In answer to your question, the “Separate but (un)equal” part comes right here:
See? Two sets of laws: one set covers what people who want to drive who are over 18 have to do, and one set that covers what people who are over 18 have to do to drive. Note that one group has a significant additional hurdle to overcome. And the way the laws are structured, it’s trivially easy to add additional limitations to that group: if it’s decided that, say, the under 18 group shouldn’t be allowed to drive at night, you already have the bureaucratic machinery in position to add that, because you already have a body of law specifically targeting under 18 drivers.
The parallel here to your plan should be obvious. When a couple goes to the registrar, there’s a law that says, “If they’re opposite sex, they get a marriage license.” And there’s a law that says, “If they’re the same sex, they get a civil union license.” To your credit, that would be the only difference, but as with the driving situation, you’ve created a bureaucratic mechanism to distinguish between the two groups, which would vastly facilitate the later addition of new limits or entry barriers for gays attempting to access the same rights and privileges as straights.
Well, for future threads, a lot of time can be saved if, as soon as magellan weighs in, someone just summarizes his argument that hetero marriage is special, that gay marriage makes it less special, and specialness is undefinable.
And that in the future, something, might somehow, in some way, in some manner, be worse if we allow gay marriage. Based on no evidence aside from Magellan’s say-so.
Well, to be fair, the bible has instances of mixed race (or at least mixed ethnicity marriage) but not a lot of instances of same sex marriage (although there are a lot of cases of polygamy).
So, for a long time I was willing to give the conservatives the beenfit of the doubt. Then i saw the debate on repealing DADT and I realized its not the love or reverence for institution that is driving the movement to keep homosexuals out of the military or keep them from getting married. I don’t believe taht anymore.
Well if Sylvester McMonkey McBean’s Star on machine is allowed to operate then the all star-bellied sneetches would lose their specialness. It must be stopped at once!
Perhaps I don’t understand exactly what is being meant by “two seperate laws”. But I don’t really see the difference, in terms of how many laws there are, between;
and
and
Each are one paragraph. Each have two seperate groups who qualify. Each have additional stipulations determining the differences between the groups. Each group could still be targeted by seperate legislation, since they are purposefully distinct.
“Seperate, but equal”, is not necessarily bad (it can be, simply on the basis of seperation, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment). The reason they’ve become dirty words was because, in practice, they weren’t equal. I’m not a lawmaker. But if I had some kind of grudge against one group (and I certainly don’t think that of magellan), I can certainly see methods of adding inequality. The first situation is already inequal, as other have pointed out, because one group has an additional burden, which is judged to be necessary. But even so, all I would need to do as a lawmaker is define a narrow period in which the driver’s ed class must be taken, or a particular body to oversee the tests I know is biased, or come up with an incredibly difficult test, or charge a lot of money to take it, or repeatedly come out with new tests that must be passed, and the burden is ever-increased. Because even though it’s one law, we can still seperate the groups and apply different burdens because they’re seperated into groups within that law.
I suppose to issue a challenge back to magellan; can you come up with a phrasing of the kind of law that you might support that would entirely flummox someone trying to apply additional burdens (or privileges) to one group and not the other? Literally having marriage laws on one sheet of paper, and civil union laws on another, and deciding to put them on the same sheet of paper, even in the same paragraph, would loosely count as making one law out of two, but still easily allows for seperation, and therefore, potential inequality.
Heck, I was kind of curious how many counties would have “marriage license clerk” and “civil union clerk” as two separate positions, then find themselves oddly unable to fill the “civil union clerk” position because of budget cuts.
Sorry I’ve been unavailable to answer a bunch of people, but I’ve been swamped. And that is not going to let up soon, so I have, and will have, only very limited time.
Regarding the last part of the last paragraph, if there were laws for marriages and laws for civil unions meshed into one paragraph, that would NOT constitute one law and would tread into the negative aspects of “separate but equal”. I am not advocating anything of the sort. I provided just what you asked for once or twice in at least one previous thread, but I never have luck with the horrendous search feature so I’ll try to describe it.
There are two aspects to what I’m talking about. There is:
A) a set of things viewed as “good”
B) a stipulation as to who can tap into that goodness
In the segregation case, the “good” were the better schools. The groups identified as being able to have access to those schools were Whites and Blacks. The notion that Whites could go to some schools and Blacks to others, and that would be okay because the schools would be “separate but equal” was found to be VERY unlikely. So, the courts said that all schools could be accessed by both groups.
Back to SSM. The two groups here are gays and straights. If I were advocating that we’d have a set of civil union laws and a set of marriage laws, that would, in fact, be analogous to the separate bunt equal situation with the schools. But if the two groups—gays and straights—were to have available to them the very same, sole, ONE set of laws, then the separate but equal problem is gone. There is only the one set of “good” stuff. Yes, we still have two groups (just like Blacks and Whites), but they both have access to the identical “good”, i.e., the legal benefits and privileges that traditionally come with marriage.
As far as your request, I don’t think I’ll be able to do my older work justice but, something like (in bad lawyerese):
Article 3, Section 4
Marriage and Civil Unions and the Benefits Afforded Each Group
What follows are the benefits, rights, and privileges reserved for couples who have chosen to commit to each other through the ceremony of Marriage or a Civil Union. It is stipulated that while the benefits, rights, and privileges may, over time be altered, whatever changes that are made must apply to both groups, straight couples who have joined together in Marriage and gay couples that have joined together in a Civil Union. There will from this point forward be only one (1) set of benefits, rights and privileges for both groups.
He probably won’t respond to me, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.
Do states currently maintain omnibus lists of marital “benefits, rights and privileges” (and responsibilities, I assume)? I was under the impression that references to marital status pop up in numerous places throughout a venue’s civil and criminal code. Tracking them all down just to compile a comprehensive list would be quite the undertaking (and if any venue has already done this, I’d like to see it just for my own edification), and the only reason, it seems, to undertake such an effort is to say “this list applies to both marriages and civil unions.” Heck, the effort just duplicates existing law (and if it fails to do so perfectly, creates ambiguities and loopholes that can be exploited). Or does compiling an omnibus list render all other references to marriages moot/invalid, in which case you better make damn sure you don’t miss anything.
As an incidental note, I raised this same issue some months ago and didn’t get a clarification at the time.
Wouldn’t it be easier, indeed vastly easier, just to slightly expand the legal definition of marriage and just use existing laws relating to marriage? It’s still the right of any citizen to maintain his or her own personal definition of the term, and judge for themselves which marriages are “special” and which are not. I’m not sure why government should be in the “specialness” business.
I would still like to know the answer to what makes hetero-sexual marriage special in a way that same sex marriage is not. I suspect that deep down same sex marriage opponents feel that two men or two women can’t have the same depth of feeling towards each other, as a man and a woman can: bigotry through and through.
However, as my wife likes to comment, these same sex partnerships are much more real marriages than she had with her abusive ex. Even though their “marriage” was recognized while the same sex marriages aren’t.
So it’s separate but equal, but not separate but equal. How utterly original.
In any case, Magellan, have you addressed what are the problems with allowing same-sex couples to be married? Because you think that it will somehow hurt marriage, but have been so-far utterly unwilling or unable to explain yourself.
You are asserting something without evidence, and as such, your argument can be dismissed without evidence.
So there!
But really, I haven’t seen (or at least don’t recall) any offers of definitions of what makes a hetero marriage “special”, just the claim that whatever the nature of this specialness, it will be diminished or diluted by gay marriage.
What happens is when you are asked for an answer you tell people to re-read the thread. But obviously, we are having trouble figuring out what you’re saying from what you have already written.
To many in this thread, it appears that you have never answered those questions. It appears that you are making bald assertions and have no evidence to support them. If you have stated your answer, and given your evidence, you have failed to make it clear enough to be plainly clear from what you wrote.
Would you please explicitly, in a response to this post, answer my questions? Don’t you think that would be an honest thing to do?
Here’s my primary logical response to Megallan’s claim: So imagine a future 20 years down the line in which homophobia has decreased quite a bit, and gay people are generally treated with tolerance and respect, but which, for some weird reason, has adopted the Magellan rule, and loving-committed-lifelong-romantic-relationships-between-same-sex-people are legal but never referred to as “marriages”.
And some young child is growing up, and observing the actions and relationships of of the adults around her. And when she learns about marriage she asks “so, are mommy and daddy married?” “yes”. “Are grammy and grampy married?” “yes”. “Are uncle Rich and uncle Bob married” “no, they’re not”.
So this child’s example of how adult relationships work is based on 3 examples of committed romantic relationships, two of which are marriages and one of which is not. Comparing that to a society in which all three couples are married, is that more or less likely to make that child, when she herself grows up, think that getting married is an important life step?
To go back to the analogy about “specialness”, imagine an honor society or something at a school whose objective is to celebrate academic achievement and excellence, and which lets in boys with GPAs of 3.8 or higher. Now we could presumably make an argument that dropping the GPA requirement to 3.6 makes the club “less special” and thus makes it less able to fulfill its goal. If, on the other hand, it starts also admitting girls with GPAs of 3.8 or higher it now has potentially twice as many members, but it seems far MORE likely to now be able to properly fulfill its goal of encouraging and rewarding academic excellence… both because it is now open to girls (obviously a benefit in itself purely out of fairness) and because you won’t have people who, while Freshman, while deciding what organizations might be worth joining, observe that lots of people who achieve high levels of academic achievement in fact do not join that club.
If our goal is to encourage young people to (a) find partners for committed lifelong romantic relationships likely resulting in children, and (b) solemnize said relationships by entering into marriages, then we want to make the link between lifelong-romantic-committed-relationships and actually-getting-married as strong as possible. Allowing gay marriage makes that link stronger, disallowing it makes it weaker.
Oh, and by the way, I agree that Magellan’s argument is bafflingly bizarre and totally illogical. At the same time, the fact of the matter is that on the grand scheme of homophobia, a position that is basically “I’m totally OK with gays openly living in society in their loving public relationships and having every legal benefit of marriage, but just not using that word”, while insanely weird, is pretty damn far over on the right side of the bell curve… so calling him “vile” and other words to that effect seems to be to be a bit hyperbolic.
(On the other hand, I’m straight, so this issue, while one I’m pretty passionate about, is also one that I can go home to my legal wife every night and forget about, so it’s a bit facile for me to pass judgment on the emotional response of others…)