I don't think making gay marriage legal should be so important to us
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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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Concur. Why are gays so hung up on the idea of doing what straight people do?
There are those that came to terms with their homosexuality by completely shaping their identity around it, and creating a sense of "otherness," an us-versus-them sort of philosophy. I went through a phase like that myself, and it's definitely an important part of the pie that makes all of us up as a community.
Other people like having sex with their own gender, but don't necessarily feel the need for "otherness," though. Some people want the white picket fence, the family life, the whole Somewhere That's Green bit. It's okay to be suburban, mainstream, and gay at the same time. The beautiful cultural shift over the last few decades has allowed for more and more options for how any of us chooses to live our lives … including those who want the whole suburban thing.
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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.
Many gays were plenty happy to just have civil unions. The reason this became an issue over the past decade is many states started doing legislation to stop even allowing civil unions to be done. Made for basically two main camps arguing with each other, those wanting to allow gays to enter a legally recognized relationship with the protections they afford and those wanting to ensure their churches weren't forced to gay marry everyone in sight.
There's also just the problem that civil unions being an entirely separate legal realm just complicates everything when it comes to forming a union or dissolving one. With marriage there's already systems in place to protect either person as well as to provide opportunities for divorce. It simplifies a lot of things to just allow marriage licenses to be doled out to those wanting them.
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It's important 30 years from now, when one of you die and you don't have the right to inherit.
There are also taxes, insurance, title and stuff that will get complicated fast without that license. So unless you live on an island, definitely get that paper signed.
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I think what is important is to make the laws such that there is no discrimination of people in gay relationships in such things as taxes. The name marriage itself doesn't seem an important thing to fight for IMHO
This point may already have been made, but extending a basic right like the right to marry, to one group but not another is intrinsically discriminatory. It's the equality that's really the important part.
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Concur. Why are gays so hung up on the idea of doing what straight people do?
There are those that came to terms with their homosexuality by completely shaping their identity around it, and creating a sense of "otherness," an us-versus-them sort of philosophy. I went through a phase like that myself, and it's definitely an important part of the pie that makes all of us up as a community.
Other people like having sex with their own gender, but don't necessarily feel the need for "otherness," though. Some people want the white picket fence, the family life, the whole Somewhere That's Green bit. It's okay to be suburban, mainstream, and gay at the same time. The beautiful cultural shift over the last few decades has allowed for more and more options for how any of us chooses to live our lives … including those who want the whole suburban thing.
While it's true that having gay marriage on the table does allow this option for more people (and I am on board with the idea of more options being a good thing), I do get a little bit concerned about how that option can be passed onto children as an obligation or as a limiting ideology. I remember growing up in blissful suburbia and living with what was basically an expectation to want my own white picket fence and dog and cute little family photos running up the staircase wall. If gay marriage had been readily available to me and I had been able to slide right into that sort of "pre-planned" future, I probably would have done so and thought nothing of it because I grew up learning that marriage is "good." Liking boys meant marriage could not be implied, so I had to think a little more deeply about what I want and whether or not marriage is actually the "good" choice or if it is simply "a" choice.
I guess I hate to be the guy that uses "indoctrination," but I feel like marriage does that. Our culture and media talk about marriage like it's some amazing thing - even in the supreme court ruling, the language was all about how marriage is the most important thing ever. We don't even give people an opportunity to reject the idea marriage, and when people manage to carve out their own path they're pegged as weird and lonely. Don't we value them, too? I think it's unfortunate that after the ruling everyone is like, "Great job, we finally did it! Let's go home!" when there is still a lot to talk about.
Gay marriage is great and I do think it's a good idea. But we are not talking about a society in which there are two choices (marriage or not-marriage) and people pick one. We are talking about a society in which there is a "good" choice (marriage) and a "bad" choice (not marriage). The "good" choice just got a whole boatload of new friends to help it shun the "bad" choice and I think that is lame.
**Also saying there are only two different choices is silly. There are LOADS of ways to live a life - I just want to see alternatives to the mainstream being given a chance as equal.
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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.
In response to those who responded to this, my first response, I'd like to stir the pot with a bit of irony by asking a (presumably) rhetorical question: "What genders were the two people credited for engaging in 'history's most famous (if not first) kiss'?"
[ [b]A: http://bfy.tw/3MQP ]
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It's important 30 years from now, when one of you die and you don't have the right to inherit.
There are also taxes, insurance, title and stuff that will get complicated fast without that license. So unless you live on an island, definitely get that paper signed.
Most western countries had that stuff sorted without recourse to the word 'marriage'
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I've read every word of every comment posted, and I have to say I can find nothing to disagree with. In particular, I felt as if several accurately expressed my "white picket fence in suburbia" childhood expectations (and better than I could have).
But I have to admit something I really didn't know until just now, when I decided to go to the primary source: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title1/pdf/USCODE-2011-title1-chap1-sec7.pdf (see § 7. Definition of “marriage” and “spouse”) … the definition of “marriage” is not simply a religious interpretation, and it's not singularly discriminating against homosexuals.
I have always assumed it to be solely Judeo-Christian in origin, extended to apply to our governmental definition because our country, thanks to King James I and the landing of the first settlers at Cape Henry on 26 April 1607, was founded as a Christian nation. (The irony of the King's historic homosexuality notwithstanding, the perception of homosexuality as a Biblical sin disproportionately worse than anything a heterosexual might engage in, seemed to me to be completely subjective in its discrimination against the practices of many other religions and lifestyles.)
Christians, Jews and Muslims all believe Abraham was their ancestor; but the Islamic defenders descend from the union of Abraham and his mistress and not from a man and his spouse, as do the Jews and, later, the Christians. Even today, the concept of "marriage" in most Muslim nations is not "between one man and one woman." (Muslim men, for example, in accordance with Islamic Sharia law, are permitted mistresses and legally allowed to take up to four wives.) So if we're to believe that all American citizens must agree to abide by the laws of the country, by definition, Muslims practicing the Islamic faith are no more "acceptable" as citizens (or, for that matter, legally represented) than homosexuals in America; yet the homosexuals never joined forces with the Muslims to argue their obviously shared case of marriage discrimination and no one, to my knowledge, has ever once mentioned it.
Don't get all excited about it, either. We shouldn't be too surprised about the laws in America; at least not if we have studied them. They are replete with religious discrimination. (Just look here: https://t.co/ixFqIYRZtI ) In the U.S. Code, 153 federal laws apply solely to Christians, five apply to Jews, and only TWO apply to Muslims; but, again, no one seems to care enough to notice.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that homosexuals may be a bit to blame for making the case of discrimination against their sexual/lifestyle preferences, because, clearly, they are alone only in having made the noise - and not alone in the law. (My grandma used to say, "Those who cry the loudest, are the most guilty.")
In a perfect world, religion wouldn't be a factor, all men (archaic term including women) would be treated as equals, all laws would be objective and there would exist no discrimination. But it's not a perfect world, is it? Why, then, should America be any different?
(Please don't misunderstand me… I am like the rest of you... stuck here, too!)
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