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protecting marriage
I'm late in adding my voice to this. California's Proposition 8, and similar efforts when they crop up in other states, destroys families. Its supporters like to argue in the abstract, but it has real effects on real people, and if you can't look the affected people in the eye and say "yes, I intend to attack you", maybe you ought to rethink your support.
I am married, religious, and heterosexual. I cannot see what recognizing other types of unions could possibly do to threaten my marriage. On the contrary, equal acknowledgement of all unions helps protect the institution; it makes it more likely that the folks in marriages actually want to be in them, rather than settling just to get legal protection (for, say, your kids).
What threatens marriage? Taking it lightly and not working with one's partner(s) to strengthen the family. The high rates of divorce and abuse demonstrate that we heterosexuals don't have a great track record on this. Why should I believe that my gay friends will do worse? I expect they'll do better, because when you're a minority, it takes a certain degree of commitment to your marriage to be willing to put yourself out there in the first place. I suspect there is a far, far lower proportion of casual marriages in the gay community than there is in mine.
You know what consittutional amendment I'd like to see? The abolition of marriage as a legal entity. The avenue of legal partnership -- for the sake of inheritance, custody, power of attorney, taxes, finances, etc -- should be available to any group of people who voluntarily and compently choose to enter into such an arrangement. The state should simply register them, as it does for business partnerships. Beyond that, it's not a state concern. This is not marriage; this is a civil union.
Marriage, on the other hand, is a religous matter. Different religions have different rules for what they will and won't accept. That's fine; all communities have rules that apply within that community. It is equally valid for Roman Catholics to say "no divorcees need apply", for Jews to say "no intermarriages here", and for Pastafarians to say "marriages must be trios of any two adults and a pasta product". Your community, your rules, and your own enforcement problem. Please leave the rest of us out of it.
If there is anyone out there who is at this late hour still able to turn dollars into efforts to defeat this proposition, please let me know. (The link I've seen expired before I saw it.)
I am married, religious, and heterosexual. I cannot see what recognizing other types of unions could possibly do to threaten my marriage. On the contrary, equal acknowledgement of all unions helps protect the institution; it makes it more likely that the folks in marriages actually want to be in them, rather than settling just to get legal protection (for, say, your kids).
What threatens marriage? Taking it lightly and not working with one's partner(s) to strengthen the family. The high rates of divorce and abuse demonstrate that we heterosexuals don't have a great track record on this. Why should I believe that my gay friends will do worse? I expect they'll do better, because when you're a minority, it takes a certain degree of commitment to your marriage to be willing to put yourself out there in the first place. I suspect there is a far, far lower proportion of casual marriages in the gay community than there is in mine.
You know what consittutional amendment I'd like to see? The abolition of marriage as a legal entity. The avenue of legal partnership -- for the sake of inheritance, custody, power of attorney, taxes, finances, etc -- should be available to any group of people who voluntarily and compently choose to enter into such an arrangement. The state should simply register them, as it does for business partnerships. Beyond that, it's not a state concern. This is not marriage; this is a civil union.
Marriage, on the other hand, is a religous matter. Different religions have different rules for what they will and won't accept. That's fine; all communities have rules that apply within that community. It is equally valid for Roman Catholics to say "no divorcees need apply", for Jews to say "no intermarriages here", and for Pastafarians to say "marriages must be trios of any two adults and a pasta product". Your community, your rules, and your own enforcement problem. Please leave the rest of us out of it.
If there is anyone out there who is at this late hour still able to turn dollars into efforts to defeat this proposition, please let me know. (The link I've seen expired before I saw it.)
no subject
The only way I can figure that you can claim homosexual marriage injures heterosexual marriage is in the same way that imitation products injure name-brand ones. If you imagine that "marriage" is a high-quality brand name, then other people labelling inferior products as "marriage" hurts your image, and if it should happen that someday "marriage" comes to refer to the generic item rather than your version of it, then you've lost all the value in the term entirely. It's not that any particular individual marriage will get worse, but rather that its distinction and specialness is lost.
I imagine they don't want to solve this the other way (by making up their own new term for hetero religious marriage) because "marriage" is some really prime linguistic real estate, and they resent that what was previously theirs alone is now being shared.
But really, I have no idea what I'm talking about. :)
no subject
Or, less long-winded-ly, it's not the gender of the participants that marks marriage quality.
no subject
I suspect that, even if it's not the total determiner, it's still considered a factor of it by the parties pushing this.
Edit: In particular, in a certain worldview, this is like comparing a marriage between two humans to someone marrying a goat. Regardless of the problems in the human-human marriage, it's still more legitimate than the human-goat one.
no subject
All right, my last reply was intemperate, and I retract it. But the comparison of a relationship between two people with beastiality is not only offensive, but grows in offensiveness each time it's made. When will people stop already?
no subject
No, I used it because it was the first thing which came to mind as "could be called marriage, but clearly isn't because the participants are unsuitable." If you wish to mentally substitute "cube of granite" for "goat", please do--the metaphor will take no harm in meaning thereby (though it might take some damage in comprehensibility). If anyone else has been using this as an example, I don't know about it--I've been pretty much ignoring this whole thing except to occaisionally say, "Why the heck are you all still talking about this? Shouldn't we be instead figuring out how to get out of the four wars we seem to be in?"
Also, please note that I didn't compare homosexual marriage to bestiality. This was a metaphor of four objects, and the things being declared similar were the differences between the pairs. Which, in the "certain worldview" I mentioned, they are. They're also similar to the difference between garnets and glass, and the difference between heaven and marriage, but I was trying to take two differences as similar as possible so that I didn't have to explicitly outline the points on which they were the same and different. Alas, I fail at teh internet.
As an aside, I take offense at your offense, as I believe that any comparison is valid to evaluate. Comparing a bag of dog manure to Benjamin Franklin shouldn't be inherently offensive to fans of Franklin--rather, declaring that they're the same should be. Certainly you have a right to be offended, but please be offended at what I actually said (homosexual marriage is of a lower order of legitimacy than heterosexual marriage) rather than what you apparently thought I said (homosexual marriage is indistinguishable from bestiality).
As a further aside, my opinions on this issue are pretty much the same as the ones Monica expounds in her original post. This entire exercise is a speculative attempt to determine how "marriage" would be harmed by the renaming of civil unions, a subject on which I am currently undecided. (Hence favoring Monica's solution, which throws the question out of government and over to the people who actually care to argue about it.)