Nah, the un-fucking-believable part is when he asked
[QUOTE= D’Anconia]
Isn’t justice supposed to be blind?
[/QUOTE]
to justify* arresting someone for refusing to leave their same-sex partner’s bedside.
(*Or maybe just minimize. Your pick)
There’s some people who are just compulsively oppositional. Or even perversely so.
Nuh-uh!
Pervert!
From this account, I feel like there’s something missing to the story.
Did they guy need to be admitted to the hospital? If not, why did they admit him? If so, why does the daughter blame the brother for the guy losing out on vacation deposits? And why does she end by saying he’ll be getting out soon, instead of by saying they cleared up the misunderstanding and he left right away?
What was the fight about? Was it about the guys’ treatment? The hospitalization?
I’m pro same-sex-marriage, and I’m in favor of spouse’s being in the patient’s room and participating in decisions and all that. But there’s something about this particular story that doesn’t add up.
I don’t know why it’s particularly important to this tread. D’Anconia asked if a specific thing had happened. Miller provided 3 different cites. D’Anconia chose to latch on to one. It’s really just an attempt to derail the thread unless she can similarly discredit the other 2 cites which she hasn’t even acknowledged.
As a “straight” person I’d almost rather have universal civil unions. I never much cared to get “married” myself, but I did. I was privileged enough to be able to just do it, and not think too much about it. Maybe if I were denied access, I would be much more interested in having one. What the Netherlands has to do with a social/ political issue in a country where most public officials are required to be outwardly Christian and kiss ass of religious bigots, I have no f-ing clue.
I like what we ended up having in Spain, where the two systems are parallel. While not every religious officer can act as a civil officer, many can; people can choose to be civil-married but not religious-married, vice versa or both. The vice versa is usually chosen when there would be negative economic consequences to getting a civil marriage, such as loss of retirement pensions.
Honestly, I don’t know any more than what’s been reported. Some aspects of the story seem a bit incomplete to me, but I don’t really know. But I was arguing primarily in defense of Miller’s cite. “Marriage” confers certain understood rights, and it appears that in this case, the understood rights of a “civil union” were ignored.
At the risk of an own goal, what, in practice, can a patient’s legal spouse do if a medical facility refuses to acknowledge the marriage for whatever reason?
If in the (hypo perhaps tenuously based on) the case being argued about, the patient and his partner were legally married but the homophobic hospital staff refused to treat the husband as they would a patient’s different-sex spouse, would the outcome have been significantly different?
Probably not. But with the existence of national SSM, it becomes a lot harder for someone to argue against there being a marriage solely on the basis of “Gee, how could we have known they were married?” Obviously, no law is immune from dumbasses. 
Hypothetical. **IF **there was a federal bill passed that superseded all state laws and altered other federal laws to make the designation of a civil union legally identical in all ways to the designation of marriage, do you think the call to call committed gay relationships marriage instead of civil unions would have abated?
I don’t, because I don’t believe part of the fight was for social/societal acceptance of gay relationships in a more official manner, a turning of the tide that could only be granted by the honorific, “marriage.”
Incidentally, I liked the result of the gay marriage ruling, but now how we got there. I’d much have preferred state after state abandon the traditional definition of marriage and expand it to include gay couples. But the equal protection argument always struck me as a a willfully deceitful one. People always pretend that their own personal limits are some high minded and airtight logical analysis of the nature of the relationships in question when they debate whether there is a meaningful difference between the relationship status of hetero couples and homosexual couples and… polygamist relationships wanting to be called marriage. What about marrying two 15 year olds? You want to know the airtight logical argument about why we grant special treatment of one group against another? Why some restrictions cut out some pairings or groups of people all clustered together?
The arbitrary blessing and sanction of man. The reason gay marriage is OK today is not because of equal protection, it’s because important people making the decision decided that gay couples are not meaningfully different than straight couples. Had the same case come before the court 50 years ago different important people would have come to a different conclusion. What changed? The arguments details about equal protection, no, the minds of men.
It’s ARBITRARY. And that’s OK. People fight to the death to deny any arbitrary elements to why we approve of x vs y. But that’s how a lot of our decisions and attitudes are constructed. The reason we allow gay marriage now is because our standards of what we consider a relationship worth blessing has expanding to include gay relationships. IF it ever expanded to include polygamist relationships we’d OK those marriages too, but I doubt we will on that front anytime soon. Not because of some made up hand wavy argument about the different numbers and natures of the relationship, because most people find those pairings questionable and suspect. (imo for good reason, we all have these internal metrics, and they are NOT absolute laws of the universe arrived at from pure reason, that is a conceit.)
I don’t think it’s a fuck you to social conservative marriages, I DO think it’s a fuck you to their conception of what a proper marriage is.
Society writ large has taken the measure of their conception, placed it up to be analyzed and judged, and REJECTED their standard. I agree with that rejection, but it’s still a repudiation of their conception of marriage. I don’t see any way around that. And that’s fine by me.
Well, he could have sued the hospital in that case. Or sought an injunction allowing him to visit his husband. In the context of an unrecognized relationship without a power of attorney, he couldn’t do either.
If the compromise had been offered early, and in good faith, it might have succeeded.
As I note above, it still would have failed ultimately, as people in “Civil Unions” would have spoken of themselves as “married,” and there isn’t a damn thing that anyone can do to stop that.
You’re only partways right here. Part of the fight was for social/societal acceptance. But part of it was for equal legal accommodation, and if that had been offered, many would have accepted it.
(And…if the fight was for social/societal acceptance…great! Super! That’s a good thing. What possible reason is there do deny social acceptance of a class of persons on such a basis? What did society really lose, in any kind of real terms, when that acceptance began to be realized? The world is a better place because of that acceptance.)
Fair enough.
Whoa. Your extreme homophobia is showing. Gay men and women make wonderful parents. Or crappy parents. Or OK parents. Just like heteros. Your ability as a parent is not linked to your sexuality.
Whoa. Sexism. Get you some. Oh, wait. You already have some. I am bold, love to take risks and, frankly, am a dick sometimes. I’m also a woman married to a man. So, there you go. Stereotypes. They’re just not true.
Actually, in the vast majority of history, women were simply a form of currency and marriage was the payoff. They had no rights and certainly no say in whom they married.
And no rights to inherit or own property in their own right.
That’s varied a lot by time and place. In traditional Jewish law, a wife is sort of a superior slave, who is owned by her husband, but women do have rights to own property. It was customary for a woman to sell herself into marriage in exchange for a bride price which was held in escrow, but given to her outright in the event her husband divorced her.