No problem. But I think your idea is even less likely to fly than mine, which I don’t have too much hope for.
There is an enormous emotional attachment (visible in this thread and pretty much every discussion on the subject) to the word “marriage.” Marriage traditionalists do not react well to the suggestion that they need to change terminology.
I think it would be easier to tell everyone, “okay, you win, ‘marriage’ can be exactly what you want it to be, for you and yours–but if you want the government to assign legal rights to it, you’ll have to also register as a ‘civil union.’”
When I lived in NJ we were across the street from an old, stable lesbian couple, whose live was at least as special, if not more so, than that of our neighbor, who was on her third husband.
Each marriage is its own celebration. No same sex marriage would have the slightest negative effect on my heterosexual one - done in an atheist ceremony, by the way.
I’ve not had the pleasure of attending a gay marriage, even in the short time it was legal here, but I can’t imagine it would be less beautiful and special than either mine or our daughter’s. Please explain yourself further.
I confess to being emotionally attached to the word marriage, which I think represents a deeper level of commitment. That is exactly why I support SSM.
Under my proposal, everybody gets to have “marriage” be whatever they want it to be. And everybody also gets equal and impartial rights and protections under the law.
However I think it is wise to have predefined levels of commitment and entanglement, with one the ultimate. When I proposed, back in the dark ages, I proposed marriage not living together because I thought it wrong to ask my now-wife to make a big change without a full commitment. My daughter had been living with her boyfriend for years. When she finally agreed to marry him, it was because she had decided they were stable and secure enough to take the step. They were covered under Oregon’s civil union law already.
In any case, I don’t think that make your won marriage is going to be practical without a lot of lawyering. Do you start with sharing utility bills and upgrade to filing joint returns? Do people have ceremonies to mark changing from a level 3 up to a level 2 marriage?
IANAL, but I see the legal side of my proposal as being uniquely simple.
The enforceable rights and responsibilities of “marriage” today would become part of the legal construct “civil union.”* We’d simply substitute the phrase “civil union” for every single occurrence of “marriage” in all laws, “civil partner”* for “husband” and “wife” (excluding, of course, those laws which were only designed to make this legal package unavailable to some classes of citizens; those would be dropped).
Thus “marriage” is removed from the province of law, but without removing any of the socially-useful or personally-desirable legal conditions, which would be equally–or more–available to anyone who wanted them attached to their own relationship. The “ultimate entanglement,” in the legal sense, would remain exactly what it is now.
The word “marriage” would then become like the word “love,” subject not to government regulation, nor the imposition of somebody else’s religion, but free to be made afresh, unique and beautiful, by each of us in our own way. That seems appropriate to me.
Or some other term. That isn’t significant, as long as it’s not anyone’s traditionalist terms.
Civil unions today are easy to get out of. Marriages are not so easy to get out of, which is common to this type of contract. Today, because of the inequality that forces some couples into civil unions instead of marriage, it makes sense to increase the benefits of civil unions in order to decrease the level of inequality now suffered. In a world of SSM, this makes a lot less sense.
Do civil unions even make sense in a word where anyone can get married who wants to? I’m not sure.
But there is nothing wrong with marriage. Marriage undoubtedly predates religion, it certainly predates Christianity by a lot. No one has to mix marriage and religion. In Pennsylvania you can get married with just a witness, no state sanctioned person at all.
Why does one size have to fit all? A marriage is at the top as far as responsibilities go (now modified by prenups) but why force those who don’t want to get married for whatever reason into these same responsibilities. You can go from very simple agreements to almost marriage ones. I suppose with MP3s no one has to fight about splitting up the record collection any more.
What is wrong with marriage anyway? I know the religious want to claim ownership, but I don’t want to let them. They can pry my secular marriage license from my cold, dead, fingers.
Same here. No same sex marriage would have the slightest negative effect on my heterosexual one - done in a super secret ceremony so religious that my parents and wife’s parents were excluded, by the way.
Likewise. I would really like to get married some day. If that were entirely off the table, as in spark’s idea, and I was left with civil unions… Well, who gives a shit about civil unions? I might enter into one if it made sense for tax purposes, or to get one of us onto the other’s health care plan, but absent a solid financial inducement like that, I doubt I’d ever bother.
Marriage is, indeed, special. And I want a chunk of that specialness for myself, someday. I’m not interested in a margarine marriage. If it’s not the real thing, what the hell is the point?
But opposite-sex marriage isn’t a unique celebration of the love that exists between a man and a woman. It is a legal contract that can be performed between to people who just met by an Elvis impersonator at an all-night drive-thru “chapel”. If the love part isn’t necessary, why the hell is the “between a man and a woman” part? Why is that the specific requirement that must be upheld? Why is Anna-Nicole Smith and a nonagenarian billionaire’s farce “beautiful, wonderful and special enough that it’s worthy of its own celebration” only as long as they’ve got the correct genitalia for it?
The Supreme Court has ruled at least 14 times that marriage is a fundamental right of all people. They are of course very particular about word usage in all opinions, and in all 14 cases regarding marriage rights, they have never mentioned gender at all.
14 times.
Under the law, if this was so traditional and important, some of the attorneys in the cases would have made the point, and it would have worked its way into an opinion.
Apparently, for such a “tradition”, no one ever thought to mention it before.
14 times, did I mention?
It really seems like that horse left the barn a long long time ago, sorry.
There is really no place in the law where marriage is as tightly defined as you say, because the Supreme Court has already looked past all that 14 times.
The dilution rationalization (I can’t bring myself to call into an “argument” due to its lack of valid premises) is shattered (or it would be, if proponents were open to reasoning) by the “dilution” of extending the franchise to women, the “dilution” of ending segregation and the “dilution” of striking down laws against interracial marriage. Claiming “dilution” carries as much weight as claiming it’ll hurt your feelings, and should be dismissed with contempt and a mocking offer of tissues to the crybaby.
It’s begging the question, ISTM. Endless repetitions of “my right must remain unique to my group, on account of the fact that it’s unique to my group.”
It has been almost twenty-five years, and I would appreciate if someone would correct me, but I do not recall anyone testing The Wife and I for “love” when we got married. They relied on our personal statements, and I don’t believe any of the legal documents we signed included the stipulation that we be in love. (I may be wrong, it has been a long time since I went ove the contract looking for loopholes.)
I don’t know how it could be tested anyway. I also don’t recall any restrictions or requirements on what we did in the bedroom, so I am perfectly willing to allow *any *other couple who wants to sign the contract be legally married. Love or private behaviours within a relationship should not have any bearing on whether they can file their taxes jointly or be allowed on each other’s insurance policies.
“Marriage” is not subject to governmental regulation, insofar as you can call yourself married and nobody from the government is going to arrest you.
If all you’re doing is substituting the word “civil union” for “marriage” in every law, such that civil unions are exactly equivalent to marriages, what would be wrong with calling “civil unions” “marriages”? If they’re exactly the same thing, they’re exactly the same thing. It don’t make no sense. It’s a meaningless exercise in semantics.
It would be like demanding the removal of the word “murder” from every legal document and replacing it with the word “homicide”. Except, the two words mean the exact thing. So what is accomplished by removing the word murder? If people insist it isn’t murder to kill a gay guy, they aren’t going to change their mind if you agree and say it ain’t murder but rather the brand new crime of homicide, it’s just that homicide has the exact same legal definition and punishment as murder.