Missing the point

[pegkerr]

The (lack of) logic some people resort to in order to argue against gay marriage just amazes me sometimes. Their blindness to the obvious just boggles me. Here's a typical example that appeared in today's Star Tribune. In it, a libertarian absolutely ties himself into knots to argue against gay marriage. One thing that particularly struck me was this:

One could argue that gay couples want the same rights/responsibilities implied by the marriage laws. That is, they want to be governed by the same marriage laws.

This could easily be accommodated via civil union legislation.

However, gay marriage activists have rejected this idea. This rejection is a stumbling block to the libertarian argument for gay marriage. Under the civil union proposal, no right would be blocked to homosexual couples, yet this is not good enough.

So why do gay activists want marriage for homosexuals? The answer appears to be social validation.

Well, social validation is all very well, sure. But is this person so ignorant that he is really unaware of the real differences between civil unions and marriage? Marriage confers a whole host of rights, particularly on the federal level, that does not exist for any civil union as that term is understood in the United States today, rights concerning Social Security, the right to file federal income tax jointly, inheritance, etc. He blithely asserts that these rights could "easily be accommodated" by civil unions. If so, why aren't they now? And why the hell should gay people be told to be satisfied with a second-tier solution, as if their relationships aren't as real as those of heterosexual folk?

It reminds me of the stupidity of people who inquire plaintively why on earth would gays want to serve in the military anyway?

Uh, hello? Aside from the educational, employment and travel benefits, maybe it's because they love their country and want to participate in serving it, and it should be their right as citizens to do so?

I remember once helping elisem with a project to catalogue a library full of books at the University Club (or was it the University Women's Club??? Can't remember.) And one of our discoveries was that someone had donated a very large collection of anti-suffragette writings to that library, full of explanations of why it was immoral, unethical, stupid and ridiculous to give women the right to vote. The arguments in those books were absolutely fascinating in their tortured logic and willful blindness to the obvious: that women had every interest in voting, and that it was the right thing to do.

I think that about fifty years the arguments against gay marriage will seem as silly to us as those anti-suffrage arguments seem to us now.

The irksome thing is, how long will it take people to finally accept what is right and just? And how many families with GLBT citizens will be hurt in the meantime?

Yeah, and I did call my senators on the vote this week. Glad that horrible idea has been shut down for the time being. I'm sure we'll see that sucker again, however.

Comments

[samhudson.livejournal.com]

A similar sort of discussion is carrying on over here. Somewhat annoyingly, our MP (= Senator, sort of) is one of the most staunchly opposed (apparently it's not a 'family values' sort of thing).

Personally, I tend to think of denying homosexuals the right to marry as a sort of discrimination based on creed, which (if I remember correctly) is forbidden by the Constitution. Or maybe an Ammendment.

Some of these people are so blind.

(On a side note, marriage is all the more important because the U.S. does not recognise de facto relationships on many points: a friend of mine's boyfriend of eleven years (and father to her two children, I might add) got a job in New York. They had to get married on a month's notice, because otherwise the U.S. immigration service wouldn't let her and her children come across from Britain.)

Marriage

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

When I was in the Sign Language Interpreter program at Saint Paul Tech, one of the requirements was to study Deaf culture & history. I recall hearing something about prohobitions* against Deaf people marrying, and the reason was, of course, to protect children - Deaf parents would *of course* end up having Deaf children (IIRC most Deaf parents have hearing children).

I gotta research this some more, but I think making a parallel between this & prohobitions against queer people marrying really shows how stupid the whole thing is.

David ("I'm Not Willie Horton" Cummer
huladavidaol.ocm

*And I really don't understand what people have against hobbits...

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

There are plenty of people to rail against on this topic, but this letter writer might not be one of them. He writes, "This could easily be accommodated via civil union legislation" [italics mine]. He says "could be," not "are"; while civil unions as they exist now are not equivalent to marriage in terms of rights, there is no reason they couldn't be, with properly written legislation.

I would prefer that the government not be involved in "marriage" at all, for straight people or gay people. I would prefer something called by another name that emphasized its secular and legal character, such as civil union, legal domestic partnership, domestic contract, or the like. That's the only part of the union that the government has any business getting involved in, the legal aspect.

Religious institutions could have "marriage" ceremonies for those whom their tenets allow to be married, and individuals could whatever "marriage" ceremonies fit their personal values.

This is the way several European coutries handle it.

[markgritter.livejournal.com]

That actually brings up another good point, which is that even in states without same-sex marriage, there are still gay marriages performed by churches. I would hope that those marriages carry some weight with the religiously minded as well, although I fear the typical response is to dismiss them as either sham weddings or sham religions.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Well, you are right, re: civil unions could be written to make the rights equivilant, but that still begs the question, why should they have to be, when we have this institution of marriage which accomplishes the same thing? To me, it all smacks of arguments from the 1960s, where the southern states argued that black children could do perfectly well in colored schools, and why on earth would they want to go to white schools anyway? Yeah, perhaps black schools could be upgraded to so that they would match the benefits of regular [i.e., white] public schools, but why on earth should they have to go to different schools in the first place? Weren't they tax-paying citizens, too? (And speaking of wilful blindness, I also cannot believe the very vocal continent of black clergy who insist that, despite these obvious historical parallels, the issue of gay marriage has nothing to do with civil rights.)

And yeah, I do think I prefer your solution, that the government should be only overseeing the contractual aspect of "unions" be it gay or straight, and we'd leave religious aspects to the churches. Speaking as a religious person myself, it would make me a lot happier to take away the ability of politicians to pander to religious sensibilities in order to curry votes.

But then I'm one who believes that a gay union has as much validity religiously as a straight union, which puts me even more out there on the fringe of most American opinion.

Oh, and also

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

You're also correct that this is probably one of the less egregious examples to rail against. Yeah, I've seen much worse, haven't we all? But I still get frustrated when even those with "moderate" opinions argue against gay marriage.

Then I try to remind myself how far we've actually come, i.e., that now even many Republicans say that they can support civil unions. What a huge change that is culturally!

(But still . . .)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

If I wasn't clear before: I think that legally gay unions should be equivalent to straight unions. But I think that the government should give up its claim on the word "marriage" and simply issue licenses--to any mutually consenting adults, and yes, that means any number of them--to form the legal union. "Marriage" should be the ceremony that the involved individuals pick based on their own values and beliefs.

But then I'm one who believes that a gay union has as much validity religiously as a straight union, which puts me even more out there on the fringe of most American opinion.

Not belonging to any religion, and not even being a theist, I don't think I have the right to venture an opinion in this area, but if I was and I did have, it would be the same as yours.

Toss it all out: baby, bathwater, etc.

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

Well, we can be all fringe-y together then. :D I think, though, that the analogy of school desegregation is exactly why the anti-marriage bigots are so threatened. Schools were desegregated, white parents pulled their children out of public schools and put them in private and parochial schools that most black families couldn't afford, then because THEIR children weren't the ones benefitting from public schools anymore they fought to prevent school budgets from keeping pace with inflation and what private schools/wealthy school districts were spending, followed by asking the government for help paying their expensive private school tuition via vouchers, all because the bigots didn't want their kids going to school with black kids. The public school system was basically, as a result of desegregation, devalued in the minds of many people. But it certainly was the right thing to do and it wasn't the fault of people fighting for desegregation or of the black families. It was the fault of the bigots who fled the public school systems across the country.

Anti-marriage zealots are afraid that the same thing will happen to marriage if everyone is allow to do it: it will be devalued. Which is both ludicrous and has a precedent in the school desegregation debacle. The behavior of bigots is sometimes, unfortunately, horridly predictable.

Frankly, I think it's possible that we may eventually need to tread a third path between a) legal marriage for all and b) separate but unequal institutions--marriage and civil unions. The third path would be CIVIL UNIONS FOR ALL and marriage for NO ONE. That way the government doesn't have to deal with idiots who get all het up on a stupid WORD, a single sweeping law can be passed in all states that says that any place marriage was previously referred to in the law should be understood now to mean "civil unions," and no clergy, anywhere, would be authorized to solemnize civil unions. All of them would HAVE to be presided over by public officials (judges, justices of the peace, etc.).

Then if, in addition to having a civil union, you want to also get MARRIED and have a WEDDING, you can arrange that with the house of worship or clergy person(s) of your choice. That is what they do in France. Weddings are a church deal and the license that makes your relationship recognized in the civil sphere are two entirely different things and never the twain shall meet. There is entirely too much entanglement of church and state here for a country that purports not to have a state religion and it needs to END.

anti-suffrage

[(Anonymous)]

Damn! I've been looking for anti-Suffragist tracts forever on-line and you know what? You can't FIND them there! There are one or two pieces by *women* against suffrage, but nowhere do you find the hundreds of male editorials and screeds you KNOW were out there. arrr. I guess I can understand people not wanting to bother to put them up, or thinking it would just encourage evial, but doggone it. Was trying to help Carene with some research, is why. :-)

xxx, Mog

Yes...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Rather twisted article I thought. I keep thinking I've heard this "separate but equal" argument somewhere before...

[kaytecat.livejournal.com]

I do think I like the idea of "marriage" being taken away from the government and left to religious entities to decide what form marriage should take within their church or other religious organization. Some churches could decide to be narrow minded cretins, and discriminate against their members (no, I don't have a bias here (grin!), but seriously, so long as it is not my religion, I really don't have a say in what they believe or how they choose to interpret that belief, so long as they only impose it on their own members), and other religions could explore the diversity of the human condition with all forms of unions using whatever name is appropriate for that religion.

I also like the idea of civil unions (for 2 or more people of whatever gender) be granted, as a contract, separate from the religious context. Civil unions, in this scenario, would be a contract to unite people legally into one family, and would grant all the rights and responsibilities currently attached to "marriage".

Thus, the government is not interfering with religion, and religions are not messing with civil rights.

And, no, civil unions are not there yet. I don't think there is a good likelihood of them getting on an equal footing with marriage, as long as marriage carries a legal value and preference. So a distant second (or third, or fourth) choice would be to grant the legal definition of marriage to those who want it, regardless of the gender of those participating.

Sigh.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

You'll also find me in favor of contractual partnerships. Most of the "rights" of marriage are currently assigned by the government and only the government. I think that needs to be changed before a reasonable and equal system can be set up.

One thing that worries me about gay marriage is that a group of very on-the-ball gays has developed a nice set of contractual workarounds that's verging on better than the government version, and I'm worried that taking government marriage will be a step back, as well as killing development on that sort of thing. Essentially innovators caving in to the marriage monopoly.

Re: Toss it all out: baby, bathwater, etc.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Mostly public schools have been devalued because they haven't been serving their customers. My parents pulled me out of my (overwhelmingly white) public school for a private school. Why? Because I was getting the shit beaten out of me every day, and the administration flatly told us they didn't intend to do anything about it. So they put me in a school that would -- and that also happened to be only about 60% white.

Re: Toss it all out: baby, bathwater, etc.

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

Different parts of the country have different demographic situations in the schools. In general, because the kids of the wealthiest people this country don't go to public schools and the wealthiest people are also the ones giving the politicians the money they need to wage campaigns public schools are not a priority to politicians. It's not the chief concern of the folks helping them get elected. If it was they'd be doing something to keep kids from getting the shit beat out of them every day.

Re: Toss it all out: baby, bathwater, etc.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but I refuse to blame the fact that I got beaten up every day as the vice-principal watched on some bizarre sort of class-warfare. This was hardly a politician's fault.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and check out what just happened in Virginia. All those contractural work arounds were just outlawed by the state of Virginia, including wills, power of attorney, joint ownership of property, medical directives, even adoptions finalized in other states. See also an editorial here. This law is so overreaching that it may even render it impossible for people who are of the same gender to enter into any of this sort of contract together, for example, same gendered college roommates trying to sign a lease on an apartment.

Blindness and stupidity.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This was a problem in Nebraska as well: the law hasn't been interpreted that way, but if you wanted to read their anti-gay-marriage law literally, you could read it as forbidding same sex business partnerships.

Which might be an interesting way of getting more women in president/CEO-type positions, but is still just wrong.