.
So my questions become what is the extralegal/numinous quality of marriage that civil union doesn’t confer, and what is the importance of some public recognition of a committed relationship that a (for lack of a better example) “church wedding” doesn’t provide?
The extralegal/numinous quality is the fact that a marriage is recognized by all and sundry as a legitimate, respectable, and responsible union between two individuals. A civil union simply isn’t - it’s simply a legal dodge to get rights out of the government.
Curiously, we as a society don’t seem to care who or what solemnizes a marriage, so long as we recognize it as a legitimate societal authority. So as long as the government is in the marriage business, non-religious people can get the legitimacy of their relationship sanctioned without turning to a church. If the government gets out of the marriage business, then that avenue will simply vanish.
If the government decides to call the marriage licence a civil union licence, the average guy will scratch their heads and decide that since the government is out of the marriage business, only religious marriages count now, since there’s no longer a way to get a non-religious marriage solemnized by any agency that anybody takes seriously. This isn’t going to make civil unions rise to the status of marriages. It’ll make the state certification of unions drop to the level of societal importance of a tax form. And continue to leave gays (and now athesists too) SOL with regard to getting anybody to think they’re not amoral loveless hedonists.
Somehow I think the average gay couple is more worried about legal rights of a spouse than being considered amoral.