What Do You Think About Marriage...?

[wayward]

I was lately enamored by the idea of marriage... a wedding, not so much. When I was a little younger I didn't have interest to be married, because it seemed a superficial formality, which I feared would obstruct the natural course of a relationship. I do desire to have the choice available to me, but I'm not entirely concrete on my views at the moment.

[wayward]

So, if same-sex couples were given exactly the same legal rights and benefits as married couples get except that they couldn't get married but only have their partnership registered (i.e. civil union), it would be OK?

Personally, I am opposed to bigotry on the level of semantics.

[Iceblink]

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.

No, I'm not expanding the grounds of my argument. I'm just not allowing them to expand the grounds of their argument beyond a legal one in advocating one thing for one set of people and something else for another. I'm asking them to make a sound legal argument about why there should two systems, even if equal, and they have no such argument they can make. I am asking them to leave their emotional and religious judgments out of this and I am not allowing the government to make those judgments about me, which is what happens if you accept something by one name for some and another name for others.

[larafan25]

Iiiii

do not wish

to get married.

EVER.

[Bowyn Aerrow]

Wow! I never expected so many different perspectives on this and wouldn't you know it,.... I'm going to add a few more to this. hahahhahaha!

First ---
If you don't support the concept of same-sex marriages then you should at least support the effort and the struggle and make your support known. We who are working to achieve it not only for ourselves but for all like us yet to be born --- are confronting the very people who have made it their business to oppress, kill and imprison gays for 3,000 years based on bronze age religious Blicti (a Llanito word meaning "not worth an iota' or "meaningless words.")

Second ----
Reading the 35 LONG comments on this my work became real easy. I quit reading as soon as I came to anything about how the commenter felt same-sex marriage had no bearing on HIS life or HE had no intention of getting married if it becomes legal. I didn't stop reading because the opinions differed from mine. I stopped because this isn't an issue that should be looked at from an egocentric perspective limited to how it will effect YOU. There's a hell of a lot more at stake here than any single one person and failures of some to recognize that is a disappointment. This issue is bigger than men getting the right to get married. It is about establishing EQUALITY. If the opponents of same-sex marriage prevail they will not stop there in spite of what you'd like to think while you sit back in your life and don't want to be bothered. They will continuously seek to warp laws in order to discriminate, ostracize and even punish "ungodly unheterosexual people." NEVER underestimate the fundamentalists.

I will not even begin to discuss how being able to marry my man will change our lives or anything else about us. I will say this and be done with it. We're going to do it in a way in state where it's not yet legal that will embarrass the hell out of the people who oppose it...not for "us" but because of "all of us here now and yet to come."

Let us all pray for Mem that his life continues to be as sheltered and clearly 'lucky' as it appears to be.

Now I'm going to do the bad thing... I'm going to pull the Age Card.

20-25 years from now don't be surprised if you end up jaded and cranky about marriage and many other things.

[LJay]

Stevie and Iceblink, I don't know how it is in other countries but in the US a religious wedding means nothing to the state. any minister who performs weddings will tell you that the signing of the certificate with witnesses is what counts to the government. Most ministers do this before the ceremony.

As for not wanting a church wedding, that's easy. My parents were married by a justice of the peace. I even had a couple of friends (straight) who wanted to get married and could not figure out where to do it, so they came to the house, had a couple to be their witnesses and a magistrate came to do the service. We had sparkling cider and peanuts afterward and the newlyweds stood on the front porch and smoked a cigar. I think she liked the cigar better than he did.

[Buzzer]

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?

I understand WHERE it's coming from (though I don't agree with it.) The push-back forces against gay marriage have successfully sold the story in the public that the legal rights should be regarded as separate from the concept (or "intellectual property", if you will) of the notion many people have of marriage as something traditional and cultural and in many cases with specific religious meaning based on the individual in question.

So I understand how people wind up considering "compromises" as we're surrounded with an argument of: yes yes okay whatever, fight for your legal rights, but why do you have to take MARRIAGE away from those of us who imbue it with a special extralegal meaning that is core to our beliefs or our religion or our cultural identity?

It's miguided, though (I believe) generally not malicious in intent when gay people end up falling into that reasoning. I've made several long posts in this thread already about my views about how separate is never equal, so my stance on that is really clear, but I think that's where the "why can't we just go for the equal rights under a different name" comes from.

[wayward]

peanuts sound good LJay

[Buzzer]

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.

I don't understand. You make it sound as though the paradigm of gay people somehow presents an entirely different family structure or set of family values as a straight couple. My family values are the same as if I were a straight person... and they're the same ones my straight parents taught me. Forgive me if I'm not understanding the distinction you're drawing here correctly, but I couldn't figure out what else you're saying here about how this is "not just arbitrary subjective opinions, these sets of values structure our social reality." Gay people are not proposing the introduction of any new, alien, foreign sets of values.

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.

Again, I realize you're European and do not have this same history, but our courts and legal system do not recognize that separate but equal can work, it violates Equal Protections guaranteed as a right of citizens because segregated institutions were recognized as inherently unequal.

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Bo..._Education

[discreetserpent]

best wishes! it shouldn't matter what other people are thinking... as long as you're happy with the decision