I don't think making gay marriage legal should be so important to us
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While "gay marriage" may not be the most important part of our battle for equality, it's been the biggest catalyst. I never imagined in my lifetime I would see such strides and acceptance. We're not there yet, but we're getting there. The best part is seeing kids and teenagers come out with more support and acceptance than even 5-10 years ago.
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Imagine laying your husband dying in your deathbed. The doctors came in and ask you if your a relative. and you say you are his partner. You do not have fundamental rights because first and foremost if your are not LEAGALLY MARRIED. you have no rights to hospital visit.
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The most important thing I see is the right to your own kids that comes from marriage.
If the biological parent dies, the states can take away your kid and won't even allow you to apply for adoption to get your own kid back because you aren't married and some states don't allow gays to adopt.
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Straight marriage is a borderline joke. I mean, most of them are based on convenience, money, family pressure, etc. And there's the 50%+ divorce rate. What grinds my gears is the length some straight people go through to "protect" marriage. There's nothing to protect, it's a joke. Sometimes it seems like a fantasy, like Santa Claus but for adults.
But when gay people aren't given the right and the chance at it, it's insulting to them. Am I the only one who thinks like this?
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I think is a huge enough thing like a lot of comments shows about legal stuff and recognition…
In my country it been legal for 10 years, i'm not from a generation who have had to fight for that or use to think on it (i'm 25), but i think not coca cola have right now an advertising about families with adopted children with a couple of fathers in it, if gay marriage was not legal and accepted by the society. I think the idea of family is changing, growing and evolving for all the society and that is one of the steps to do for start it.
All my best wishes and support with you all are fighting for our rights. -
Marriage in any form is not great for everyone. There are pros and cons.. The fact that gay marriage isn't legal is the exact same as white not being able to marry black. We are all human….
My partner and I will have to pay a lot more taxes when we get married - If Texas gets with the program.
But when he coded on the operating table at Baylor - I was worried they hospital would treat me like I was his "person". They did the exact opposite. They are holding my hand and took me to see him. He's fine btw...
For our on peace of mind... I want to make sure that he is making life or death decisions for me if it comes to that.. NOT MY MOTHER!!! We need to be able to take care of ourselves... we don't have the benefit of dumping our old age on our kids!!
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I agree with this 100% - the key issue is no discrimination, by forcing people to accept things and redefine terminology, we're only preventing the former from happening.
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Interesting points of view in this thread. Not all gays support gay marriage. I think there is a political agenda at work.
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I agree with this 100% - the key issue is no discrimination, by forcing people to accept things and redefine terminology, we're only preventing the former from happening.
It's basically the same fight that happened in the US during the 1950s thru to late 1960s with interracial marriage.
In both the interracial marriage and gay marriage fight, the Supreme Court forced it on the minority that was against it.
In the west, governments force people to "accept" others all the time.
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More like making laws able to prosecute hate crimes …
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You're saying that you want a separate-but-equal status (like what African Americans had in the United States before the 1960s), and that's naive of you to think it's remotely workable.
Like it or not, there are real legal rights and statuses tied to having a legal document proving a certain person is your spouse … taxes, critical health situations and power to make decisions in those situations, ownership of property, guardianship of minors, blah blah blah ... so much is deeply rooted in having that legal status of being "married" to a person.
Sure, it would be TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE to run down a checklist of all 1,001 laws on the books that marriage affects and "correct" them individually (each one of which would be a congressional battle in its own right, and be a nasty clusterfuck, but I guess it could be done) to essentially give us the same rights with our partners that a straight married couple has right out of the box with a brand new, $15 marriage certificate ... you could do it.
Why, though? The quickest route is just to say LET GAYS GET MARRIED. It's less complicated, and it also means an important cultural victory for us. It fixes all 1,001 laws of those little issues in one fell swoop, and ensures that the particularly uptight people in the societies in which we live are forced to adjust to a mainstreaming of us. It basically means that a homophobe's grandchildren are going to understand, a few decades from now, that we are a part of humanity and a certain ratio of gays, lesbians, gender-swapped, yadda yadda individuals in the general population is a NORMAL THING.
...you wouldn't achieve that cultural victory without fighting for the word. The word is important. I want the WORD "marriage." Fuck not getting it. Yes, it's important.
.... at any rate, at least in the United States, this argument is moot and would've been more appropriate a year ago. All other developed nations will fall in line soon. We have the word; the issue is getting close to being over.
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Imagine laying your husband dying in your deathbed. The doctors came in and ask you if your a relative. and you say you are his partner. You do not have fundamental rights because first and foremost if your are not LEAGALLY MARRIED. you have no rights to hospital visit.
this argument is null and void in Australia where a Civil Union gives you the same spousal family rights as a married person
in areas such as visitation etc.
i cant speak on behalf of other nations though -
agree
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Remove the State from the business of marrying people. No more State-issued marriage licenses for anyone. Problem solved!
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Remove the State from the business of marrying people. No more State-issued marriage licenses for anyone. Problem solved!
THIS!
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I know a lot of the people around now don't remember, but for a long time the gay community decided that they would just live in a separate world, more or less, than the mainstream 'straight world'. I know even a lot of the younger gay people experiencing the 'gay ghetto' in a city for the first time didn't really give it much thought that, in fact, the atmosphere was always so different there, and that the gay community had completely different attitudes, overall, to a number of things.
I agree – I think marriage is a sham. And I think that frankly it's insulting that now that marriage is worthless and basically something discarded by the people who always took it for granted, oh -- now we can have something like it? Gee, thanks.
To be frank, nothing's going to change unless and until these authorities, these politicians, and everyone else, actually stand behind what they say. It's great to say 'you have to honour visitation rights', but it's not that special if you don't actually enforce that. Equality isn't going to happen until we have that enforced. It doesn't matter if you call it marriage, civil unions, or pootonkto glameetra. And yeah, being able to marry is important to some, but the rest? Who cares! I'm never going to get married.
But I do expect the same human rights afforded to everyone else. And that is not an unreasonable expectation. Until that happens, I'm not going to be satisfied.
And I'm certainly not going to be one of the self-loathing hypocrites who bashes gays who are comfortable in their identity because ooh, we might not get a pat on the head and blend in with the heteros. Some of us need to get over this fixation on approval by straight people.
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They (governments that have marriage equality) are enforcing these rights.
If a hospital won't let you see your civil partner, husband or wife, then call the police. Call the media too.
YES, there are still plenty of areas that gays need equality in, especially in the US. However, that does not make marriage unimportant.
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i agree. gay marriage shouldn't be that important to us mainly because gay couples have survived centuries without the benefit of them being legally recognized. gay marriage in my opinion is more of sticking the middle finger to society at large rather than be what real marriage is all about -love. love is not a right we have to fight for. love is not a legally binding document we have to sign to prove it. if anything else, gay marriage is more of a financial convenience as the couple will benefit from lower taxes, etc. there is also a looming problem caused by gay marriage and that is gay divorce. can you imagine queens in the courtroom fighting over who gets the fleshlight? also, how sad is this?:
http://www.totaldivorce.com/news/articles/society/first-gay-couple-married-file-for-divorce.aspx -
Remove the State from the business of marrying people. No more State-issued marriage licenses for anyone. Problem solved!
This is something that I constantly hear libertarian-oriented people say, but the truth of the matter is that to honestly expect that to happen very easily is a bit … naive. We all wear those ideaology-shaded glasses once in a while.
The legal status of traditional marriage, for better or worse, is deeply wrapped up into our legal and tax systems to convey certain benefits across a wide swathe of life's obligations. The courts and mainstream culture view the arrangement as a binding partnership agreement, and the creeping tendrils of that status penetrates EVERYTHING about your finances and interactions with the State.
To nitpick over this because of some ideals-based notion that the government shouldn't be involved in marriage whatsoever ignores the fact that they already HAVE, and that battle is pretty much over. To try to win equality on a multitude of legal issues involving gay couples, to put them on something of a level playing field as a traditional hetero married couple, would mean a slow, tedious, expensive, and possibly-unwinnable-battle process of methodically untangling a complicated tapestry of legal rights in the court systems … and to make matters more aggravating, it would mean doing the same thing in every state and county in the country. Local marriage laws can differ quite a bit.
It's a lot, LOT more simple from a civil rights strategy standpoint to just knock all that mess out in one punch, by insisting on earning the legal and cultural concept of what the vast majority of the country grew up understanding (what marriage means for a human being) ... rather than spending the next 100 years necessary to unravel our system and remake the nation culturually and politically anew into a LIBERTARIAN UTOPIA OMGZ!!! (if that's what you're into), because government-completely-out-of-marriage would require a movement about that revolutionary.
TL;DR VERSION: Yes, yes it should be important to us. To earn the very word itself carries a lot of significance for the LGBT community's presence and standing in the country, and is culturally and legally VERY significant. To stubbornly hold out on that hoping for a small-to-zero-sized government solution to evolve in any kind of reasonable timeframe is political naivete and wishful thinking at best.
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Concur. Why are gays so hung up on the idea of doing what straight people do? THEY get married. It's a word. Why can't "union" be the word gays use for theirs? (The straight won that coin toss thousands of years ago. ) All it would really take is the amendment of a few federal laws.
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