Exactly. Plus allowing same-sex marriage is a one-step procedure. Divorcing (ha!) “marriage” from “government” requires then creating some new term that covers the legal bits that are currently covered by “marriage,” and then those legal bits have to be rejiggered to allow for same-sex new term and grandnephew/grandaunt new term still.
I’d prefer if you didn’t couch your argument as if you were speaking for atheists in general, because as an atheist, I find your proposition almost as unpalatable as simply banning gay marriage.
Correct, which is pretty much what those in favor would consider the whole problem. Ideas don’t gain popular support without someone proposing them first.
It’s also worth noting that popularity under the status quo is a pretty shitty method for determining one’s beliefs about much of anything. Are you honestly of the opinion that all ideas are invalid unless they fit into the existing system without conflict?
Who is “they” in this? “They” may be who the OP is referring to, but unless I very much misapprehend his argument, “they” don’t include Left Hand of Dorkness.
I broke those two paragraphs up because they seem to embody the two most valid counter arguments I’m seeing in this thread.
The second paragraph refutes a proposal I’ve seriously never actually seen floated by any media pundit or political figure, or even on this message board. I’m not calling it a strawman, because I take the OP at their word that the argument exists, but someone’ll have to provide citations to show it’s a seriously advocated position. -If it is indeed seriously advocated, I think it has been shown by you and others to be completely untenable.
I’m much more familiar with the position that’s described in the first paragraph, which advocates the creation of legal civil unions available for consenting adults who wish such recognition from the government for their relationship. I’ve seen the position taken that this should be for “any two consenting adults” and I’ve also seen it advocated for group marriages. Sometimes it’s presented as you (jsgoddess) describe it, as a replacement for the legal term “marriage”, but again, I don’t read LHoD’s argument that way, and such a legal deletion of “marriage” would be absolutely unnecessary.
That would be the simpler and better route, of course. But would you really oppose, on that principle, legislation that offered full recognition and equal rights, if that status was not called “marriage” by the state?
I sincerely believe that such a legal arrangement would be commonly and colloquially known as “marriage” before the ink was dry on the signatures.
Ah, but why is it a separate issue? If those benefits were made available to ‘unorthodox’ couplings by a permanent change to our civil laws, that would necessarily include gay couples, as consensual sexual relationships between any prospective couple would be irrelevant. And if “best-friends-living-together” and spinster aunts can get the same rights as “married couples”, how would this not promote wide social acceptance of the legal rights of gay couples as well?
Oops!
That’s a silly statement (the italicized part). I’ll just claim it was a brain fart; I didn’t intend to say I’ve never seen it on the SDMB and other on-line venues. I do claim it’s not a widely held variant of the “civil union” position. Might just be my personal perception, but I’m not convinced that’s what most people mean when they propose civil unions.
This thread is like the end result of a game of telephone with an anarchist.
The radical position isn’t “gays should get married just like heteros.”
Nor is it “we should redefine some of these terms and play semantic games to make everyone feel better.”
The radical position is that the government shouldn’t be in the marriage business at all, for anyone. It should confer no privileges, duties, obligations, or any restructuring of their tax payments – any of it – for any type of domestic arrangement. Period.
If local churches or any other non-governmental organization wish to hold formal ceremonies or pageantries to solidify a couple’s (or more) relationship, well, isn’t that just cute?
Well, that certainly is a radical position you’ve outline there, marshmallow. I’ll just go right out on a limb and say I don’t think it’s either possible or reasonable.
I’m pretty sure that’s precisely LHoD’s argument: marriage should have no legal meaning, and a new institution, containing the same package of rights and responsibilities currently imbued in marriage, be created to take its place.
Heck, people want the government to recognize their union because, well, the government is the people, and that’s the point of the commitment–to have other people involved, making it harder to go back on your commitment.
I think that’s the real problem. Divorce is too easy, so people are no longer seeing the value of having the government involved.
And if small communities did take over for the government–guess what? They’d be a frickin’ government.
My first sentence was the one where I spoke for atheists, and I think it was pretty true for all of us. The second one is the one where I spoke for myself–and as I’ve said before to you, the extent to which state-sanctioned marriage confers societal approval on a particular relationship is exactly the extent to which I dislike that state-sanctioned marriage. I don’t think the government has any business telling me whose relationships I should approve of, and there are plenty of current marriages that I don’t approve of out there, just as there are plenty of current unsanctioned relationship out there that I think are ducky.
Your talk about how it’d need some sort of “magical” change is frankly absurd. You could nearly put my proposal in effect with a crayon and a jar of white-out. There’s nothing mysterious nor difficult about it.
It’s not realistic? Yeah, I know that. I own that. As I’ve said many many many times, I’m okay with that–many of the things I’d like I’m never going to see (US government: slash military funding until we have exactly the military we need to defend against an invasion! Pay teachers the same as lawyers, and enact similarly grueling entrance requirements! Raise marginal income taxes to pre-Reagan levels! I’m a dreamer). You correctly note that it’s a messageboard idea, not a practical one. You may have noticed that I’m posting it on a messageboard.
However, you’re absolutely wrong that I propose it as a sop to homophobes. I don’t give a shit about their opinions, not in my idealized world; they can kiss my ass for all I care. I propose it in spite of any succor it’d give them; I propose it because I think it would make for better law.
Miller, your last post has it right (as a summary of my position), with the note that by divorcing the legal rights from the social connotations of marriage (namely, that it’s a romantic/sexual relationship), I think it’d make the rights more broadly available.
That may be LHoD’s argument, but I can’t see that he’s clearly articulated that in this thread. And it’s quite different from what marshmallow outlined: government has no package of rights associated with marriage, for anyone.
ETA: Well LHoD added his last sentence as I was composing this post. I’ll concede that that’s his position. 
I disagree with him, and propose civil unions as an extension of existing law.
Not really, because I’m born into the government’s jurisdiction, but I get to choose my community.
I went to my brother’s wedding, and my sister’s wedding, in part because they’re family–but also in part because they married awesome people, and I wanted to support them. If either of them had chosen an abusive partner, I’d like to have the freedom not to support that relationship. If the community approval of the relationship is enshrined in a government document, I lack the freedom of disapproval. If the community approval is more anarchic–that is, it’s entirely formed through free association–then I can protest an awful relationship by withholding my support from it.
Xenophon is right, by the way: whereas marshmallow wants no union rights for anyone, I want them to be as broadly available as possible, and I think SSM doesn’t go as far as I’d like in this respect. Government should be a servant, IMO, and given the many times people have close long-term relationships that need a specific package of rights, I want those rights to be easily available; I think they should be available without the cultural connotations of “marriage” for those folks that want it that way.
FWIW, I’d be very nearly as happy with a proposal that allowed anyone to choose either a marriage or a civil union, with the understanding that the terms were identical in all legal documents. My only objection to such an idea would be the trivial one that I still don’t want the government to make me approve of shitty relationships.
The problem is that you have exactly the same freedom of disapproval of government “marriage” as you do of government “this newly named package of rights.”
You’re saying you aren’t allowed to disapprove when it’s called marriage but you will be allowed to disapprove when it’s called a union? This makes no sense at all. Either way, the government will be enabling a potentially nasty (or potentially beautiful) relationship. Unless you are planning on reducing the rights inherent with marriage when you change the name to something else, the amount of approval or disapproval you’ll be able to feel or express will be identical.
To give an example, if Jimbobbie and Jehoshaphat are roommates who want to enter into a civil union for some reason, but Jimbobbie is actually an abusive asshole who likes to beat up Jehoshaphat and steal from him and belittle him. The state isn’t going to do a background check to make sure these people are in healthy, great relationships, right? So, if they are given the set of rights that go along with what’s currently called “marriage,” and they are recognized by the state as having those rights, in what way is that different than if they were romantic partners and it was just called marriage? Either way, your government would be supporting it, and by proxy you would be supporting it.
I don’t want to misrepresent Miller here, but I’m kinda responding to previous discussions we’ve had, in which I believe he’s said that SSM is important because the word “marriage” confers social approval on the relationship. Is that a fair description, Miller? If so, I’d like to get rid of that; and the phrase “civil union,” IMO, confers no such social approval. In other words, where he likes the connotation of the word “marriage”, I dislike it–or at least, I dislike its being in the government’s jurisdiction.
Okay, if that is his argument I can see where you might reject marriage for that reason.
I wouldn’t say “marriage” conveys any social approval. I’d say it conveys social recognition of the relationship-as-fact, which is extremely important to me.
It’s not the legal status granted by the government that makes marriage a social institution. All the gov’t can do is recognize the individual contract between partners. Which doesn’t assume any approval by parties without a legal interest. So I’m unclear how changing the terminology changes any of that.
Can you explain why this is important to you? I mean, I may have some sort of social disability here that affects my understanding–I didn’t march at high school graduation because I so thoroughly didn’t give a crap about society recognizing what I did–but I’m not grokking why governmental/societal recognition of the relationship-as-fact would be important. I want the people I love to recognize my relationship, absolutely, but Joe Blow who runs the supermarket? Why do I care whether he recognizes my relationship?
Because that’s where I get my rights.
Edited to expand: If, say, a hospital decides I’m not married enough for them to allow my spouse to have the final say, for example, that’s a problem. The whole point of marriage as a rights-bearing institution is that it has a universal package of them that goes with me and is recognized everywhere in the country. It’s not something that has to be figured out on an individual basis by, say, that hospital to know if my spouse has the right to do X or Y.
Not just everywhere in the country: Everywhere in the world. That’s a key point that’s sometimes forgotten in discussions like these. If you’re married in California, say, and you go on a trip to Germany and have an accident, the hospital there will recognize your spouse to be your legal partner with the associate rights.
Honestly, I backed down to “in the country” just to avoid trying to defend such a broad statement when the narrower idea was broad enough, but yeah. Marriage is something that’s recognized most places in the world.