sqweels, I think you misinterpreted the tone of Giraffe’s post.
What?! How do you figure? The law doesn’t care if I’m masculine or feminine. I can wear a dress and makeup and marry a woman. The law cares about whether I’m a male or female- thus, sex, not gender.
Oh shut up. I said nothing of the sort.
What? How? Oh. On second reading, I see what you mean. Yeah, that sounds offensive. By “like”, I meant romatically. I retract “I don’t like black girls” and replace it with “I at the current time have no romantic affiliation with any girl of another race.” The point is, I don’t want to marry someone of another race. I fell in love with a white woman. But I’d still be pissed if someone took away my right to marry someone of another race. I said black because that’s the iconic example (black and white) but any race still illustrates my point.
On the contrary, because…
By calling it gay marriage, it frames the issue in the wrong way. At first glance/hearing, it seems like it’s straights vs gays. It makes it look like it’s “them” that’s being discriminated against. It makes it seem like it’s “their problem”. In fact, it’s all of us that are being discriminated against. Me and you, and you, and you, and you, and you. Every single adult in this country is the victim of the way things are. The gay community bears the burden of it, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s just their issue. When I get in a fight with my straight (religious) friends, I shouldn’t have to say “Imagine if you were gay…” I should just be able to say “Isn’t it unfair that **you **can’t marry a [same sex]?” When I get you to realize that it’s not their rights being withheld, but *your *rights, I have a better shot at convincing you, right?
That’s 90% of the issue. The other 10% is that it’s just grammatically wrong. The law says nothing about sexual orientation. It doesn’t say “If you’re gay, you can’t get married.” It says “A man can’t marry a man. A woman can’t marry a woman.”
Before this thread gets longer, let me point out something about it. It’s a pitting against a news outlet, not against any arguments. The news outlet is supposed to stick to the story, not take a side, and report the news. Say what you want about homosexuality, morality, religion, and voters, but Prop 8 is most definitely about same-sex marriage. It’s a constitutional amendment, not a thought, not a feeling. It’s part of law. And the law is about sex and marriage, not orientation.
ETA: Since my edit window is closed on my previous post, I’d like to add here that calling it SSM, not gay marriage, helps shoot down one of my favorite (because it’s ridiculous) arguments against it. The idiot will say “But then gay people can just get marriages of convenience. Fake marriages just for [benefit]”. I get to point out that it’s not gay marriage, it’s same sex marriage. They can already get fake marriages…with the opposite sex. No one’s had a retort for THAT logic yet.
Ablative and vocative are cases, and the imperative is only arguably a mood.
And before 1965, the law said “A white man can’t marry a black woman.” Both are unjust.
News outlets report so that the audience will understand. I don’t think many audiences would be confused or offended by “gay marriage” in a way that didn’t also apply to “same-sex marriage”.
How many times must I tell you people to stop bothering me with facts?!??!
I’m incensed, I tell you. I’m gonna go work out my rage by putting cigarettes on the eyeballs of that preposition I’ve got chained up in the basement.
No. It’s a lousy way of convincing someone who doesn’t already believe in gay marriage. “This thing you think is disgusting … and that you would never do in a million years … you realize that it’s illegal for you to do it, right?” How is that a helpful argument?
A better line of attack is: “Imagine that it was illegal for you to marry the person you loved? How would that make you feel?”
Well duh. And phrasing it as just being about gays makes it harder for me to convince others of this.
In my argument circles, appeals to emotion get shot down pretty quick. And it’s helpful because it takes away their anti-gay stigma. When I mention that they can’t do it, they don’t try to think of themselves as being gay. They don’t try to imagine sympathy for a gay couple. And saying “You know that disgusting thing? You can’t do it.” is still better than “You know that disgusting thing? They can’t do it.” The results don’t lie. So far, this argument has worked pretty effectively against arguments like I mentioned.
Generally speaking, you have a point. But that only applies if the right being infringed is something the person would ever want to do in the first place. No straight person, who isn’t already sympathetic to gay marriage, is going to give a fart in a high wind that he’s not allowed to marry another guy, because he’s never, ever going to want to do that in the first place. If you want to go this route, you’ll have better luck pointing out that the people who most strongly oppose gay marriage are also pretty keen on controlling straight people’s sex lives. In fact, they’re much more interested in that, because there really aren’t that many gay folks around to control in the first place. Point out that the folks who want to ban gay marriage would also like to ban condoms, pornography, strip clubs, and (if you can’t get to them on prurient interests) the HPV vaccine, and that the reasons they use for being against gay marriage are pretty much identical to the ones they use for being against those things. That’s how you make common cause with straight people against the anti-marriage movement. Not by making ridiculous appeals to rights they don’t want in the first place.
There’s nothing grammatically wrong with calling it “gay marriage.” The word “gay” describes the relationship between the two spouses, not the spouses themselves. It does make an assumption, possibly unwarranted, that any marriage between two people of the same gender is going to be undertaken because the principals are in love with each other, and therefore, are gay. Obviously, that’s not necessarily the case, as one can construct various scenarios in which two straight people of the same gender might wed. But that makes your objection categorical, not grammatical.
This reminds me of the debate over ‘suicide bombers’ vs ‘homicide bombers’.
Looking up the term, I see that Fox News is still calling em homicide bombers.
In the interest of maintaining a consistent level of stupid, perhaps we should call these two very different types of marriage ‘suicide marriage’ and ‘homicide marriage.’
Surely everyone can see how totally lacking in rights infringement such terms would be.
Quit calling it gay marriage
I’m willing if 300 million other people are willing.
I will never surrender “opposite marriage”!!!
I’m sure that folks like The Gonz (not bigoted! not bigoted!) might argue: can’t we just call it “faggy marriage” instead?
P.S. I too wish we could stop calling it “gay marriage” and just refer to it as “marriage”. I don’t give a flying fuck who you choose to marry. If two consenting, sane adults declare that they’re married, then fuck the state or the church. They offer a seal upon the fact and not the legitimacy itself.
I like to call them “homicide martyrs”. 
Sorry about that, wasn’t my intention to try and speak on behalf of everyone. Let me rephrase the opening of that as ‘Many bi folk I have talked to about this issue…’
Those that I have spoken with on the topic have said that since they don’t identify as gay, the distinction of calling it ‘gay marriage’ doesn’t apply. Even if they settle down with a person of the same sex, they are still bi and not gay. It seems that’s a self-identity issue.
This I strongly agree with. I really liked the legislation that was passed here in CA (twice, vetoed by the governor both times) that simply changed the wording in the marriage statutes to not recognize the gender of the people involved at all.
Wait, so you’re telling me that I* am forbidden to take an action that I find disgusting? How does that make me more likely to accept the notion of anyone at all being permitted to do it?
*Hypothetical “I”. I am in favor of “gay” or “same sex” marriage.
Incidentally, I think the reason CNN puts “Gay Marriage” in their graphics is because “Same Sex Marriage” takes more work. And most people won’t immediately get “SSM.” And “SSM Marriage” would just be stupid.
I prefer to just call it marriage as I can figure out what it means by its context.
Take this example:
“My friends are married.”
Without even mentioning what gender my friends are, the definition is known and lacks any ambiguity without having to “redefine” the meaning.
I agree with your general point here, but I don’t think that generalizing opponents of gay marriage as necessarily being against a host of other things is helpful.
To put it another way, I find the “you can’t do it either” argument to be very unpersuasive. Imagine another rights issue like gun control. Having a pro-gun person tell an anti-gun person that their legislation prevents them from owning a gun has no bearing because an anti-gun person in favor of a particular piece of gun ban legislation has no interest in owning those weapons. Similarly, imagine a pro-marijuana legalization person telling an anti-legalization person that they can’t smoke it either.
That is, as a libertarian myself, I care about maximizing my rights on a philosophical level, but being able to marry another man is pretty much at the bottom of the list of rights that I’m really interested in having. And even as a libertarian, considering the small amount that I personally care about that right, solely in the context of that argument, it wouldn’t take very much at all for me to think it’s probably a right I’m personally willing to give up in exchange for something. So, really, I just don’t see how that argument is very persuasive, especially to someone who opposes it and doesn’t have some sort of political perspective that includes maximizing social rights.
The thing is, like it or not, gay marriage is “their” problem. I appreciate that you want to make it “our” problem, because that pretty much the only way it will get addressed, but I really think this is just the wrong way to go about effecting change. Really, as a few above posters have said, it doesn’t sound like “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” are really the right terms at all. If you want to make it “our” problem, as others have said upthread, it needs to be marriage, because that DOES affect everyone. The problem is, with the way things have been done, I think it’s actually hurt this end so that people have been forced to define what marriage means, and it’s forced many people to choose definitions that exclude the desired result, whether it’s stuff related to families, tradition, or the man & woman thing, and now those definitions have to be undone to instill a new one.
Wow, I thought I was the only guy in the whole world who was into that.
It’s not entirely irrelevant. It’s not even a little irrelevant. Anti-Gay Marriage laws by design and in practice keep gays from marrying. Being deliberately obtuse in no way heightens the perspicuousness of the media’s coverage. CNN is obtuse enough. We do not need them to be deliberately obtuse.
The average person on the street who opposes gay marriage, no. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be much of an argument for convincing people to stop opposing gay marriage, would it? But the major organizations that oppose gay marriage are overwhelmingly also opposed to virtually all of the social advances since the sexual revolution. If Focus on Family ever gets the federal constitution amended to completely ban any sort of government recognition of gay relationships, you think they’re just going to go away? Of course not - they’re going to turn around and start trying to ban something else, something that straight people have a personal stake in, such as easy access to contraceptives.