Magellan, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don’t actually intend to discriminate with your proposal. It seems pretty clear to me and many others that the simple insistence on keeping the terminology different for gay and straight people could lead to “separate but equal” situations, especially in places where the administrators may be, shall we say, less enlightened on the merits of same-sex unions of any name. It seems to me like the result of either failing to learn from history or being exceptionally stubborn. Let’s ignore that for now.
Allow me to take another tack. Let’s say you’re right and you manage to get this implemented in a truly equal way. What’s going to happen? I’ll tell you. Some number of years from now, the entire country is covered by laws that treat “marriage” and “civil unions” the same. Straight couples get married and gay couples get civilly unionized, and somehow we all overlook how tortured that terminology is and live in harmony. But now society has come to accept civil unions as the same as marriage, and nobody feels the need to make the distinction in simple conversation anymore. You ask a gay guy if he’s single and he says, “no, married” and nobody bats an eye. We all know it’s really a civil union, but hey, my mom says she’s married too and that was really a non-legal commitment ceremony and nobody cares about that. Call yourself whatever you want; the law knows the real deal.
But in fact, these things are so much the same that most institutions which have forms and databases that record your marriage status won’t even bother to make new ones: they’ll just co-opt the “married” checkbox to mean “married or civil unioned”. The IRS sure as shit isn’t going to redesign their forms. The credit card application you fill out doesn’t care if you’re married or civil unioned, it just wants to know if there’s another person who’s legally liable for your debts, so they won’t make any changes either. Turns out the most cost-effective infrastructure change is no change at all, because, assuming you’ve been successful in your proposal of laws which treat these two things as 100% equal, there’s no actual difference.
In other words, you’re fighting tirelessly for a distinction which is going to make no difference whatsoever in legal terms, in technical terms, nor in social terms. Eventually, we’ll have a distinction which is completely irrelevant for all practical purposes, but which has been codified into law forever. What’s the point?
If you think it’s tortured, in Perú common-law marriages are so common than most forms have married / divorced / widow /common-law option.
They entail most of the rights of a married couple and they are not even married. You simply sign an affidavit saying you’ve lived together for at least two years and, voila: inheritance, visitation, alimony.
Lisa and Dave walk into the county clerkhouse and ask for a marriage license. This is a benefit they are able to receive.
Bob and Stewart walk into the county clerkhouse and ask for a marriage license.
At this point, there are two possibilities:
They are able to receive this benefit, in which case they are treated equally under the law to Lisa and Dave; or
They are not able to receive this benefit, in which case they are not treated equally under the law to Lisa and Dave.
This is incredibly simple.
You could, I suppose, argue that the word at the top of their license is unimportant, that the difference is trivial and not worth worrying over. Is that what you’d argue? Or do you think the benefit given to Lisa and Dave, but not to Stewart and Bob, is important?
Yeah, there should only be five or six city, county, state, federal, and international laws to amend so we don’t have two sets of laws. Right? It couldn’t be that there would be thousands if not millions of laws that would have to be altered.
Mostly, it’s about magellan getting to have his unwarranted sense of superiority over gays enshrined in the law.
(We’ve reached page eight and based on how previous threads went, it’s about time for magellan to drop his front and start openly ranting about how gays want to hijack marriage so they can pretend to be normal.)
In the same way that two groups would have access to the same house, except that one group has to go in via the tradesman’s entrance.*
*Do you have any idea how difficult it is to phrase this in a way that doesn’t sound like a gay sex joke? I know what all you people are like.
There are two types of people in the world. Those who divide people into two groups and those who don’t.
We are seeing the conflict between a person who needs “groups” to be kept seperate and the persons who believe that social justice is best served by removing as many distinctions as possible (in the eyes of the law).
Yeah, he’s said some charming things before, like:
[QUOTE=magellan01]
The other thing they want is to appropriate the word and use it as a shroud of normalcy in order to create the idea that homosexuality are merely two equal expressions of what it means to be human. They are not. Even leaving God or a god out of it, one expression would allow the species to continue, the other would not. In one, the body an its intended use are aligned. In the other they are not.
[/QUOTE]
And:
[QUOTE=magellan01]
Tell me, is there ANY part of the gay agenda that a straight person can not agree with and NOT be a homophobe?
[/QUOTE]
It reminds me more of all the phony liberals during segregation - they wanted to think of themselves as enlightened, advanced, fair-minded Christians (usually), often including telling themselves “Why, some of our best friends are Negros” (like the cook, the gardener, the maid, all of whom knew how to ingratiate themselves to Whitey). They were even willing to grant superficially-equal civil rights for them, too. But sharing the same schools, the same restrooms, the same drinking fountains, talking with rather than to them, actually thinking unconsciously as well as consciously of them as equals, no way in hell. Let them have their own parallel society, sure, but don’t let it mix with ours. God intended the races to be separate, anyway.
We’re seeing the same thing with sexuality now, among the pseudoliberal-but-actually-reactionary contingent that our little spamtroll here represents.
What makes me saddest is that maggie is totally sincere in the belief that writing “and whatever we call it when two queers want to legitimatize their relationship” next to “marriage” in all the law books is a workable solution.
Perhaps we’ve been misperceiving each other’s position. I am a strong supporter of traditional marriage, by which I mean two people, up until recently a man and a woman, joining their lives together in an ideally lifelong commitment. The thing is, pver the years I’ve seen the need to apply what the Eastern Orthodox term ‘economy’ to that absolute definition, to temper the wind to the shorn lamb, so to speak. I don’t favor ‘marriages’ that last only until the honeymoon is over and the thrill and newness are gone. But on the other hand, consider former member His4Ever. Her first marriage, when she was young and naive, was to a violently abusive man. Although she committed to a lifelong union, I find no fault in her divorcing him; it was quite literally a life-saving act.
And by the same token, I see some people whose romantic attraction is to someone of the same sex. When one of them finds the person he or she wishes to make that lifelong commitment to, I think that’s appropriate. Take the Martim-Lyon relationship from your home town as a good example: they were together, committed for life, for 50 years, even though only legally married for the last one, before one of them passed on. That’s the sort of relationship that strengthens marriage, not vitiates or dilutes it. IMO anyway.
I agree that if we are discussing your plan, we should address your plan. But there are a few issues with that. First, you’ve never spelled out what “one set of laws” actually means. (Yes, I can read and comprehend the phrase.) Like this: Do you intend that (a) pne new law be passed defining civil union and stating that any reference to marriage shall be construed to mean marriage or civil union, any reference to spouse/husband/wife shall also mean partner in a civil union, etc; or (b) an omnibud session law bill be introduced and enacted that enumerates every reference to marriage/spouse/etc. in law and revises the language to include civil unions accordingly? Or maybe something else I haven’t thought of? There is a good reason I’m asking, in terms of how it will work out.
Second, a point I’ve seen made to you repeatedly and which I’ve never read your refutation of (if you have done so, please link me; I may have missed seeing it). It is precisely as hard or easy to revise the relevant law(s) so that marriage and civil unions are no longer precisely equivalent as it was to adopt the Magellan Plan in the first place. And while it may not be your intent to do so, don’t think for one minute that there are not people who would gladly do so if they can muster a majority, including by lying about it – we’ve both seen that happen already, right? When people say “separate but equal isn’t”, tjeu aren’t just working up a sound bite, they’re reporting a historical reality. I think the Plessy court really meant “equal” – but that’s not how it worked out.
Third, let me ask this: Since the Magellan Plan will be a new law, what is the rational basis for drawing the distinction between marriage (OM/OW only) and civil union (OSCU or SSCU) that justifies drawing the distinction between them?
There’s probably more to be said, but that’s talking about your proposal – two distinct institutions governed by one set of laws. Why are two needed? How can we ensure the one set stays one set and doesn’t get amended by exception after exception? I think they’re fair questions specifically addressing your plan.
I did not answer you earlier owing to Marley’s directive to take it elsewhere. To respond briefly, and begging the Moderators’ forbearance, it was my assertion that not every thread on the topic of SSM was amenable to discussion of the Magellan Civil Unions Plan, and that your seeming insistence on bringing it up every time constituted a hijack IMO. It was my belief that if you declined to stop doing so, and others would not refrain from refuting you when you did, that it would be appropriate for the moderation staff to take staff action (starting, I presume, with a PM or Mod. Note). Marley pointed out that such discussion belongs in ATMB, not here, and if you want anything more than this brief response to a question I didn’t answer earlier, let’s take it there. I’ve gone this far to clarify for you what I was saying earlier in the thread in which you asked it, but I’m mindful of the limits on discussion of staff actions (or their lack) and want this to be the end of it in the Pit – I’ll be happy to join you in an ATMB thread if you wish.
That part you quoted? That wasn’t my OP. No, being a bigot makes a person a bigot as illustrated in the Bigots’ Bigotry Compendium available at the front of this thread. Now, kindly get less stupid.
No. Defining a person as an “Other” who does not deserve the same rights and recognitions as “We” enjoy makes a person a bigot. The number of laws which would need to be re-written is an example of how poorly Maggie has thought through his “plan.”
There’s more conversation happening here than just what was laid out in your OP you know. I’m not even talking about Magellan. So, print out the OP, roll it up, and shove it up your arsehole.
Magellan may well be a bigot, I haven’t followed his posting. Indeed, some of the recent examples quoted, in particular this one, cast a poor light on the matter, far poorer, in fact than any example quoted in the OP.
Because I do not agree that replacing the word marriage with “marriage or civil unions” everywhere the word marriage occurs necessarily implies that someone is “Defining a person as an “Other” who does not deserve the same rights and recognitions as “We” enjoy”.
FWIW, and I’ve said it before, I’m perfectly happy for gay people to have the right to marriage.