After a week of gay marriage in California, I feel pretty secure in saying whew! We survived! Humanity has not devolved; heterosexual marriage has not eroded into irrelevance, and except for a few shameful protests at the Supreme Court, almost nobody even noticed that gays were getting their matrimony on.
This is the way it should be.
One thing that always bothered me was the legal definition “domestic partnership” or “civil union.” These silly phrases existed for the sole purpose of reserving actual marriage for the people who had the good sense to grow up hetero. Way back, many years before I was born, there was another phrase that sort of tried to accomplish the same thing: “Separate but equal.”
Domestic partnerships, civil unions and other awkward seperate but equal phrasing demeans us all, even the hetero white girls like myself. I’ve read that many gays don’t want to get married, and I have to wonder if they don’t want to be “married” as most of the United States sees it: engage in these not-quite-marriage marriages whose rules nobody quite understands. Saying “I’m married” means something very definite in our society. Saying “I’m in a domestic partnership” means that the person listening needs a law degree to have a conversation with you.
One of the issues under domestic partnerships, and one of the most convincing arguments against gay marriage, is the issue of children. I don’t think that two gay women or men are the ideal parents, but I also don’t think single women, or single men, or even an intact, loving heterosexual marriage produces ideal environments for children. There’s no such thing as the ideal parent, any more than there is an ideal person.
Since the government is not in the business of deciding what ‘ideal’ means, it should be compelled to issue marriage licenses to whomever is of legal age and wants them. The argument that gay marriage degrades all marriage doesn’t make sense to me. Nobody’s marriage makes my relationship any more legitimate. What my neighbors and friends do is nobody’s business but their own; this is what I mean when I say I’m radically neutral. It shouldn’t be an issue. I shouldn’t have an opinion on it any more than I would anyone else’s relationship. To do so seems very presumptuous. If you don’t have something nice to say about my relationship, keep your mouth shut. And do the same for Adam and Steve.
If someone doesn’t like gay marriage then they shouldn’t marry someone who is gay.
Problem solved.
I have yet to understand how gay marriage will “degrade” what my husband and I have.
Hi Ruby,
I agree. And I’m as right wing conservative as they get; I just don’t see how allowing gay people to marry will hurt me or you or any other person. Religious reasons are often cited as “proof” that it’s wrong, but I have a hard time taking that seriously for the same reason that I have a hard time taking the Muslims’ word that I’m going to hell because I don’t cover my hair. I just refuse to believe that ANY religious reasoning is faulty because it’s subjective. We must use reason and reason dictates that gays should be able to marry.
I think that the issue of children is a really big deal. The point of marriage is to establish a family. I know I’m offending tons of people by saying this, but I don’t think that a man and a woman who are in a loving marriage should be in line behind a gay couple or a single mom for adopting an infant. No amount of “get over it” is going to change my mind on the subject. Children need a mother and a father. I also don’t like the way that the CA justices overturned the will of the people of CA on the matter. It sets up a dangerous precident to me. A week in we can shrug our shoulders. But what happens when the government decides that churches have to recognize and perform gay marriages? I will have a huge problem if it comes to that. Marriage is not a constitutional right. I don’t get why people are applauding this as if it prooves we’ve advanced somehow as a society. To unleash my inner-geek, “This is how democracy dies, to the sound of thunderous applause.”
Ohmigosh, Jessicarrot, what happens when the government decides that your orthodox Jewish synagogue (let’s assume you’re orthodox Jewish) has to marry two heterosexual non-Jewish atheists?
Oh, wait. The government decides who gets marriage *licenses*, not who any particular officiant agrees to marry. Phew!
The only time it will (and has) come up is when a church-owned property is designated for public use because it receives *public funds*. In that case, they can’t dictate who can and can’t use it (that’s why it’s called *public*.) But they don’t have to provide the officiant, and if they stop taking public funds for it, they don’t have to provide the location for me and my wife’s wedding any more than they have to provide it for the annual gathering of the Holocaust Deniers Social Club.
The justices in CA did their job: They issued a carefully reasoned decision on the constitutionality of a challenged statute. Since constitutionality depends and has ALWAYS depended upon what is *actually written* in the constitution, and not at all on “the will of the people”, I can’t see what is dangerous or even precedent-ish about their action.
If you have actually read the decision, have any legal expertise at all, and have an actual legal argument that disagrees with their verdict, by all means, present it. But the mere fact that the decision did not line up with what the people voted for in the past does not make it a dangerous precedent. Think about it: every single court decision that strikes down a law “overturns the will of the people”.
“Children need a mother and a father.”
Says you. I say they need a loving parent-figure, and best case scenario, two loving parents who are committed to staying together and raising them as a family. And guess who the data actually supports, insofar as it exists at all? Hint: it’s not you.
And before you protest, consider this: If I created a statistical cohort consisting of
-your family
-plus all the poor single teenage moms, divorced parents, families ravaged by drug abuse, abandoned spouses, foster-care kids, orphans, and half-orphans in the USA
and then compared the outcomes of that children in that cohort, statistically, to all the children of stable, married (socially, or legally where they can) gay parents in the USA, you’d come out looking poorly, now wouldn’t you?
That is what is done to us, statistically. We get lumped in with all these tragic, broken families where we don’t belong and don’t make up enough of the sample to possibly influence the “result”. When we’re studied on our own, not surprisingly, the effects of abandonment, poverty, and the sheer difficulty of raising a child on one’s own don’t show up. Amazingly enough, it is not actually the absence of a penis (or vagina) in the house that causes the problems.
The thing is, you don’t get to decide what my children need. What my children *deserve* is for their parents to have access to the same family legal structure and protections and benefits as every other kid’s.
You might think kids are better off in a “traditional” family. I might think kids are better off in richer families than yours (let’s assume you’re working-poor). But you don’t get to tell me I can’t get married because I won’t provide what YOU think is ideal, and I don’t get to tell you that you can’t get married because you won’t provide what *I* think is ideal.
I might think a child is better off in a household where there’s no TV allowed except PBS, and Bratz dolls and gun toys are banned, and organic carrots are served for snack instead of Ho-Hos. Guess what? I don’t get to say whether or not parents who let their kids watch MTV and play shoot-the-Bratz and scarf Ho-Hos can get married. And there’s FAR more evidence and common sense behind the idea that this stuff is bad for kids.
Get it?
Oh for heaven’s sake. Could you run with that a little further? I was stating my *concise* opinions. Thats what people do in the comment section. No where did I ever presume to decide for the world what they get to do or not do. The government may not be able to force my orthodox jewish rabbi to perform gay marriage, but it can revoke its tax-exempt status when my rabbi refuses to do it. You don’t see this as a problem, I get that. I do.
“No where did I ever presume to decide for the world what they get to do or not do.”
Don’t know where I would have gotten that idea. Oh, maybe it was the part where you made a sweeping statement about the worthiness of gays to be adoptive parents, told people not to “get behind” that idea, and then decried the California decision as the downfall of democracy. Yeah, maybe it was that.
Say me and my partner want to get married in California. We have a valid marriage license. We call your synagogue. We will now encounter two difficulties.
1) Your orthodox rabbi – who, as an individual and entirely unrelated to what particular religious congregation flavor he happens to lead or be employed by, as an ordained rabbi has been deputized to solemnize state marriage licenses. He cannot be forced to perform that function if he does not want to. He himself is not the embodiment of the religious organization. HE does not have tax exempt status that can be taken away, the religious organization does.
He can refuse to marry us on any grounds he pleases: he’s busy that day, we’re not Jewish, we’re gay, I’m hispanic, we’re ugly, or he just doesn’t like us. There is no way that his religious organization’s tax exempt status could be threatened because of his individual action.
My mom is a notary public, and like a rabbi, is entitled to marry people in Florida. Guess what she’s not forced to do? Marry anyone who comes by and asks her to. She’s not a public figure. She’s not a justice of the peace. Neither is your rabbi. The fact that he makes himself available to the members of his congregation for this function is a matter of convenience and convention, not a legal requirement.
2) Hiring the building just for the location, even if we provide our own officiant. If the area is not a publicly funded, public access public amenity location, it is private. Which means they can refuse to rent to us or allow us to use the facility for any reason they see fit. Their tax-exempt status as a religious organization won’t be threatened for this any more than it would be threatened for refusing to rent their synagogue to the Christian heterosexual couple “because it’s religious discrimination”.
For crying out loud, if no one can take away the Catholic church’s tax exemption because it won’t ordain women, how could you possibly think it would be threatened because it won’t perform gay marriage ceremonies? The religious part of marriage is completely irrelevant to the legal part.
I’m sorry, but your opinion is simply based on wrong information. Not all opinions are created equal.
You are correct in that social psychologists have found that children fair best under two parents of opposite gender – a fact that was not publicized while this issue was in flux (references escape me right now).
I really could not care less if two people of the same gender want to get married. However, I do have a problem with th fact that in such a time of crisis, our Government decided to spend time on this and actually come to a decision rather than with the many more important issues.
Nice blog.
http://salon1.wordpress.com