What Do You Think About Marriage...?

[AdamAndWill]

Will: I posted this yesterday and then got called in to work - and when I came back to it this morning, I was amazed at the number of responses and by the serious and thoughtful discussion. I was particularly struck by what MikeW said about being role models for gay kids.

I was 16 the first time I saw 2 men walking down the street in Provincetown holding hands, and even that small a thing had a huge impact on me. I felt less alone, more like I belonged to something and was part of a larger community.

And Iceblink made some excellent points about the legal benefits. At present, we've cobbled together a very imperfect framework of legal protections, and doing so was ridiculously expensive.

Our original plan was a quick trip to City Hall, but the rector of our church convinced us that marrying openly and publicly, and allowing the congregation to celebrate with us, would be an affirmation of marriage equality.

Thanks to everyone who responded - there's A LOT to think about here...

[Steve]

Bhp91126: My definitions of getting married and a wedding come from an even higher authority: Hollywood!
Steve Martin in "Father of the Bride" explains it as the difference between the legal contract made in front of a city-official and the circus-productions that modern weddings have become...

Now I get it Bph! Why didn't you say so in the first place darlin'? I have watched enough Bette Davis, Lucille Ball, and Marilyn Monroe movies to understand the importance level involved. I should have made the "Father of the Bride" connection sooner. And for the record, I agree wholeheartedly about the rest of your post as well.

For the record: I agree with meme.

[SIZE="6"][COLOR="Navy"]Separate but Equal is B.S.
Equal Rights = Civil Rights.[/COLOR][/SIZE]

To ignore all of the activist work in getting us thus far toward marriage in the US, toward equal rights being denied our communities, isn't about simply love. I'm glad you're in love and want to marry. No one discounts romance. Hell I'm a romance addict. But sentimentality and love aren't the biggest issues here. You can be in a loving relationship the size of North America, but if you don't have the choice to legalize your union, what you have is a lovely scrap of paper that means nothing legally, romantic as it may well be to partnership of two people. If you don't want to marry that should be your choice, What is important for all of us is that we have the choice. The same choice heterosexual couples get, even if half of all marriages (gay or straight) end in divorce. We are no less human than anyone else on the planet. Cut us and we bleed, like everyone else. We are not separate, we are equal.

[Virge]

[SIZE="4"][COLOR="Red"]With my first comment I did my best to keep it short for a change. I know everyone in GS is sick and tired of me ranting about things like this... and THIS is one that I've never really ranted about here.

The best way to describe what Jay and I conceived our marriage is to make it unforgettable --- not for us because the ceremony we went through on August 15th was as 'legal' as the one we'll have here July 11th in the presence of 4 famous US presidents with a reception that will be so over the top people will be talking about it for years and maybe decades.

From December 26th to late July 2015 our lives will be recorded and --- hopefully --- later edited and broadcast for all to see ---- so that younger people will be able to see it and say 'if they can do it, I can do it.' If it's not legal here by the time we're ready to marry .... GREAT!!!! We'll be documenting the ordeal of having to leave home, family and friends to make it legal ALONE in others states. Hahahahaha!

And ........... the big question is..........
how do we lure Westboro Baptists here to help us celebrate.

[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[MikeW]

I don't understand how anyone who IS gay can oppose equal rights for gay people. Why shouldn't we have the SAME rights as straight people? Like others are saying, this isn't about "me" or "you" -- it is about all of us and all of us yet to come.

Now, today, we have the right to find one another, to date, have sex, build relationships -- all without the fear of arrest, incarceration, public exposure, the loss of social standing and our jobs, being labeled a sex offender under the law, and regarded as psycho-sexual deviants -- all because we sought out and or engaged in "lewd" (non procreative) sex.

Fifty years ago, that not only COULD happen, IT DID happen on a regular basis. We could and did get arrested and were beaten by police for being homosexual. We could and were subjected to regular assault and battery, even murdered, by haters and homophobes -- with no protections, no redress of grievance. We could and were denied housing, jobs, and all the other legal protections other straight white men (and eventually women and eventually black and other minorities) have. We could and were regarded as psycho-sexual deviants and could be committed to mental institutions with NO legal rights at all.

All that and much more didn't change because straight white men just decided to be nicer to us. That changed because gay people ORGANIZED into political groups that built alliances between themselves and other groups and applied pressure to l governing bodies -- at times engaging in civil disobedience (the willingness to get arrested), demanding that the laws be changed, vowing to continue to agitate until they WERE changed.

That work of gaining equality is not over (see below). But as well as attaining complete equality, don't ever ever ever think for one minute that what legal protections we now have can't be taken away again. They can and will if we don't continue fight those who view us as immoral sexual deviants.

We're still second class citizens. Just a quick search found these instances where WE ARE NOT equal under the law to "straight" people:

• Without the right to marry, you and your partner can not have (this is a partial list):
  • Joint parental rights of children
    
  • Joint adoption
    
  • Status as "next-of-kin" for hospital visits and medical decisions
    
  • Right to make a decision about the disposal of loved ones remains
    
  • Immigration and residency for partners from other countries
    
  • Crime victims recovery benefits
    
  • Domestic violence protection orders
    
  • Judicial protections and immunity
    
  • Automatic inheritance in the absence of a will
    
  • Public safety officers death benefits
    
  • Spousal veterans benefits
    
  • Social Security
    
  • Medicare
    
  • Joint filing of tax returns
    
  • Wrongful death benefits for surviving partner and children
    
  • Bereavement or sick leave to care for partner or children
    
  • Child support
    
  • Joint Insurance Plans
    
  • Tax credits including: Child tax credit, Hope and lifetime learning credits
    
  • Deferred Compensation for pension and IRAs
    
  • Estate and gift tax benefits
    
  • Welfare and public assistance
    
  • Joint housing for elderly
    
  • Credit protection
    
  • Medical care for survivors and dependents of certain veterans
    
• Currently (this may not be factually accurate but so far as I can make out) 31 States ban same-sex marriage: 26 by constitutional amendment and state law; 2 by constitutional amendment only; 3 by state law only. There are 12 states where gay marriage bans have been overturned BUT appeals against those judicial opinions are in progress.
  
• Job Security: In a majority of states, employees can be fired just for being gay. The Employment Nondiscrimination Act first accepted by congress in 2007 prohibits discrimination of sexual orientation in the workplace, specifically during hiring, but it is not equally followed or applied in all states and can not always be enforced without lengthy and costly legal battles.
  
• Protection from Discrimination: In many states, you do not have the right to protection from harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation.
  
• In July 2009, the Senate approved the Matthew Shepard Act, which outlaws hate crimes based on both sexual orientation and gender identity. However, In the U.S., 75 percent of students have no state laws to protect them from harassment and discrimination in school based on their sexual orientation. In public high schools, 97 percent of students report regularly hearing homophobic remarks from their peers. Moreover, of the estimated 1.6 million homeless American youth, between 20 and 40 percent identify as LGBT. In one study, 26 percent of gay teens who came out to their parents or guardians were told they must leave home.

If you don't want equal rights for LGBT people, why not?

[MikeW]

[size="4"][color="red"]with my first comment i did my best to keep it short for a change. I know everyone in gs is sick and tired of me ranting about things like this... And this is one that i've never really ranted about here.

The best way to describe what jay and i conceived our marriage is to make it unforgettable --- not for us because the ceremony we went through on august 15th was as 'legal' as the one we'll have here july 11th in the presence of 4 famous us presidents with a reception that will be so over the top people will be talking about it for years and maybe decades.

From december 26th to late july 2015 our lives will be recorded and --- hopefully --- later edited and broadcast for all to see ---- so that younger people will be able to see it and say 'if they can do it, i can do it.' if it's not legal here by the time we're ready to marry .... Great!!!! We'll be documenting the ordeal of having to leave home, family and friends to make it legal alone in others states. Hahahahaha!

And ........... The big question is..........
How do we lure westboro baptists here to help us celebrate.

[/color][/size]

lol that is so awesome!

[Steve]

[COLOR="Navy"]Original Except from memechose post:
[/COLOR]

"...The best way to describe what Jay and I conceived our marriage is to make it unforgettable --- not for us because the ceremony we went through on August 15th was as 'legal' as the one we'll have here July 11th in the presence of 4 famous US presidents with a reception that will be so over the top people will be talking about it for years and maybe decades."

Proud of you both meme. Glad to be able to call you friend.

ASIDE: Those Presidents will be living ones, won't they?

Continued excerpt from memechose post:

"...And ........... the big question is..........
how do we lure Westboro Baptists here to help us celebrate."

Chloroform?

[Maverick]

Cant wait to hear about / see what all memechose has planned...

[Aike]

I realize you're from Europe so you do not have this same sort of frame of reference to draw upon, but how familiar are you with the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.? If we'd left things up to the individual attitudes of individual people in individual communities in individual states across the whole country, I can guarantee you that laws against mixed-race marriages would still exist in some parts of the country. Hell every single year we still hear about some small town somewhere cancelling the local h.s. prom and converting it into a private invitation-only party because parents in the local community are so against white-black dates attending.

When it comes to legal and procedural equality and rights of the minority, I think it's both unrealistic and unfair to tie the progress to how rapidly or how slowly individual attitudes change when there is no legal basis for continuing to uphold unjust distinctions in law.

Sometimes unfortunately it's a case of you have to write off some bigoted people as a loss, disenfranchise their power to enact their prejudices, silence them, shame them, sideline them, and wait for them to die off.

I never said it's an either-or situation. By all means, use all the legal arguments you want and ground those views on constitutional rights or the notion of equality (which, by the way, is not merely a factual statement but also a normative principle, a value, even if inscribed into the law) in your struggles for gay marriage, etc. What I was trying to say is that we should not lose sight of moral struggles and also fight for our own set of values against those who pretend to cherish so called family values, etc. Values are never just a matter of arbitrary subjective opinions. They structure our social reality and codify communal living, i.e. they create distinctions between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of behavior and set the rules of what it is to be included, socially recognized, in the society. Values are a very social matter and worth fighting for.

In the case of marriage, to take an example from my own country, there has been a debate on whether the Evangelical-Lutheran Church, the national church of Finland, should recognize gay marriage in the form of performing wedding ceremonies. As the law does not extend to the Church's internal matters, as it doesn't force them to perform wedding ceremonies for gay couples, it doesn't help those gay people, who would want to have a church wedding for religious reasons, one bit whether they possess a marriage certificate and all the legal entitlements provided to them by the state or not.

To take another less religious example: In various applications, such as job applications, the applicant is often asked to inform on his or her marital status. Now, in the case of gay people who have registered their partnership, to cross the "civil union" box in the application can be taken as an indirect confession of one's sexual orientation, which might then affect the outcome of your job interview. It's obvious that this problem wouldn't exist if gay people could get their partnership officially recognized as a "marriage". However, at the same time, that's not a legal argument: the problem would prevail even if civil unions had exactly the same legal entitlements as marriage.

We have something that's become something of a "saying" in America, and it's based on our history: separate is never equal. It wasn't with segregated schools, or segregated neighborhoods, etc.

My problem with a "separate" marriage-alternate for gay couples is that it's just begging for situations like a gay couple winds up with one of them injured in a hospital in another state and that state's hospitals only recognize "married" partners, not civil unions. We already have these kinds of problems. Give people hostile to gay rights any ground upon which to treat a gay couple as not having the exact same equal right or union as a straight couple, and you will see it used in policy or procedure or law in those places.

In my view making gay marriage completely identical to straight marriage is the only way to ensure that people will not assign gay unions to a lesser status or lesser recognition in practice.

We have already tried separate but equal without great success. Second, what would be the reason for there to be something separate? There would have to be some compelling reason to give some people something different than others, and outside of the government saying there was something religious about a government-issued marriage license, I can't think of anything else that could be used to justify saying there was something different. It would therefore be the government sanctioning a religious view and that could set a dangerous precedent in all kinds of areas of our lives beyond religion.

I agree with all of that but to argue like this already means that you're expanding the grounds of your argument. In other words, you're both arguing here that just having the same legal entitlements as straight people is not enough. If it was, the principle of nominally-separate-but-legally-equal would be fine, which you're both denying here on the grounds that all sorts of other factors come into play, which might distort the actual real-life outcomes of equality on the level of legislation only.

[Uneunsae]

Finally, I think marriage is very important if you want to have a family. It creates a bond that isn't just emotional but has roots in the legal underpinnings of the society itself. It creates a sense of safety for all involved. Of course *anything* can happen, but that's the point. A marriage constitutes a "family unit" that has its own established place in society.

Yeah, I agree with you... If I was planning on having children, there's no question that I would marry my partner. I feel that this is extremely important.

[LJay]

While I can't see myself as married, I don't have any objections to whose who wish to be doing so.

I do think there should be a right to marry for those who wish to exercise it, even straight people.