[QUOTE=Lynn Bodoni]
I have never understood how allowing two people of the same sex to marry will threaten my heterosexual marriage. I’ve also never understood why some people criticize gays for having multiple sex partners, and then those same people are aghast at the notion of same-sex marriage.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I’ve never had this adequately explained either. Could someone on the ‘let gays have a civil union but don’t call it marriage’ side care to explain why this is an important distinction? I mean, assuming you want to allow gay men and women have exactly the same rights and privileges that straight couples enjoy, but you merely want to call it something different that is (:dubious:).
And, of course, that’s the crux, ain’t it? It’s just another ‘equal but separate’ scheme, IMHO. And, it’s the answer to the OP as well (I’m sure it’s been answered a hell of a lot better already, and a lot more eloquently too)…why do gays ‘insist’ on marriage? Why the fuck shouldn’t they? Why SHOULD they have less rights than everyone else? Why shouldn’t they be able to have exactly the same rights and privileges UNDER THE LAW AS EVERYONE ELSE?? Why should they be second class citizens and labor under all the horseshit restrictions that ‘we’, as a society are placing on them by NOT letting them have all those rights and privileges??
Answer…we fucking shouldn’t, and it’s pretty despicable that ‘we’, as a society, are allowing this travesty to occur. Or going through all these ridiculous gyrations to try and delay the inevitable. This SO reminds me of the end of the segregation era, when the civil rights movement really started to take off. Consider…do you folks opposing this REALLY want to look like those idiots in the South? 20 years down the pike, guess what? You WILL look like that. And I hope you folks who are doing this silly shit are embarrassed that you did.
You can see the original here.
Note that he changed 2 or 3 of the lines as he wrote it. And that he had “aging” and “changing” in his lyrics – he just sounds like he drops the g’s when he sings it. Also, “what you don’t understand” and “rapidly aging” are not separate lines, but part of the previous line.
I am afraid I still don’t understand. Doesn’t Canada’s gay marriage law cover division of property, or abuse and adultery?
I may be mistaken, but mightn’t this kind of thing come up even if you got married in one country, and tried to get a divorce in another and were heterosexual? I think Canadian divorce law might differ significantly from British divorce law even if one does not consider civil unions.
I also don’t know if Canada, as a member of the commonwealth, has to give full faith and credit to the acts of other members.
I cheerfully admit I don’t know enough about the case to comment in detail. It’s easy to find lots of internet cites of people expressing outrage about Hincks v. Gallardo, but not a lot of detail about the case itself.
But even putting aside the possibility that the case was contentious because the civil-unioned spouses were making it contentious (i.e. one says it was a marriage and wants alimony, the other says it wasn’t a marriage to avoid paying alimony), I’m not eager to assume that Canadian officials are being dickish just for sake of being dickish - the grey areas other countries are creating in their marriage laws to avoid offending sky-pixie-worshipers represent possible headaches for our courts, having to take into account (and possibly translate) foreign statutes over which we have no control.
Personally, I figure Hincks and Gallardo should’ve just got a marriage licence in their province of residence upon returning to Canada, costing $100-$200 or so, and treated their British C.U. certificate like a quaint souvenir.
It’s very sad. A man’s partner was killed in a tragic accident. (He was working on a photo shoot and stepped off a roof.) Because they weren’t married he had no say in what happened afterwards. His partner’s family (who had never approved of them as a couple) swooped in, buried the dead man in their home state, and barred him from the funeral. Imagine having to deal with that after having your spouse killed.
This is pretty much what we did with our California Domestic Partnership upon moving to Canada. The domestic partnership was helpful for immigration, but in Canada we were common-law spouses based upon residency, not California’s domestic partnership.
In Britain, where my husband is a citizen and owns a house, the domestic partnership was recognized as a civil partnership. Canadian marriage is too, so when we married here, nothing changed in Britain, and since it was only last year it is not recognized as a marriage (or a domestic partnership) in California, either, and so our status there is unchanged as well. Other places, however, do recognize our Canadian marriage as marriage, so our status shifts with every change in jurisdiction.
My father lives in Colorado. If I go into the hospital while on a visit, or inherit property, or get arrested, or whatever, what rights does my husband have as a California domestic partner who doesn’t reside in the US? What rights does he have as a Canadian same-sex spouse? We have no idea, and it’s not easy to find out without consulting a lawyer. Heterosexual couples don’t have this issue.
Maybe that was it. It would make sense. A divorcing couple who cannot come to terms - who would have imagined?
[QUOTE=XT]
Could someone on the ‘let gays have a civil union but don’t call it marriage’ side care to explain why this is an important distinction? I mean, assuming you want to allow gay men and women have exactly the same rights and privileges that straight couples enjoy, but you merely want to call it something different that is.
[/QUOTE]
I am not necessarily on that side, but I suspect it comes from the suggestion that often gets into these threads - namely, “let’s get the state out of recognizing marriage and call everything a civil union instead”. IOW, the state is going to tell the millions of straight couples that it will no longer recognize their marriage.
It is the flip side of gay people who are upset that they can enter into civil union but not get married - if there is some real distinction between civil union and marriage, then both the gays and the straights who object have a point - if not, then it is a distinction without a difference in both cases.
Either civil unions are the same as marriage, or they are not. If they are the same, then gays don’t really have a good reason to object to calling it civil union. If civil union is really a second-class version of marriage, then I for one would like to know “in what way is it second-class?”
Brown v. Board of Education ruled that black children were suffering because of being segregated, and would suffer even if black and white-only schools had the same funding and access to resources (which they obviously didn’t). Maybe that’s it with gay marriage vs. civil union. But it doesn’t strike me as a very good argument - unless you can point to some material difference between the two, like you could with racially segregated school systems.
See my post just above. As far as I am aware, no monogamous* state-recognized married couple is ever considered anything but a married couple. A British Civil Parternship is exactly equivalent to a marriage within the UK (leaving aside religious issues), but not outside of it. Ergo, second class. It’s like having a US passport that allows you to travel to all 50 states but not to leave the country.
*It is my understanding that in the US, only the first marriage is recognized from those places that allow multiple spouses.
They didn’t just “not approve” – when Tom came out, his father attacked him physically and threatened him with a gun, and his mother tossed him out of the house.
(Fortunately, Shane’s family did the opposite – they not only completely accepted it, Tom was totally welcomed into their family. Shane’s nieces even called him “Uncle Tom”.)
Church ≠ religion. “The Church” refers to the insitution of a specific religion. Pre-Christian Roman religion did not have a Church, and did not in fact have churches. There were certainly priests and temples, and there was certainly marriage, and there was certainly a sacred element ***to ***marriage, just as there was to any other Roman contact. But no, marriage was not specifically a religious thing, and that was also the case for the early centuries of Christianity.
Is this something that would have been avoided if the UK called it “gay marriage” instead of a civil union?
If the dispute is over whether or not Canada has to recognize civil acts from the UK, I don’t know that calling it one thing or another would avoid the issue. It would just switch to “is a gay marriage in the UK the same as a gay marriage in Canada?”
Same thing if it is just people getting divorced who want to make trouble for each other, or avoid alimony or division of property. That’s always going to happen no matter what you call it.
If the UK had called it “marriage” instead of a civil partnership, then yes, it would have been avoided, because the history of Canadian recognition of British marriages is as old as Canada itself, and on Canada’s end, there is no distinction. Britain has decided that Canadian same-sex marriages are not marriages, but Civil Partnerships. I suspect that Canada has decided that Civil Partnerships are not marriages, but common-law marriages. As I am not a lawyer, I can’t tell you how this affects proceedings, but if two countries who have hose legal systems as close as Canada and the UK can’t work this out easily, it’s a pretty good indication that there is indeed a problem.
But why is it a Canadian court’s responsibility to parse the British legal definition of “civil union?” What if the British change their CU definition, as they can do at any time? I know they say “civil union” and “marriage” are equivalent for all legal purposes, but that can change, can’t it? If more countries make this half-assed civil union compromise, are Canadian courts obliged to keep international law books on hand and go on a case-by-case basis? I’m just waiting for the country that defines “civil union” but has the guts to admit that it’s not going to treated the same as a marriage.
An easier approach is “Canada will recognize marriages from other states that conform to Canadian law (i.e. no marriages to 12 year-olds, no polygamous marriages, etc.), and any and all marriage-like unions, regardless of definition, will be treated as common-law marriages.” I know it sucks and all, but during this time of transition while the rest of world grudgingly catches up, your best bet if you want your foreign not-quite-marriage to be recognized in Canada is to get married in Canada.
I’d like to reiterate that I’m only speculating on the circumstances of Hincks v. Gallardo. It just struck me as a likely response to the question of, if they wanted to part company, why they didn’t just part company. I gather at least one of them wanted a formal decree of divorce, and since there are no child-custody issues I’m aware of, I speculate that property division is involved.
As an afterthought, it occurs to me that maybe Hincks and/or Gallardo might want a divorce decree if one or the other were thinking about moving back to the U.K., with the possibility of meeting a new person and seeking a new civil union with them. I’m not sure what documentation the U.K. requires to demonstrate that an earlier civil union has been formally dissolved (I assume they don’t want people to have multiple civil unions in force at the same time). Would a Canadian divorce decree satisfy? I assume the decree wouldn’t refer to the dissolution of a “civil union”, since civil unions don’t exist in Canada, but to the dissolution of a “marriage”. Would the U.K. accept a “dissolution of marriage” document as equivalent to a “dissolution of civil union” document? Now they have to make a special case for our laws.
