Mr. M:Why can’t those rights be enshrined in a civil union, and leave marriage, with all of its attendant cultural and historical notations, be left to heterosexual couples?
Better idea: why can’t those rights be enshrined in a state-recognized civil union for couples of whatever gender(s), and marriage be left to the non-governmental religious and cultural institutions that really care about the “cultural and historical connotations” of marriage?
That way, anybody who is only interested in government recognition of their partnership can go to city hall and get civilly united, while those who want the official social and cultural status of “marriage” can find a religious or other institution that will grant it to them. So the Catholic Church can go on marrying hetero couples and refusing to marry same-sex ones, and the liberal Methodists can marry opposite-sex and same-sex couples alike, and everybody will be happy knowing that they’ve been granted the sacred and/or solemn status of “marriage” by an institution whose cultural and social definitions of “marriage” are in harmony with their own.
Except, of course, those who will go on being furious knowing that some other people have been granted the status of “marriage” by some other institution whose definitions of “marriage” disagree with their own. :mad:
kimstu: because then the governmental body that organized that would have to renegotiate all of the agreements with all of the other governments that have recognized its marriages in the past.
I agree with the Washington judge who ruled on SSM this week, when he said:
“Not quite equal” isn’t good enough. “Civil unions” are bullshit, a fence-sitting way of trying to appease the bigots while throwing a proverbial bone to homosexuals. “Seperate but equal” doesn’t work-- seperate is inherently unequal, and, in my opinion, unconstitutional.
Allowing gay couples only “civil unions” would be enshrining inequality in the law, giving precedent for discrimination.
Why do they need to? That’s the part I’m still not hearing. I’m not being belligerent; I’m honestly asking why is it so crucial to maintain this distinction? Why are the “cultural and historical” connotations of marriage are so threatened by two loving, consenting adults of the same sex being married?
“Not quite equal” in this case, is like saying “kind of pregnant.” It’s not equal, period. That’s unacceptable. Why does the stability of the institution hinge on its being exclusionary? Why are people still talking about “separate but equal” in 2004?
I’ve said it before: homosexuals aren’t cultured in petri dishes or shipped in from another planet, and we don’t necessarily have a fundamentally different mindset from everyone else. I was raised in the same culture with the same values as millions of heterosexual people. I like the idea of marriage, and I have always imagined myself as someday being married, with all the attendant cultural and historical connotations. The only difference is that at some point in my life, I realized that I’m attracted to people of my own sex instead of the opposite. And because of that, I have to call my relationship by a different name?
There are gay couples who have been together for decades and are still very much in love – how come those unions aren’t “working” in American society?
What is the most important aspect of “marriage?” Is it just for procreation? Or is it based on a lifelong bond of love, honor, commitment, respect, mutual attraction, and devotion?
I haven’t been following this issue closely enough to know the real facts. Could someone educate me?
Wasn’t there an offer by the federal government of legitmitizing “Civil Unions” for gay couples? And weren’t those very “civil unions” designed to offer gay couples the same protections that spouses enjoy under marriage?
And wasn’t it turned down by gay rights groups because it didn’t use the word marriage?
I understand that gay couples want the right to call their union a “marriage”. Um, at least I think I do. They want their unions to be accepted by everyone just the same as “regular” marriages.
This is what confuses me. They’re NOT “regular” marriages. Just as homosexual and hetersexual are not the same. They are different. Is using a differnt term for gay marriage not something that gay couples would accept?
In my home state, gay couples in most business have 'partner benefits" in insurance, “final expenses and rights” and as far as I know, most of the other benefits of heterosexual couples. Are other states not up to date on offering partner benefits?
Lastly, as a christian, I do NOT get the other christians who don’t want this to happen. I mean if it happens, it will be a LEGAL term, a LEGAL union. It doesn’ mean that it will have to be accepted as a holy union. Your churches won’t be forced to make it so, nor will your congregation. If it is part of your belief system then it can remain so, making it legal is one of MAN’S, not God’s decisions. So why fret? You’re not going against your beliefs as a christian if it’s one of man’s laws that make gay marriage legal. RELAX.
The only thing that bugged me about the rush to the alter by all the gay couples during the 'protest marriage" times, was the idiocy of marrying under those conditions.
That is, as a protest. IMHO, the ONLY reason people should get married is because they love each other so much, they can’t stand to live their lives apart. Not as part of a protest, not because you have to “get out of mom and dad’s house”.
And it’s not like there would be any way to legally enforce a gay union being CALLED, whatever gay people wanted to call it, no matter how it was written into the laws.
Can’t for a second claim to speak for all gay people, just myself. And no, it’s not something I’d accept.
You post, as I understand it, boils down to: “If all the exact same rights are granted, and it’s just a difference in terminology, why is it such a big deal to you?” And my response: “Exactly!”
Assume that a “civil union” status is created that grants same-sex couples (and other couples who qualify) exactly the same rights as married couples. I believe that’s an extremely naive assumption, but just for the sake of argument, assume that it’s true. Once you have that, what is the point of having two separate terms? Why is it necessary to call one “marriage” and the other “civil union?”
You say that same-sex couples ARE different from heterosexual couples. I say that they’re not different in any meaningful way. Why is it important that they be called something else? What is so important about the distinction?
I heard that. It kind of sucks that needless discrimination makes people feel as if they have to take their personal feelings for each other and make them public as part of a political statement. Sucks that people have to give up so much of their privacy just so that other people will leave them alone.
So who’s the bad guy in that situation? The people who are creating an unjust situation, or the people who would rather just live their lives without the need to protest?
Right, so why should the law care what it’s called, either? Look at it from efficiency’s sake: you can either go through the text of every single law that currently exists and replace “marriage” with “marriage and civil union.” Or, you can just say “gays can get married” and be done with it.
If I meet a guy and we fall in love and decide we want to get married, it won’t make a difference if some lookers-on still insist on calling us “partners” (making the quotes with their fingers while they say it). It will matter if the government insists on doing that.
Let us just posit that there is a man I love, live with, and want to spend my life with. (Not terribly difficult.)
Let us further posit that we intend to put effort to maintaining those conditions, to mutual support. That our happiness is bound up with each other. That we support each other in our respective jobs and hobbies. That we spend our time together. That we consider ourselves a family. (Also, not terribly difficult.)
Let us further posit that this man and I have signed a certificate before a Justice of the Peace certified by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, exchanged vows and rings, and have that piece of paper filed at City Hall marking us as life-partners. (This is exactly as true as the first two.)
What about the contents of my pants matters to what that certificate shall be called?
Well, there are a couple of reasons why I believe in this formulation.
First of all, gay marriage cannot pass right now. It simply can’t. The only way it can is to have it crammed down the throats of an unwilling American population by a bunch of unaccountable judges.
The last time this happened, over such a divisive issue, it was with the abortion issue. I don’t think the resulting thirty years of heated rhetoric and clinic bombings have been good for our country at all.
Secondly, my views on this might be influenced some by the experiences of my best childhood friend. He never knew his father. He lived in a household with his mom and his aunt. His aunt had a good city job, which paid for the house, but his mom had to make do for years with retail jobs at KMart and Sears.
Now, it would have been helpful for them to set up a legal household where they could share benefits. A civil union would have served the purpose nicely. A gay marriage wouldn’t have, obviously, since these women were not gay, and were sisters.
There are people in America who are in need of the benefit-sharing and tax simplification benefit that comes from a shared household. Homosexuals aren’t the only people excluded by these benefits only being extended to married heterosexual couples.
Presented in this way, and with people like my friends mom and aunt going to the Legislature to lobby as well, civil unions could become a reality quite quickly. And since there are many gay people who need hospitalization and tax breaks right now, it seems a good idea to persue this option, rather than something attainable decades from now, if then.
You realise it wouldn’t be compulsory, right? This is a personal issue. It has no conceivable effect on the lives of people who do not want a gay marriage. The only thing being crammed down anyone’s throat is that dictating people’s private lives is wrong. If a country founded on such principles as personal freedom needs “unaccountable judges” to interpret what those principles entail, then so be it. In what circumstances do you think such legalistas should be allowed to interpret the law? This is, after all, their job. If the answer is “when they agree with the majority”, then their purpose would seem to be at best vague, and at worst to be a rubber-stamp body to give a legal gloss to the worst whims of the ultimate nanny state. Where do the limits of what the majority can decide lie, in your mind?
On the other hand, all the back street abortions that have subsequently been avoided might be seen by some as a wee bit more important than the ravages of “heated rhetoric”. As for abortion clinic bombers, I thought we weren’t supposed to cater to the whims of terrorists?
I still fail to understand why your friend’s cohabiting non-gay aunt and mother constitute a valid reason why full SSM should not be available, but we’ve had this argument before, so it’s probably not worth it. They represent a different problem, and if there needs to be a solution then solve it. SSM is not about convenient cohabitation, it is about two people who love each other. You happily acknowledge that gay marriage was not appropriate for the sisters in your example. Why, then, should people who do want gay marriage have to settle for anything less? Why should the sisters have their needs catered to, and not the gay people of America?
Why shouldn’t all the people who need household benefits, currently shut out of them, have their needs met? Especially when such a plan has a much greater chance of passage.
You know, in an environment where constitutional amendments banning gay marriage can get 70% of the vote.
Catch my drift here? Remember the old adage, that politics is the art of the possible.
Many other people are doing admirable jobs of addressing the rest of your post, but I would like to speak to this point. My husband and I were one of those who rushed to get married in San Francisco. We have lived togethor for 5 years, have joint accounts, registered as domestic partners here in Calfornia, (which does not grant as many rights as you think it does, and the ones that it does grant have no affect outside of California), exchanged rings with each other, done as much as we can to bind ourselves togethor.
At first, we decided to go to SF to get married partly to join in what we saw as civil disobediance, partly as a way of affirming our love, and partly as a way to have a little mini vacation. Neither of us thought that it would change anything in our lives. We were wrong.
I first started to get nervous as we drove into downtown SF. We were early for our appointment, so we stopped and got some bagels for breakfast, then wandered over to city hall. As we were waiting to fill out the paperwork before our ceremony, my hands started to shake. I started to sweat, and I was so nervous I couldn’t believe it. Aaron asked me if I was going to be ok, and if I wanted to back out. I of course said NO! Finally, we filled out the paperwork, and headed out to the grand rotunda to meet the person who would marry us. We weren’t able to bring anyone with us, so we grabbed the witness from the previous marriage. Then, at 8:47 am on March 5, 2004, we were wed.
It was the single most amazing experience of my life. As much as I thought that it wouldn’t change anything, it did. Getting married transmuted from everything that I thought it would be to an intenssly personal experience, and we were finally married. No matter what happens with the legal trappings of our wedding, we are now married, and no-one can tell me that it was anything less than a real marriage. If we could, we would have done it differently, but sometimes you have to grab while the grabbing is good.
And I know that no matter the original motives for getting married those 4400 couples had in San Francisco, every single one was a marriage, just like any heterosexual marriage. And none of us were doing it to “get out of Mom and Dads house.” We left a long time ago, and these are our lives, not some “teenage rebellion”.
So, gay people qualatatively love in a different way emotionally from straight people? Isn’t marriage about love? Should not love be recognized equally between consenting adults when it comes to marriage, regardless of the gender of the participants?
While it may have not been legal when I was married, all you had to do was spend an hour with my ex-husband and I to see that we were married. Marriage transforms a relationship.
The gender of the couple has no impact on love or marriage. Why should we take a lesser term with lesser rights and priveledges?
To Moto:
The art of the possible or the art of cowtowing to bigotry? Would you have told black people forty years ago that they just needed to take more time and they’d get their rights some day?
Either I’m too naive or too idealistic to believe that this is about politics. It’s about love, and about what’s right.
There is no such thing as an unaccountable judge. That’s part of the scare talk about some fascist government, used to get bigoted laws passed in the name of “democracy” and the “will of the people,” and to get people to settle for something less because they believe they don’t deserve anything more. We have a system of checks and balances, which works more often than not, and the judicial branch of that system is every bit as important as the legislative one. It is designed to ensure that the rights of the few are not ignored in an environment where attempts to deny them their rights could be approved by a majority of people.
Yes, it sounds like your friend’s mom and aunt would’ve been well-served by a civil union. But the story is irrelevant – not unimportant, but irrelevant. Not because they weren’t gay, but because they were not married. Take a same-sex couple who wants to get married. 99.999% of their relationship is just like the thousands of heterosexual couples who want to and can get married every day. The only way that it’s similar to the story you describe, is that both people involved are the same sex. That’s it.
At best, the story tries to piggyback a separate (but important) issue on the back of the issue of same-sex marriages. At worst, it cheapens the validity of same-sex couples, equating them with some casual relationship of convenience or self-interest or protest. It says that heterosexual couples can be truly married, while gay couples will never be more than just “really, really good friends.”
I think civil unions can pass, and they can give benefits right now to people now who need them, gay, straight or celebate. Furthermore, they can be used in the future as a steppingstone toward gay marriage.
Meanwhile , the push for full gay marriage right now is prompting a vast and ugly political and cultural backlash, that I don’t regard as at all healthy for homosexuals or the body politic in general.
That’s my viewpoint. It’s certainly not motivated by bigotry, only by hardheaded realism of what is possible at the moment. I sincerely believe that some gay activists are persuing the perfect at the expense of the good, and denying benefits for years to people who need them right now in the process.
As one of the volunteers in St. Louis for the Constitution Defense League (the organization affiliated with PROMO that was organized to try to defeat this amendment), I found it very frustrating that the supporters of the amendment had ready-made forums within which to argue their points – the churches – whereas we had few equivalent options. Yes, there are pro-gay congregations, but they are overwhelmed in number by the congregations with clergy speaking out against gay marriage.* There were many lost opportunities in the CDL campaign to contact people, but one of the things that stood out to me was that we didn’t have many chances to efficiently contact large groups of people with an established relationship of trust and community, meeting together week after week, leading up to voting day.
Our effort to educate people about our stance was, I think, greatly hampered by the fact that we pretty much only made contact with voters by going door to door, by phone bank, through mailings, and with advertisements. Going door to door was hampered by the fact that at least 60% of the time people were not home or did not answer. This was further frustrated by the organization’s own snafus, such as a lack of literature/yard signs to distribute when going door to door during the early weeks of the campaign. People didn’t even know we had been there! (This situation improved later, but too late IMO) And how many people really bother to study all the pre-election stuff that comes in the mail or pay attention to TV commercials?
If anyone has any ideas about where gay and lesbian people and their supporters congregate in hundreds (or even dozens) at a time week after week, please let us know. We need ways to get our message out there, to fight ignorance. We can only reach so many people at the coffeehouses and independent bookstores. And the gay bars are hardly conducive to having a serious conversation!
rivulus
*I want to be clear that I understand that churchgoers have minds of their own, and are capable of making their own judgments about what they hear being preached. The problem is that of making sure that information about both sides of the issue is being presented so people have the knowledge on which to base their judgments.
Is it possible you’re shooting yourselves in the foot by concentrating on stereotypically gay hangouts? I imagine you’re going to find a lot more people who support SSM who aren’t gay than who are, just because there are a lot more heterosexual people to start with. Why does it have to be an independent bookstore? Why not campaign at Borders or Barnes and Nobles? Or for that matter, Home Depot (not just the EXPO center)? The malls? College campuses?
In my case, this issue does directly affect me, but I hadn’t heard what was going on until I saw mention of it on this message board. I’ve been to a gay bar exactly once in my life and am not that anxious to go back – my point being that campaigning at traditionally gay-friendly places is nothing more than “preaching to the choir.” The anti-gay-rights people are protesting at places like hot air balloon rallies, according to avabeth’s recent pit thread, not just in churches.
