I’m not sure I’m following you, but hopefully this answers your question. I’m in favour of same sex couples having the same legal rights and different sex couples. I’m not in favour of that legal relationship, in either case, being call a marriage by the state. If a couple wants to be married they should go to a church for that. The state is not interested in marriage and it should not use the term. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the state originally wanted to extend certain legal rights to married couples. Later the state rightly decided to extent those rights to couples who were not married by the traditional definition of that word (i.e. civil marriages) but it did not change the term it used to describe these couples. It still called them marriages, and by doing that it began to infringe on the meaning of that word. That was a mistake, and it should now be corrected. The government has no interest in marriages, and its incorrect use of that term has become increasingly problematic, so it should stop using the term and pick another one.
There's so much argument over semantics. If your church doesn't want to recognize gay marriage, then they don't have to. If the Catholic church doesn't want to recognize a divorce, nobody's forcing them to. Hell, if your church doesn't want to recognize interacial marriages, that's their constitutional right. I don't think that any church should be forced to recognize or perform a marriage that doesn't meet their own dogma, even if I disagree with it. However, the government (both federal and state) provides many benefits for a couple who enter into matrimony. If the government is going to grant those benefits to some, it needs to grant them to all. In this country we don't grant rights to some but exclude others. If you don't think a gay couple should have the same tax, inheritence, and medical benefits as your own marriage, you're a bigot. Granting them rights, does you no harm. You're trying to deny them due to your own prejudice. This to me is no different than trying to deny rights to someone because they're Jewish, Black, or Latino. You can dress it up however you want to try and justify it, but ultimately it's because you're discriminating against a minority which is bigotry. It's really inconcievable to me that we're having this debate at a time when we're "liberating" other countries from tyranny. Luckily our kids will look back on this the way most of look back on Segregation. Separate but equal doesn't work because separate never is equal. It's probably been posted before, but I'll post it again. <object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/GrEbJBFWIPk&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/GrEbJBFWIPk&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>
This is weird, given that all through those millenniums, governments around the world of all faiths (and no faiths at all) have always had an active legal role in marriage: determining who could get married, what rights it bestowed, etc. It seems you're the one trying to redefine the government role out of the term.
Topics like this are why I am so disillusioned in organized religion. It seems to me that more and more religions are just clinging to their age-old ideals of equality between all men and women...as well as patriarchal bigotry against women and homosexuals. The Catholic Church, I know, loves to rail against moral relativism and demands a measure of black and white. Well, what can be more clear-cut then this? The churches of the world better take it one way or another, or they should just straight up say; we are an organization dedicated to all of humanity, but heterosexual men are preferred. All people will confer us some matter of prestige. But if you differ from the norms, we will never grant you a position of power in this organization. We will never respect you. We will always try to change you into "one of us", because we are superior to you.
If your sense of any important concept is directly and deeply dependent on everyone else having exactly the same understanding and relationship with that concept, I have bad news regarding your future prospects for happiness.
The 'all non-religious marriages should be called civil unions' argument rings very hollow with me until someone can point to any significant organized effort to prevent the use of the term outside of the church before gay people tried to crash the party. I don't recall anyone actively trying to pass legislation to prevent thegary getting married (with the possible exception of mrsgary's family), nor being taken aback by his use of the term despite his clearly being a heathen.
Fair enough. I guess my point is, that based on the reasoning above you would vote No to the proposition in Maine and allow same sex marriage. In other words, you are in favor of giving same sex unions the exact same treatment as heterosexual unions, and as long as the government calls those unions marriages they should allow either type. That's your position, right?
If anything - in a lot of ways, marriage is less legal today than it has been throughout history. Certainly in Western countries. The current Western world's conception comes out of Victorian thinking and ritual. Historical marriage was mostly a contract bewteen two fathers. I will take your (mostly worthless) daughter off of your hands (through my son) if you give me X amount of liquid and fixed assets. It was done for financial, social, and/or political reasons, had nothing to do with love and family (other than producing children to help with income or labor), and religious morality was only applied secondarily to help maintain the contract through whichever society's moral norms (as far as we know, since the babylonians codified it). As such, I don't think we should talk about preserving history with this topic.
To be fair, a ban on certain marriages was invoked before, with tacit support from various religious groups. They were only repealed in the 1950s. They're a part of American history that seems to have been forgotten. And why not? It would certainly make a lot of people uncomfortable in our day and age to still have that discriminatory spirit with us.
As you know, and as Maine just re-proved, we do still have that discriminatory spirit with us. It's just a more 'acceptable' form of discrimination. No less shameful though. Kudos on torpedoing Grizzled's argument that religions have any business deciding who should be allowed to marry. They have a horrible, shameful track record there.
That's nonsense. Other countries also had armies and laws and currency. Should we not have any of those too since we're different? His argument was the opposite - that marriage should be treated as it always has been - as a religious term. However, it's incorrect because marriage has never been just a religious term; it's always been a governmental term.
I'm a bit confused by your use of 'to be fair' If you're referring to interracial marriage I don't think past opposition to that is a particularly effective illustration of the notion that current opposition to gay marriage is based on the sanctity of marriage rather then some form of ignorance, fear or bigotry.
I don't know. I think a return to traditional marriage could be awesome. I wish my father-in-law would send my father X amount of liquid and fixed assets. I think all he has, however, is a handle of Jack, a liter of Coca-cola, and a pellet gun.
Well said. I would be interested to see Grizzled respond to this, as it seems that he, and others, have a few misconceptions about the history of the institution of marriage.
As long as the government doesn’t call them marriages, you mean. Yes, that’s an accurate summary. I haven’t had a close look at the Maine proposition but if it’s like the California one I might not even vote, because it essentially amounts to a lose-lose proposition. Either way the proposition is needlessly taking rights away from one group. A progressive solution was not given as an option.
What's the difference between marriage and civil union? It's a word. That's it. Marriage is just a word. You can call it a civil union, you can call it marriage. If two people are recognized legally as a "civil union" and it has all the rights as "marriage"....than you've essentially are arguing that law and legal papers should just not use a word and this is all a semantic argument. I mean, people can just say they are married you know that right? Two men can say they are married - and that's it. The only question is if they get the same legal application - and if you are arguing for that, you are essentially saying you support "gay marriage"
