No marriages, hetero- or homo-, just civil unions.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Miller

By the state. Otherwise, what’s the point?

The point is that it’s a commitment made publicly in front of the people you love, and a request that these people support your commitment. The state ought to have about as much to do with it as the state has to do with your plans to get together with family over the holiday. (There’s the separate matter of mutual contractual rights that the state SHOULD be involved in, but that’s very different from the ceremonial commitment).

We can also both claim to be the Emperor of North America, and the proclamation will be every bit as real. Without social recognition of a marriage, in what way is it a marriage at all?

Terribly analogy. A claim to be an Emperor is a claim to have the exclusive prerogative to use force in a given area. Nortonizing ourselves is clearly delusional. A claim to be married is a claim to have a commitment to another person. There’s nothing exclusive about it, and there’s no reason for the state to be involved in that commitment. The social recognition comes from your loved ones, not from the state.

How is it different from just having a boyfriend? Marriage is important both because of the bond it represents between the two people in the relationship, and because of what that bond means to society at large. If a marriage has no inherent rights and responsibilities, then it has no social meaning whatsoever. It’s entirely valueless.

Not at all. My marriage’s value does not come at all from the piece of government paperwork I filled out; that paper’s value has only to do with how I can file my taxes. It has everything to do with the ceremony I and my wife performed in front of our loved ones, and how we live every day, and how we relate to other people.

[quote]
No? Would there be any reason at all to put this proposal forward if there were not a debate over same-sex marriage?
Yes: again, there are the closely-related folks who ought to have access to these rights. There are also the people who have a platonic relationship who would like the rights but don’t want to be saddled with all the connotations of the word “marriage.”

Absent a state agent, the only organizations remaining that will recognize the importance of any particular marriage are religious organizations.

I’m sorry, Miller, but this is just nonsense. How about your employer? How about your social group? How about a nonprofit that allows you to join at a family membership rate?

In any case, a marriage is not defined by the organizations that recognize it: it’s defined by the people who live it, and to a lesser extent the community of their loved ones who support them in it. Marriages in Europe only recently became state institutions at all, yet they functioned just fine. We don’t need the state to hold us to our commitments, nor should they be involved in them.

Daniel

[Gorsnak]

@Napier

I still think, though, that the religious and legal aspects of marriage are frequently enough correlated that religious attitudes about marriage tend to influence laws about marriage, and that, more specifically, negative religious attitudes about same-sex marriage influence the availability of legally married status to the detriment of same-sex couples.

I think this much is undeniably true, and I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to making the split between religious and civil marriages more explicit - for example, to remove the ability of clergy to perform legal marriages, and require everyone to sign the civil documents before a notary public or whomever for a marriage to be legally recognized. I could absolutely get behind something like that.

However, that’s something completely different from the government getting out of the marriage business.

[begbert2]

The government isn’t in the marriage business, they’re in the marriage business. That’s entirely different from churches, which actually do perform marriages, but which certainly don’t perform marriages, which are of course exclusively the job of the state to track for legal and tax reasons.

In other words, the problem is that there are two somewhat different things that are referred to by the same name. The bigger problem is, that if you change the names to be distinct, then you’re probably going to cause more problems than you solve.

The reason why churches don’t want same-sex marriages or unions to be legal isn’t because they want gay couples be saddled with the fun of legal divorce, or even because they don’t want the gay people to get the tax breaks. It’s because, for all their touting that marriages in their churches are special, they still functinally recognize all marriages, and that wouldn’t change if you gave some of them a different name. So they fight it, since they don’t wan’t to have to recognize gay couples as being married.

If we start distinguishing ‘civil marriages’ from church marriages, and you manage to actually sell that idea to the populace, you’re going to fragment that populace. First you’re going to have the churches telling their members that everyone in a civil marriage is living in sin. From there it’s a short step to them noticing that really, religion isn’t a cohesive thing, and that they don’t have to recognize anybody else’s marriages but their own. The mere concept of being married will become a dividing factor between groups, as nobody accepts anybody else’s marriages, while the legal protections of civil unions are spurned on principle by some (hopefully small) number of religious people as being a bastion of iniquity.

Now, I’m not sure how far this would go, but this is what you are actually pushing yourself towards when you break apart the concepts of civil and religious marriage. So, splitting the concepts isn’t the answer. Getting religious and homophobic bigots to shut up and grow some tolerance is; since no matter what you call it, what gay couples actually want is for their unions to gain the same recognition as everyone, not for the acceptance of other people’s marriages to lower to such a degree that everyone else’s marriages are as unaccepted as the gay peoples’ are.

[Miller]

@Left Hand of Dorkness

The point is that it’s a commitment made publicly in front of the people you love, and a request that these people support your commitment. The state ought to have about as much to do with it as the state has to do with your plans to get together with family over the holiday. (There’s the separate matter of mutual contractual rights that the state SHOULD be involved in, but that’s very different from the ceremonial commitment).

By that standard, I already have the right to marry. I’m singularly unmoved by the priveledge.

Terribly analogy. A claim to be an Emperor is a claim to have the exclusive prerogative to use force in a given area. Nortonizing ourselves is clearly delusional. A claim to be married is a claim to have a commitment to another person. There’s nothing exclusive about it, and there’s no reason for the state to be involved in that commitment. The social recognition comes from your loved ones, not from the state.

It’s a perfect analogy. I can call myself married all I want, but unless there’s some sort of social mechanism that recognizes it, it’s an entirely meaningless declaration.

Not at all. My marriage’s value does not come at all from the piece of government paperwork I filled out; that paper’s value has only to do with how I can file my taxes. It has everything to do with the ceremony I and my wife performed in front of our loved ones, and how we live every day, and how we relate to other people.

And that was all totally, completely different before you had the ceremony? How is any of that different from what it was when you were just dating her?

Yes: again, there are the closely-related folks who ought to have access to these rights. There are also the people who have a platonic relationship who would like the rights but don’t want to be saddled with all the connotations of the word “marriage.”

And I want those rights and the connotation. But one doesn’t do me any good without the other. By seperating the two, you reduce them both.

I’m sorry, Miller, but this is just nonsense. How about your employer? How about your social group? How about a nonprofit that allows you to join at a family membership rate?

That’s exactly my point. What about my employer? Why is my employer going to recognize my marriage if the government does not? How am I going to get that family membership rate is marriage is literally nothing more than me saying, “I’m married now?”

In any case, a marriage is not defined by the organizations that recognize it: it’s defined by the people who live it, and to a lesser extent the community of their loved ones who support them in it.

No, it’s not. It’s defined by society as a whole. My parents are married. They are married in the eyes of the law. They’re married in the eyes of complete strangers. They’re married in the eyes of people who hate their guts. They’re part of a community that is larger than just their immediate circle of friends and family, and the recognition of their marriage by that larger community is important to them. If their relationship was only important to their immediate social circle, they wouldn’t have needed to marry in the first place, because the nature of their relationship is already apparent to the people closest to them.

Marriages in Europe only recently became state institutions at all, yet they functioned just fine. We don’t need the state to hold us to our commitments, nor should they be involved in them.

Yes, because before the state started taking over, it was a Church institution. The point being, there was still a controlling institution giving the relationship status beyond that of mere cohabitation.

[BrightNShiny]

@Napier

Well. Maybe you don’t mean to be rude, but you sound downright hostile and even angry, again. I’ve posted my share of stupid mistakes elsewhere, and been dense occasionally, but don’t remember anybody reacting like this. I hope you’ll pardon me if I don’t respond to your posts any further.

Suit yourself, although I am glad to see that you’ve accepted the idea that religious and legal marriages are distinct. If you’re argument is based off the idea that people think their legal marriages have religious overtones, then I have no quibble with that (although I don’t know how to verify that absent polling data).

[BrightNShiny]

The idea that marriages in Europe only recently became state institutions is nonsense. Marriages in Europe have been handled by the church until recently, and in most European countries, until recently, the church has been either a governmental or a quasi-governmental institution. If an entity receives governmental funding and/or can have its decrees and rulings enforced by the state regardless of private consent, then it is a state actor.

[Polycarp]

Miller and LHOD, I think what’s causing the disjunct between you two is failure to recognize that there are not two but three institutions termed “marriage” in our culture. In addition to the religiously sanctioned and spiritually meaningful vowing before God (and let us not bandy about metaphysics; that’s what it means to the couple engaging in a religious marriage, regardless of what objective truth may be) and the state-sanctioned pseudo-irrevocable ontract,there is also the exchange of vows between the couple themselves. Some marriages, e.g. common-law marriages in states that do not legally recognze them, and gay marriages between couples not affiliated with churches willing to perform them and living in places where the state does not recognize them, are purely “Type 1” marriages whose sole claim to reality is their meaningfulness to the couple contracting them.

On April 12, 1975, Barb and I vowed lifelong fidelity and love before the Rev. Clyde Relyea, who heard our vows both in the capacity of an Elder in the United Methodist Church and in the capacity of a person sanctioned by the State of New York to solemnize legal marriages. Both halves of that equation are important to us, and if we lived in France or the dystopias suggested by the “civil unions only” people posting to this thread, we would have had to go to the trouble of undertaking the same promises twice that day, in whichever order church and state ended up agreeing on.

My personal opinion is that this is the premise o people whose tenet is, “If it doesn’t matter to me, the almighty center of the universe, it certainly should not matter to you.” Not only are they reinventing the wheel, they are arguing whether it should be square or triangular.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Miller

By that standard, I already have the right to marry. I’m singularly unmoved by the priveledge.

But having the government use the word “married” to describe you is a moving experience? Okay, whatever floats your boat.

And that was all totally, completely different before you had the ceremony? How is any of that different from what it was when you were just dating her?

I’m flabbergasted by this question. Do you understand the role of ritual in human culture?

And I want those rights and the connotation. But one doesn’t do me any good without the other. By seperating the two, you reduce them both.

No you don’t.

That’s exactly my point. What about my employer? Why is my employer going to recognize my marriage if the government does not? How am I going to get that family membership rate is marriage is literally nothing more than me saying, “I’m married now?”

Once more: your employer doesn’t have to recognize your marriage. They would have to recognize your civil union, just as they have to recognize everyone else’s civil union.

No, it’s not. It’s defined by society as a whole. My parents are married. They are married in the eyes of the law. They’re married in the eyes of complete strangers. They’re married in the eyes of people who hate their guts. They’re part of a community that is larger than just their immediate circle of friends and family, and the recognition of their marriage by that larger community is important to them.

How is coerced recognition meaningful? I have no choice in recognizing your parents as married, if that recognition is based on state sanction of their marriage. Whatever recognition they get, in the manner you’re discussing, is literally meaningless.

To the extent that I’m forced to recognize a marriage as meaningful because the state sez so, that’s a terrible thing. There are plenty of folks whose marriages are a pitiful sham, and I don’t respect them as the same thing as my marriage. Why should the state get to say that some jerk with a trophy wife is married in the same way that I am? that two drunken fools hitched in Vegas deserve my respect for their marriage?

Allow those folks to get civil unions like anyone else, and then earn respect for their marriage from their loved ones, and you’ve got a superior system.

Polycarp: “dystopia”? Gimme a break. I also really don’t think you want to be introducing the idea that one side of the debate is self-centered here.

Daniel

[Napier]

>The government isn’t in the marriage business, they’re in the marriage business. That’s entirely different from churches, which actually do perform marriages, but which certainly don’t perform marriages…

>I think what’s causing the disjunct between you two is failure to recognize that there are not two but three institutions termed “marriage” in our culture.

Very interesting. It is debatable how many institutions are termed “marriage”. I think the category “marriage” is fractal, and it means one thing, or two, or three, or even as many things as there are married couples, or even more if you count what each partner thinks distinctly from the other, or what each partner wishes, or, or, or…

If you have a social agenda, and are in an influential position to control what society thinks “marriage” is, and your views are common enough to sell broadly, you may want to unify a single societal understanding of “marriage” consistent with your own views.

Or, if likewise but your views are in a minority view, you could opt to try to sell those views against the odds or you could carve out a different version of “marriage”, isolated enough to be permitted but connected enough to carry worthwhile enfranchisement.

I think there is some societal interest and benefit in having some broadly agreed upon institution. For example, the idea of marriage seems often to be associated with the idea of family, and many children take various kinds of comfort from having a clear idea of belonging to a well defined family.

But, then again, there’s plenty of reason to take the opposite view. For one thing, society has mostly operated with a premise of a broadly agreed upon institution, and hasn’t given much of a chance to many of the alternatives. We all know how badly classic marriage and family dynamics can turn out, and most of us know people who have done very well taking different paths. For another thing, it looks like the mainstream classic marriage institution doesn’t accept many of us. In fact, the idea that the last presidential election was won partly by galvanizing the right around a supposed threat to classic marriage is horrifying evidence of the jealousy with which some proponents of classic marriage are eager to exclude some of the people it wasn’t designed for.

[Napier]

Say, if the Catholic Church doesn’t recognize divorces or subsequent remarriages, can some body explain this? A relative of mine was married in the Catholic Church, then divorced, then she remarried. The second wedding was performed by the family’s Catholic priest, at home. He was dressed in clergy garb and used various accessories like wooden boxes, long pretty pieces of cloth, crosses, and other things (I’m not Catholic and this was a few years ago so details aren’t clear). He said something complicated about this wedding being “in the Church but not in a Church”, in reference to the fact that she was a divorcee. I know money changed hands, but don’t know whether that was a standard thing for his services or something unusual.

Can anybody enlighten me about whether this means the Church recognizes divorces and weds divorcees? Seems to me that it does, at least “sorta”.