Wherein Quartz has a bit of an epiphany on same-sex marriage.

Left_Hand_of_Dorkness · June 15, 2006, 6:26pm

Neither can I, and if I’ve sounded certain, it’s been unintentional. I’m just saying that, just as I can’t confidently say, “The right will LOVE this proposal!” nobody else can confidently say, “The right will HATE this proposal!”

Just my opinion, but I agree wholeheartedly with Miller - and again, what you’re proposing here would in fact have the effect of substantially altering marriage (or rather, under its new name, civil unions). At this point, I think there really is something to be said about “altering the meaning of marriage” - especially since any marriage I enter into would be a strictly civil one. It doesn’t sit well with me at all to imagine my relationship being exactly the same, legally, as a simple matter of convenience. I guess I do believe there is a real societal role for recognizing the particular and unique relationship of two people in love. Also, from a legal point of view, it’s unclear to me that it even makes sense to extend exactly the same group of rights to people in non-marriage relationships, or that a single one-marriage-fits-all scheme would be appropriate for all of those people in the first place.

There’s a further problem, in that when imagining “civil unions” put to such uses, it becomes harder and harder to justify limiting them to two people, which raises the immensely complex matter of how to come up with a schme to civilly bond groups of people. Since it’s nothing but a particular bundle of legal rights, in your view, it is simply difficult to justify modeling it upon the pattern of monogamous union. And while I support the right of people to engage in polygamous marriage, it’s a huge fucking mess of a legal issue that, frankly, will take a lot longer to solve than is right to keep gay couples waiting.

Let me ask you, then. What rights do you believe you ought to be entitled to regarding your spouse, but an elderly woman ought not be entitled to regarding her live-in sister, specifically?

I reject the idea that extending rights to the sisters opens the door to polygamy, any more than extending rights to same-sex couples opens the door to polygamy. When we’re talking about extending the rights of a mutual contract, there’s no slippery slope between extending them to other consenting adult two-person parties and extending them in some undefined fashion to consenting three-or-more-person parties.

Daniel