Wait, I just realized what you’re saying.
A gay couple can get married. All they have to do is get a civil union first. Once they’ve gotten it, they have access to the benefits a straight couple has access to, and since straight couples have access to the marriage license, so do straight couples.
Why didn’t you just say so to begin with? I mean, this is a ridiculous permutation, but at least you’re being logically consistent now.
In order to understand the warped nature of magellan’s proposal, we turn to Joseph Heller:
In other words, gay people want to get married.
A few comments on this issue:
(1) I think by far the biggest reason that Mag’s plan would be impractical in the real world is that there isn’t just one set of laws… there are city laws, state laws, national laws, and international treaties. International treaties that cover marriages of people moving between countries certainly wouldn’t just magically work with his system even if everyone in the US decided to adopt his system tomorrow. In addition, Mag can put all the effort he wants into claiming that his laws would force everyone to treat married couples and unioned couples equally, and there are still, for the foreseeable future, going to be states and counties in which bigots will do everything they can to do keep the law from being implemented the way he wants it to.
(2) That said, the same thing would happen if nationwide gay marriage were adopted tomorrow. If the Supreme Court comes back tomorrow and says “gay marriage has to be legal everywhere in the US” (not sure it even logistically could, but we’ll pretend), there are still going to be plenty of barriers before gay couples in Alabama and Mississippi can just stroll into city hall and walk out married.
(3) And in fact, for all the (deserved) mockery that Mag’s position gets, I don’t think it’s Prima Facie impossible that it could eventually succeed. If a mostly-benevolent-but-with-weird-hangups-about-language absolute dictator imposed the Mags system on society and actually enforced the every-last-right-exists-equally-in-both-systems clause with ruthless fairness, after a hundred years, we’d all just think it was the status quo. BUT, we can’t there from here. Right now everyone knows that Marriage is the real thing and Civil Unions aren’t, and thus any solution that tries to make those separate but equal fails, because everyone knows they’re not equal. But one could imagine that fading over time, in the very unlikely hypothetical in which Mag’s plan is implemented.
(4) All of that said, however, to me the entire discussion of logistical difficulties is a bit of a red herring, because no one actually seems to be seriously discussing a nationwide civil union plan at all, so it seems really unlikely it will matter. To me the more interesting question is why Mag thinks that gay marriages are sufficiently less “worthy” than straight marriages that they don’t even deserve to have the same word applied to them. There’s a weird tension in issues involving words and symbols (the same thing pops up with “In God We Trust” on coins) where there’s this circular argument. It’s just a word. Why do you care if you get to use that word, it’s not important what word you use as long as you get the right. But if it’s just a word, and it’s not important, then why do YOU care if we use it? etc.
So a few, hopefully somewhat new, questions for Magellan:
(1) You are friends with a gay couple. After several years of committed cohabitation, they decide to “make it official”. They mention to you (let’s assume that they do not know of your opinion on gay marriage, to begin with) that they wish to get married, and that for them, getting a civil union isn’t good enough.
(a) Do you understand that desire on their part? Do you sympathize with why the word would be meaningful to them?
(b) If they have a religious ceremony in front of their friends and family (regardless of its legal standing) and start referring to themselves in everyday speech as “married” and referring to each other as “my husband”, would you go along with that? That is, would you stubbornly refer to “this is my friend Dave and his partner Bob” as opposed to “this is my friend Dave and his husband Bob”? Why or why not?
© If you have a child, we assume you’d want that child to want to grow up and get married at some point, correct? So you’d want to expose that child to role models who exemplify good marriages. If Bob and Dave have a relationship which is stable and happy and loving (side note: I think that the one community in the entire world which has the most stable and happy lifelong relationships is not straight couples, nor gay couples, it’s hypothetical-gay-couples-discussed-by-pro-gay-marriage-debaters), what would be the effect of exposing your child to them? Would it be different than exposing your child to an equally happy and stable straight couple? What about a married-but-sometimes-have-visible-issues straight couple?
Eh, much as I deride Magellan’s position, I think that your line of attack is a bit silly. You seem to be claiming that his plan is philosophically or linguistically paradoxical to begin with, which I don’t think is true. I think it’s (a) wrongheaded and evil, and (b) utterly impractical in the real world; but you seem to be saying that it’s in some way self-nullifying, or impossible-to-define-because-of-godel, or something like that.
I mean, a country certainly could exist in which gay people could get civil unioned, straight people could get married, and every single legal thing about those two conditions other than the name was identical. There’s very little point to setting things up that way, and a lot of logistical hassles, but it could happen. I think your objection is something along the lines of “wait, you said that they had precisely the same rights, except they don’t, because the gay couple doesn’t have the right to get married”. Which is a pretty weak and meaningless objection. The problem with Mag’s plan is not some technicality about what “they have all the same rights” means, the problem is that (a) it’s motivated by something which is certainly darn similar to bigotry if it’s not actually bigotry, (b) it’s unnecessary, and (c) it’s incredibly logistically difficult to get there from here in the world that we actually live in.
I’m glad to live in a world were magellan01 is the biggest bigot who ever bigotted.
This is really a golden age of human brotherhood if his ideas about SSM are the wrost thing in the world.
Summing up my take on it after conscientiously reading the whole thread:
If somebody who opposes same-sex marriage wants to take the term “marriage” out of civil law entirely, so that what the government officially recognizes is called “partnership” or “civil union” or whatever for all legally-united couples, I’m fine with that. I don’t happen to agree with that opinion, but it’s not advocating discrimination.
In that scenario, “marriage” would not be a legal designation at all but would be a purely social and religious term. Different groups would argue about what properly constitutes a “marriage”, just as they do now, but it would have no bearing on the legal designation. Same-sex and opposite-sex couples would have exactly the same set of laws and exactly the same legal terminology pertaining to their legally-united state, but the government wouldn’t officially use the historical/religious term “marriage” for either of them. Fine.
But saying that the legal term for government-recognized couplehood has to be different for same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples is discriminatory. The gummint has no business calling the exact same legal status by two different names just because it applies to two different types of people. It would be discriminatory to have two different legal technical terms for “men’s felony convictions” and “women’s felony convictions”, or for “white homeowners’ mortgage exemptions” and “black homeowners’ mortgage exemptions”, etc. Likewise, it’s discrimination to require separate legal designations for “same-sex couples’ united status” and “opposite-sex couples’ united status”.
Having now restated the obvious, I’ll move on to a point that I don’t think anybody has addressed yet:
Not legally, we won’t. The definition of marriage has “broadened” a lot already over the past several decades, and we’ve never seen the legal establishment of any “successor institution” turning marriage into a “two-class system”.
The closest thing to this scenario might be the so-called “covenant marriage” option enacted by some states, where traditional couples opposed to divorce can sign a marriage contract agreeing to more restrictive constraints on divorce within their own marriage. But covenant marriage hasn’t attained any kind of “Marriage B” status in our society, nor is it generally more “respected” than the modern definition of marriage with easier access to divorce.
Likewise, no “successor institution” or “Marriage B” has emerged to preserve traditional prohibitions on, say, interracial marriage or remarriage after divorce. There are still plenty of individuals who support those traditional prohibitions, but society in general doesn’t consider the modern definition of marriage to have become “irrelevant” because it’s abandoned those prohibitions. Most people just accept that people who are legally married are, in fact, married; they don’t consider that a legal marriage somehow doesn’t really count because it doesn’t abide by outdated restrictions.
And that’s what will happen with same-sex marriage as well. It will take a little longer for some people to wrap their heads around it, but eventually the vast majority of people in our society who originally didn’t consider same-sex marriage to be “real” marriage will have either adjusted to the broader definition of marriage, or died. And the new, broader definition of marriage will remain just as “respected” in society at large as marriage ever has been.
Worth repeating.
Edited to add: Or, more flippantly, you know who ELSE was the biggest bigot who ever bigotted?
It’s not self-nullifying, it’s simply contradictory. Here are some similar contradictory positions:
I want gay people and straight people to have exactly the same rights with no exceptions. Gay people can’t adopt children, but straight people can.
I want gay people and straight people to have exactly the same rights with no exceptions. Gay people can’t join the military but straight people can.
I want gay people and straight people to have exactly the same rights with no exceptions. Gay people who work at schools will be called “wardens” while straight people will be called “teachers.”
In all these cases, along with Magellan’s position, one specific benefit accorded by the government is reserved only for straight people. Since that’s the case, the idea that gay people and straight people will be treated the same is false.
The argument shouldn’t be over whether gay and straight people are equal under his proposal: the very premise of his proposal is that, in one particular way, they’re not treated equally. It’s insane for him to argue that they are, when it’s the premise of his argument that they’re not.
He should concede that point. It’s lost.
The argument should be over whether denying this one right to gay people has a rational basis.
As I see it, it’s only a weak and meaningless distinction if there’s no importance attached to the word “marriage.” If the word “marriage” is an important word with a meaning worth having, then this is not a weak or a meaningless distinction.
That’s why I’ve asked magellan: does he consider the word “marriage” so unimportant that the distinction I’m drawing is meaningless?
In case he thinks this is a dastardly trap, let me be transparent as Saran Wrap: I don’t think he has a winning answer to this question. His argument is also predicated on the idea that the word “marriage” is an important word with an important meaning. If he agrees with you that the distinction I draw is meaningless, then he abandons the very reason for drawing the distinction in the first place. If he agrees that it’s a meaningful distinction, then he abandons his claim that his proposal treats gay and straight couples equally in all meaningful ways.
Certainly this is a fair point. Ají is much more of an incoherent frothing bigot that magellan is. But he’s consistent, when he’s not trying the Chewbacca defence on for size. It’s magellan’s bizarre inconsistency that gets under my skin like a grain of sand under a gecko’s scales.
I’m glad to live in a world with literacy and people who can properly read a thread title too.
That really is a fair point. Unlike so many other times and places in history, he doesn’t feel compelled to execute gays. Why, he’s even willing to let them have their own little quasi-“marriages”, aren’t those nice boys just so adorable when they try to act normal?
But it’s only a matter of degree. While the position he holds is pretty mild compared to, say lynching uppity niggers, yes, the way he’s holding onto it is still bigoted.
Is he NOT conceding that point? As far as I can tell, he’s been extremely clear that in fact he thinks gays should not have the right to marry, but should instead have access to civil unions. That is, I think you’re trying to gotcha him on a point that he has so clearly and explicitly already agreed with that… well… I’m confused.
All I can come up with is that this is a semantic argument about what the phrase “have all the rights” means, or something like that, and then you end up falling into traps where you have to concede that men and women don’t have all the same rights because women aren’t allowed into the men’s restroom and vice versa, yada yada.
(And I’m someone who generally respects and agrees with just about everything you post.)
No, this isn’t a gotcha. He claims that his proposal leads to absolute equality, and he also claims that the word “marriage” is important. He’s not conceded that, in a way that’s important to him, he doesn’t want absolute equality.
Certainly in this respect men and women don’t have the same rights. The question then becomes, is there a good reason for this differentiation?
In the case of separate-but-equal bathroom facilities, there’s a rational basis for the differentiation. Moreover, neither men’s nor women’s bathrooms are clearly privileged (women’s get sofas, but then men’s get shorter lines, to be flip about it 
). His proposal has no rational basis for the differentiation, and one of the groups gets a socially privileged title that’s denied to the other group.
Napoleon III?
Thanks, dude. I mean, I’ve been working hard on my bigotry and magellan’s equal rights plan was not going to beat me.
Comin from the poster who chose a convoluted meaning to make a pitiful point the get points from the cools guys.
Exactly.
You do realize this is an English only forum, right?
You do realise that, for normal people, bigot has another meaning, regardless of MW’s state-of-mind definition? it’s more complicated than holding opinions obstinately.
In fact, MW has a further extension of the definiton "especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance " which completes the regular-folks definition.
You wanted cool points from the cool guys.
And for the slower folks on the board, I even started the thread with my chosen usage for the word.
The obvious and lazy response to this notion would just be the eyerolling emoticon because there’s a lot of stupid in those 8 words.
Yeah, Aji is just a mouthbreather attention whore; not really worth the effort. Magellan constructs some pretty impressive walls of denial and twisted logic, which is a lot more clinically interesting.
Let me walk this back for you:
To recap in clearer language: Zoe points out that once upon a time people paired off by simply cohabitating and sleeping together and that this was what counted as “marriage”.
You asked what the gender of those couples was.
Condescending Robot assumes that the reason you’re asking is that you think those couples were all heterosexual couples, and (based on that assumption) mocks you for not realizing that there would have been gay couples doing this too.
You respond to the snark with more snark, indicating that of course you were aware that gay people existed in the past, which implies that you were also aware that gay couples existed in the past.
I then ask why, if you knew that gay couples existed in the past, you asked Zoe about the gender of those couples.
So: why did you ask Zoe about the gender of those couples if you already knew that gay couples existed in the past, including in the time before formal ceremonies were required to be married?
I’m still not sure I’m understanding your confusion or what you’re trying to get at, but I’ll try to answer. Zoe, it seemed to me, was trying to build an argument that there was a time when “married people” consisted of same sex pairings. My question back to her was asking for a cite pointing to a time when we know that to be the case. She seems to want to go back to caveman times, before ceremonies of some type were instituted, and use that as her reference point. At least that’s what I think she was doing. But with all we do know about history, conjecturing what some cavemen might have done is so weak as to hurt her argument rather than help it. Hell, for all we know, any expressions of homosexuality might have resulted in stonings.
So, even when we go to Ancient Greece, where homosexuality was as much a part of daily life as probably any other time and place in history, you do NOT have SS marriages, Even they drew a line.
Condescending Robot’s post was quite bizarre…though of just average stupidity for him.
Does that answer your questions?