No, I’m not really saying anything about SHOULD. I’m saying WON’T. It may seem that the get-government-out-of-marriage-entirely proposal is a more modest one than legal gay marriage, but I think the likelihood of legal gay marriage over the entire US in my lifetime is 95%, while the likelihood of GGOOME is maybe 1%.
There are churches that will perform commitment ceremonies for gay and lesbian couples - the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalists come to mind. I’m sure that they perform gay/lesbian marriage ceremonies in states where those are legal. And I bet that Unitarian Universalists or a buddy who gets a ULC certificate over the Internet would marry some atheists who care about the word “marriage,” too.
A “marriage” should be optional, and absolutely meaningless in the eyes of government. One’s legal rights as a couple should not be infringed upon by whether or not someone thinks that God approves of your union.
I really don’t understand this. If government isn’t involved in marriage at all, then what on earth would stop us atheists from getting married? Shit, I’m an atheist, and although my daughter’s not baptized, I can baptize her no problem: I dunk her in a lake and say, “Bam, you’re baptized.” Who’s to gainsay me that?
Same thing with marriage. My marriage ceremony was performed by an ordained minister, due to the sort of government-church intertwining that makes me want the gummint out of the picture, but our ceremony was thoroughly atheist: we took a fairly traditional wedding ceremony and removed all references to God from it. If the government only issued civil unions, we could have done exactly the same thing.
For us atheists, the marriage isn’t between us, our community, and our deity: it’s between us and our community. There’s really no reason why you need either church or government involved in the institution, IMO.
I was replying to (and quoted) someone who said “make “marriage” only the religious ceremony portion.” I’m just as married without any additional ceremony or religious bullshit.
Ah, gotcha. Ferret Herder, is that what you meant to say? Because if you didn’t misspeak, then I agree with jsgoddess: it’s a bad idea to make marriage a purely religious institution.
Pretty much, yeah. I don’t personally care about the concept of “marriage” in terms of that word, but what legal protections, rights, and responsibilities it provides are exceedingly important. There are already options in place for atheists - and gays/lesbians in the states where it’s legal - to have a marriage performed. Many frothing-at-the-mouth “defense of marriage” types think that if gays and lesbians can legally get married, then suddenly OMG their religious leaders will legally be forced to marry the evil sodomites and blah blah - oh look, that hasn’t happened in the states where SSM is legal.
A marriage should not be dictated or controlled by government, and it should be some kind of meaningful ceremony to the participants, but which does not grant any special or additional rights in a legal/contractual/governmental sense.
But right there is the problem. “Getting government out of marriage” does not change one’s marriage from “between us, our community, and our deity [to] between us and our community.” It changes it to “between us and…” well… the doorpost, I guess. If ‘government’ in a fre society is anything metaphysically distinguishable from the individuals from whom it derives its authority, it is the legal embodiment of the community they together comprise.
I have two relevant documents.
One is our marriage license. It sits in our safety deposit box at the bank, along with our will, a few bonds, our car titles, and a few other documents like that.
The other is our marriage covenant. At our wedding, our loved ones signed this large piece of parchment, promising to honor our lifelong commitment to one another and to support our marriage. This document hangs above our fireplace in a place of honor, where it’s immediately visible on walking into our house.
The agreement between us and the government is purely for logistical purposes. It’s terribly important, of course, but I don’t give two craps about what it’s called. They could call it the Mutual Contract Contract for all I care: it’s the legal privileges that matter.
The agreement between us and the guests at our wedding is the one that matters. That’s the agreement between us and our community. To suggest that it’s not more significant than would be an agreement between us and a doorpost is insulting and silly.
I do not want the government to stand in for community support. I don’t give a crap about whether Fred Phelps approves of our marriage, and conversely, there are plenty of marriages I don’t approve of. If the government stands in for community approval of a marriage, it forces me to approve of some really crappy relationships, and it forces me to accept the approval of some real jerkwads who I know wouldn’t approve of our godless union anyway and whose approval I don’t seek.
Maybe it’s my anarchist leanings, but I’m more than capable of having a community that nobody’s coerced into joining, and it’s that free community whose involvement in my marriage I seek.
If you take the government out of marriage but still had a thing that had all of the legal whatnots of marriage then people, like me, would still call it marriage and you’d have exactly what we have now–some people referring to a religious ceremony while others are just talking about the government-issue civil ceremony. Only you’d add Christian martyrs saying “They tried sob sob to kill marriage weep weep but we didn’t let them!” It would clear up absolutely nothing, would guarantee no more rights, and would just add another layer of dickish pedantry on top of a rather silly definitional argument.
No, we wouldn’t have exactly what we have right now. Check out my “fairly minor benefit” from my first post to this thread.
Then let’s keep calling it what it’s called now: marriage.
There is absolutely nothing about forcing people to use a term other than “marriage” for the set of rights that accompanies current marriage that will enable that set of rights to be applied to anyone but heterosexual romantic couples.
Max, as I’ve told you before, I’m usually right on board with your Pit rants, but I’m gonna have to dissent on this one. I fully believe that the government needs to treat individuals as individuals, and recognize relationships between them only insofar as they mutually agree to have those relationships formalized for a given specific purpose. Creating de facto recognized-relationship types (e.g. marriage) that have automatic rulesets applied to them, and forcing an all-or-nothing choice between them, is not only ideologically nonsensical, but as a practical matter leads to arguments about whether individuals who don’t meet a single standard of the current relationship definition (having opposite genders, being romantically involved, etc.) should be able to claim the relationship anyway to receive the same practical benefits.
This, along with your previous post, presumes that governmental recognition of a romantic relationship is the only possible system under which two individuals can declare that they mutually agree to have legal interrelations. Not only is this a false assumption, it’s not even the optimal way to answer the questions in your quiz.
1 and 2: If I died tomorrow, I’d want my estate (such as it is) to go to my father. If I were injured, I’d want my best friend calling the shots. Even if I could, I’d not be marrying either one of these individuals anytime soon, so to establish these relationships, the onus is on me to declare and record my desires. I see no reason this should be any different if, in either or both cases, the person in question were my romantic partner instead of father or friend. If I fail to state my intentions on-record, then the adjudicating authority should try to determine my desires using the available evidence.
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Not a woman; not hypothesizing about being one.
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If two people share responsibilities with regard to home ownership, and the government considers those responsibilities in determining tax payments, then each person should file taxes truthfully declaring the total of their responsibilities, and be assessed taxes based on their individual situations. If audited, they’ll need to provide evidence that their representations were accurate. No recognition of any sort of relationship, romantic or otherwise, is necessary for any of this…but if it’s felt that it would help for some reason, then require the two to agree to a mutual-cohabitation tax arrangement before allowing them to file that way.
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No. This situation sucks and ol’ Dad was a dick, no question about it, but — and I’ll explain my rationale longhand if you like, but if you’ll accept the cliffs-notes Pit version — you can’t violate individual rights just to legislate against people being dicks or situations sucking. I’ll also point out for the record that, as in all of these other scenarios, an agreed-upon relationship obligating Pops to take care of Mama could be established without involving any of the other trappings of marriage…and were this the case, then any two people who cared to enter into this arrangement would be free to do so.
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It’s my kid, and they know this? Then no, they’re not being reasonable. What does marriage have to do with this? (Honest question; I don’t see the relevance.)
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Then, sadly, I’ll just need to shut up and deal. I’ve done all right with it thus far.
To sum up: marriage does and should exist, among any set of individuals who want to recognize it — not being treated differently by the government due to a mutual declaration of romantic love in no way diminishes the meaning or strength of that declaration. Formalized legal relationships between individuals do and should exist, to solve practical problems such as those posed in this thread. Other than tradition and (perhaps) convenience for the majority, I see no rational justification for combining the two.
Huh? I’m really not seeing where you’re getting this. My proposal is to make those rights available to any two mutually consenting adults who are not currently involved in a similar contract with anyone else. Full stop. That expands, not contracts, the eligible pool of candidates. It expands the eligible pool to a degree greater than SSM proposals.
OK, ideally, SSM would be legal everywhere. I’m just very puzzled that a “sacred bond between a man and a woman” (or anyone else) could ever involve a government license.
And I’m saying you aren’t going to get there by fucking around with the term “marriage.” You’re just fucking around with the term marriage with no one getting any benefit from it.
I’m also puzzled by your comments. Can you explain how a proposal to legislate the concept of a type of civil union into our system of laws which gives the same legal rights and responsibilities as marriage but doesn’t redefine or change the legal status of “married” couples does anything to fuck around with the term, or doesn’t give anyone new benefits?
They aren’t saying “Let’s add a new concept and let’s call it New Concept X while still having the old concept of marriage.” They are saying, “Let’s take the word ‘marriage’ and strip it of all legal meaning. Now let’s take all of those legal meanings that used to be in marriage and let’s relabel that. Oh, and now that it’s relabeled, somehow it will magically include all of these other types of relationships that weren’t included in the original concept of ‘married’ since ‘married’ will mean something else entirely.”
And I’m saying you can change it so that legally people don’t get married but get “united.” But unless you go in and futz around with who can get united–and there is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that the public at large and legislators in particular would have any desire to do so–being “united” is still going to mean heterosexual romantic couples. So all shifting the definitions around has done is fuck with definitions rather than actually giving anyone more rights.
I mean the “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if X and Y could have a legal agreement that’s just like marriage without them actually being married” isn’t one of those things where I see a huge public outpouring of support. It just seems to be one of those messageboard arguments rather than something that has much real-life impetus.
So, real life. What would actually happen? First, getting the government out of marriage won’t happen. Second, if you could get the government out of marriage, there would still be some legal set of rights that would only apply to heterosexual couples unless and until there was the political will to change that. Third, there wouldn’t be the political will.
So why not just say “Hey, same sex marriage is legal and fine!” That way, we aren’t doing some sort of ass-kissing two-step in order to placate the religious, and we are letting the legal terms actually mirror what people are going to mean when they say “married”–a romantic and legal partnership.
Agreed, fuck a bunch of renaming marriage. As I said above, my problem is with predefined relationship labels and rulesets in the first place. If you want the government involved in your intrapersonal relationships for legal/practical purposes, you and the other individual(s) need to define each aspect of that and deliberately state your intentions in that regard. I’ve got no problem with societal infrastructure helping people to do that effectively, but an all-or-nothing package deal — especially one that for no discernible reason centers around a two-person romantic commitment — isn’t the way to do it.
I think was jsgoddess is getting at is that it’s basically a purely semantic distinction.
If we legalize gay marriage, then any two people who are in love can do either or both of two things:
(a) they can get a church “marriage”, or any other kind of solemnifciation they desire
(b) they can get government recognition of their relationship, which comes with various benefits. This recognition is called “marriage”
If we go with the GGOOME plan, then any two people who are in live can do things:
(a) they can get a church “marriage”, or any other kind of solemnifciation they desire
(b) they can get government recognition of their relationship, which comes with various benefits. This recognition is called “a civil union”
So it’s pretty much the same. The issue is… how likely is it to happen, and how do we get there from here. Well, gay marriage legalization is a hot topic, but one where it seems that demographics make it inevitable. On the other hand, GGOOME is not even on anyone’s radar in any context other than hypothetical proposals.
I think it’s perfectly interesting as a thought experiment, but I think it’s completely pointless as an actual real life proposal.
(There is one other potential difference, which is to what extent best-friends-living-together or unwed-spinster-aunts or other such couplings should have the same access to the “benefits” of “marriage”, which would be potentially different between legalized-gay-marriage and GGOOME, but that’s a separate issue.)