Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton won praise in June after pushing to extend many federal benefits traditionally provided to diplomats’ spouses to gay and lesbian partners.
Since then, unmarried heterosexual couples have been lining up to ask for benefits too. They have approached the State Department’s personnel office and the diplomats’ union, arguing that they are entitled to equal treatment. At least one couple has threatened to challenge the rules in court as discriminatory.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which is responsible for policy on federal workers, is weighing such an extension of benefits, U.S. officials say — to the consternation of conservatives.
This is predictable. If same sex couples cannot marry, then “marriage-light” policies have to be created for same-sex couples. But why should “marriage-light” policies exclude heterosexual couples?
Marriage laws, fundamentally, are how we turn someone unrelated to us, into our legally recognized closest relative in the world. I don’t think that purpose is undermined by opening marriage lite provisions to straight couples.1 However, there’s no doubt that conservatives who oppose equality for gay people do see marriage lite laws as diluting marriage, which makes it ironic that their actions make the continued growth of marriage lite arrangements inevitable.
In somewhat related news, the DC group Full Equality Now! has walked back its initial opposition to anti-gay ads on public buses (which they now say was just a draft), after the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance and the ACLU stood up for the free speech rights of anti-gay groups. Good for GLAA and the ACLU, and good for FEN! for being willing to back off their mistake (even if they did it a little ungracefully).
- Although I can see a disadvantage to having a multiplicity of marriage and marriage-lite laws; the more such laws there are, the less they will be universally understood, which makes them less useful. [↩]
This is like what’s happening in Canada. Marital status (that is, whether a couple is married or common-law) is a recognized ground of discrimination, so it’s unconstitutional to distinguish between them in legislation, unless the distinction can be justified. One province (I think Nova Scotia?) now has a registry which confers rights on anyone you wish to register with, so a wider range of interdependant relationships can be supported, and the harmful consequences of separation mitigated. Some are suggesting that the government should stop regulating marriage altogether, and just have such civil registries, inclusive of all important relationships, and have marriage be a purely religious matter.
I’ve been saying that for years. Civil recognition of any adult partnership, without restriction, with equal legal treatment – and leave “marriage” as a religious observance.
But if same-sex marriage advocates advocated that, then we really WOULD be trying to “destroy marriage” — handing that kind of ammo to our opponents wouldn’t be smart.
So although almost every SSM advocate I know would be fine with that solution, it’s too damaging politically for SSM advocates to make their goal.
It wouldn’t be destroying marriage, it would be saving marriage from the meddling of incompetent government bureaucrats.
If you guys could just learn how to frame your pitches properly, you’d be living in a socialist utopia right now, and all the conservatives would think we’d won.
That’s right. And was predicted, in fact. Solution? Stop extending such entitlements to homosexual couples, thus removing the discrimination argument between unmarried homosexual couples and unmarried heterosexual couples. Problem solved.
RonF is sadly correct – conservatives will see this as another example of why gay relationships are evil – giving them rights is eroding the value of marriage.
@RonF
Then you’re discriminating between married couples and common law couples. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to bother many people in the US. It should. The rights and protections afforded to married partners are there because of the nature of their relationship: the interdependence that tends to develop, and the fact that adult couples are seen as providing the foundation of the family, especially if they engage in child-rearing. Hence the relationship is supported by the state. Common law partners are functionally the same as married couples, and there is no reason to deny them the same rights and protections, except for reasons based on negative stereotypes.
If you’re talking strategy, I think a good route to take would be to push for legal recognition of common law partners in general, because then it’s a much smaller step to the recognition of same-sex common law partners.
@RonF
How about just getting rid of marriage? That solves everyone’s complaint. Then no one can defile it with their philandering and coveting of neighbor’s asses and all that.
Our laws are supposed to be based not on religious beliefs, but instead on what’s good for the society. Being homosexual does not harm society, or marriage. Forbidding a homosexual to marry does no one any good. It doesn’t protect anything except the majority’s right over a traditionally-maligned class of people. In fact, it leave many children and families stranded in matters of insurance, estates, etc.
Homosexuals, just as everyone, have the right to marry. You don’t have to like it, just as I didn’t like much of what’s happened in politics. You don’t have to condone it, either. You just have to get the fuck out of the way.
conservatives will see this as another example of why gay relationships are evil – giving them rights is eroding the value of marriage.
Indeed, when the concept of granting entitlements to homosexual couples was first advanced, this is exactly what was predicted to happen.
Then you’re discriminating between married couples and common law couples.
That’s not a bug. That’s a feature.
Homosexuals, just as everyone, have the right to marry.
Quite right. However, given that it requires making a long-term bond with someone of the opposite sex, few choose to do so.
How about just getting rid of marriage? That solves everyone’s complaint. Then no one can defile it with their philandering and coveting of neighbor’s asses and all that.
I’m not clear on what the commandment regarding coveting one’s neighbor’s ass has to do with marriage. Unless you’re making a bad pun (which I doubt worked in the original Hebrew).
Getting rid of marriage does far more harm than the purported removal of discrimination does good.
Common law partners are functionally the same as married couples,
Then why don’t they get married?
Because in point of fact they are NOT functionally the same as married couples. They have not taken the step of creating the public and legal commitments to each other that married couples have.
… and there is no reason to deny them the same rights and protections,
Sure there is. They haven’t made the same commitments to each other that married couples have, so they don’t deserve the same rights and protections.
Ron, it’s not equal marriage rights which dilute marriage. It’s the refusal of equality which creates the demand for “marriage lite” alternatives to marriage, thus diluting marriage.
If avoiding “marriage lite” alternatives was actually the goal, then there’s an easy solution: Allow committed, consenting same-sex couples to marry. Where there is same-sex marriage, almost no one minds if “domestic partnership” laws and the like are jettisoned.
Since you favor forbidding same-sex couples who have made those same commitments to each other from marrying, obviously you don’t actually take this argument seriously. If you gave a damn about commitment, then you wouldn’t oppose committed couples getting married.
I’d be curious to see the two halves of this broadened into an argument.
First of all, let’s say that marriage was made into a religious thing, and distinguished from civil unions. So who can get married or not is up to the various religious institutions that perform marriage, while any (non-related consenting adult) couple can have a civil union.
Specifically, what is the harm that would do?
Secondly, I’m made curious by the phrase “purported removal of discrimination.” It seems obvious to me that the law does discriminate (“Treatment or consideration based on class or category”) between same-sex and opposite-sex couples, when it comes to marriage laws. I can’t imagine how any person could deny that.
You could argue the discrimination is fair, or that it is desirable, or that its benefits outweigh its harms. It seems to be a blatant denial of reality, however, to say that the discrimination is not taking place at all.
Slippery slope arguments usually slip both ways.
—Myca
Actually, while I’d favor maintaining the ban on incestuous sex, I think that civil unions should be open to any two consenting adults. Municipal domestic partnership registries in Portland (and other locations) were open to any pair of people, and one of the main user groups was relatives. If you are the primary caretaker for your aging parent or if you and your adult sibling live together in a mutually dependent relationship, the existing relationship laws don’t really provide you the support you want, but a partnership registry would.
A registry in which the 1000 + rights and responsibilities accorded in civil marriage could be subdivided, so that I might assign rights 1-500,556, and 900 to you and 501-555 and 890-899 to Sarah, leaving the rest unassigned, would provide the simplest solution to polygamy as well, particularly if certain rights in the registry were considered exclusive, while others were considered open (e.g. granting hospital visitation rights to all your partners, while granting the right to uninterrupted transfer of your business inventory on your death to only one partner). There could also be several default groupings (e.g. monogamous marriage, in which all the standard rights are assigned reciprocally between the two partners) for simplicity. One of the rights might be who else’s consent you need to have to change the registry listings, to handle the diversity of preferences in how new people are admitted to a polygamous relationship.
But yes, if people want to protect traditional marriage for a while longer, they are best off supporting full marriage equality. The culture is fast approaching overwhelming support for marriage-lite as a minimum for same sex couples, and marriage-lite is way more destabilizing to traditional marriage than full marriage equality is.
Now that was a terrible pun. ;)
There’s another way. Avoid handing out entitlements such as allowing loving partners of 50+ years stay by each others’ side on their death beds.
Of course, removing any domestic partnership benefits for gay couples whatsoever is probably more than even gay-shy America is comfortable with at this point, so this will be hard to do politically. Which is why the voters will need to be lied to through the teeth for their own good.
First of all, let’s say that marriage was made into a religious thing, and distinguished from civil unions. So who can get married or not is up to the various religious institutions that perform marriage, while any (non-related consenting adult) couple can have a civil union.
Specifically, what is the harm that would do?
Absolutely no harm at all. I think that’s the perfect solution! It wouldn’t get rid of the arguing about what constitutes a “real marriage” by bigots though, as folks who had both a civil union and a marriage ceremony—albeit not in a religious institution or belief system approved of by bigots—would still be told they weren’t in a “real marriage”, that they just had a sham “marriage” and they shouldn’t be allowed to call it “marriage” since it wasn’t performed in a Real Church (cue Garrison Keillor writing another unfunny column).
That’s presuming you guys would give up your bigotry so easily, for which the evidence is slim and the evidence against it is mighty.
@Amanda – obviously, after the conservatives have dug their heels in, it’s far too late to do anything… but it seems that conservatives seem capable of backing any concept, no matter how bizarre, provided that some mental gymanstics have been done and the right demagogues have gotten the meme snowballing. I mean, these are people who don’t want the government to screw with medicare. Spurious logic is their forte.
I don’t know about that, Amanda.
If all the evils of the world are to be ascribed to conservatism, then surely we must look at the historical trend with some optimism. The people I know are by and large better, or at least luckier, than the people I read about from a hundred or a thousand years ago. The world certainly feels less bigoted today than it did when I was a boy; not a great deal less, but less. Certainly things are a great deal freer today than they used to be.
I am conservative by temperament, and somewhat so by ideology. And surely I must say that there are many people in the world, including many on my side, who have bigotry in their hearts towards one or more different kinds of people. But it seems to me that people with sincerely conservative principles have moved away from racism, not towards it, in my span. When some racist idiot dresses up like a Nazi, I hear a lot more people saying “damn him” than praising him among my circle.
There are exceptions. I will make a concession – just about every stump-toothed white racist with a grudge out there is conservative as hell. We all have our crosses to bear and our extremists to deal with. Yet, in the Reconstruction era, the stump-toothed white racists were half the population or more. Today? A small fringe, able to make scary pictures on the television but mostly powerless. That happened largely because conservatism improved itself and tried to bar the outright racists from public membership.
Rhetoric has value, even when it isn’t fully sincere. Ronald Reagan wanted in his heart to be free of prejudice, I feel sure, but I cannot doubt that his rhetoric of equality and equal rights was somewhat hollow. And yet, and yet, young conservatives of 2010 will read those words and believe them without the inner mental reservations.
I think there is reason to be hopeful.
MissaA:
Right. So I really don’t understand why people who are willing to register their relationship with the government would be unwiling to get married if they can (I also don’t think marriage should be restricted by gender or number, or for that matter declension, mood, or tense). It’s the same relationship, it has the same rights and responsibilities, what’s the difference (and I would ask the same of people who favor civil unions but not marriage for same-sex couples)? Either have one thing for everybody or make it cafeteria-style for everybody.
sylphhead:
I assume you mean it shouldn’t be an entitlement, not that it shouldn’t be allowed. That, though, runs up against the issue MissaA mentioned: society likes to know who’s (currently) together and who isn’t. Society is built of households, after all.
Then why don’t they get married?
Because we don’t want to. Marriage is* kind of creepy. The history alone makes it worth avoiding. I’m not clear on whether marital rape is illegal in all 50 states and, even if it is, if it is ever prosecuted. Marriage is, currently and traditionally, about ownership. And state permission. Domestic partnerships, perhaps because of their history as gay “equivalents” are more about people coming together as equals and telling the state that they are together. You apply for a marriage license, you register your partnership. Hey, Ron, it’s the Libertarian thing to do!
Then there’s the discrimination issue. I wouldn’t buy a house in a neighborhood where minorities weren’t allowed to buy houses, why should I participate in a social rite that gays and lesbians aren’t allowed to?
* To me. No criticism of anyone who made the opposite decision and chose to marry is meant. I am well aware that my opinions on the subject are not particularly logical. I’m just answering Ron’s question about why not get married.
Yet, in the Reconstruction era, the stump-toothed white racists were half the population or more. Today? A small fringe, able to make scary pictures on the television but mostly powerless. That happened largely because conservatism improved itself and tried to bar the outright racists from public membership.
I would argue that it happened mostly because liberals pushed the window of acceptable behavior away from overt racism and conservatives eventually accepted the arguments and followed along. At least, I can’t think of any leaders of the civil rights movement, for example, who would have (at least at that time) be called “conservative”. The conservatives followed that particular reform, they didn’t lead it.
Ampersand–First of all, let’s say that marriage was made into a religious thing, and distinguished from civil unions. So who can get married or not is up to the various religious institutions that perform marriage, while any (non-related consenting adult) couple can have a civil union.
Specifically, what is the harm that would do?
It would harm anyone who wanted to be officially, legally married, but either could not or didn’t want to get married in a church. This wouldn’t solve discrimination, it would just discriminate against even more people. Gays and straights alike would be unable to have their unions officially recognized as marriage by the state. I don’t see how this is a solution. It seems designed only to appease religious conservatives, but would probably end up pissing them off too, because their marriages are also no longer recognized by the government. That’s equality, but it’s equality moving in the wrong direction, to coin a phrase I believe I’ve seen here once. I don’t think this or any other kind of compromise is going to work. Gays should be allowed to get legally married, just like straight people, and conservatives will just have to get used to it. To me, it’s just that simple.
@Chris – I assume that Amp’s proposal is that the state would completely be out of the business of marriage – that is, because of the seperation clause of the 1st amendment, if marriage became a completely religious institution, then it would be impossible to make any laws pertaining to it…. including, I think, laws restricting it to the Church.
That is to say, anybody could call their relationship a marriage. I could, in fact, marry my cat. However, since that marriage is not legally protected by the state, it would be meaningless (and it would still be animal cruelty if I tried to consummate this relationship). I probably could not form a civil union with my cat.
Dianne:
I doubt rape within cohabitant relationships is successfully prosecuted much more often.
That’s not mandatory. If you mean you’ll be perceived that way, I suppose, but you’ll equally be perceived that way if you call it a “civil commitment” or “civil union” or “fancy piece of paper” or “Bob Johnson.” I don’t think there are a significant number of people who think “civil union”=totes egalitarian 50/50 partnership between equals but “marriage”=he works and makes the rules, she cleans the house and sucks his cock.
Chris:
I have no problem “harming” (whatever you think that means) someone who thinks they should get a special status in the law, or exceptions made just for them.
It would harm anyone who wanted to be officially, legally married, but either could not or didn’t want to get married in a church.
It sounds like there are two objections here, and I’m not sure which you’re intending.
One is that “marriage” would only be available through a church under Amp’s plan. I assume that was just careless phrasing on his part (arising from the fact that it’s religious people who scream the loudest about expanding marriage), since I don’t imagine he or anyone else making the “government out of the marriage business” argument thinks that the word “marriage” should be somehow restricted to church ceremonies. If you and your partner(s) want to have a party with your friends to celebrate your commitment and call it “marriage,” you have equal right to the word as someone who held said party in a church — though there would also be no way to force anyone else to call you “married” if they didn’t like your party.
The other objection you seem to be making is that some people want not only for the government to bestow on them various material benefits (hospital visitation rights, joint filing of taxes, etc), but also to use the law to officially endorse their lifestyle by applying the word “marriage” to it. This benefit would be available to nobody (regardless of gender or number) under Amp’s plan. I suppose this is a harm, though it’s not one that strikes me as particularly compelling or particularly the government’s business. Then again, the same could be said against people who want a domestic partner registry with the exact same structure and benefits as marriage but with a different name because they’re skeeved out by the historical connotations of the word “marriage.”
That’s not mandatory. If you mean you’ll be perceived that way, I suppose, but you’ll equally be perceived that way if you call it a “civil commitment” or “civil union” or “fancy piece of paper” or “Bob Johnson.” I don’t think there are a significant number of people who think “civil union”=totes egalitarian 50/50 partnership between equals but “marriage”=he works and makes the rules, she cleans the house and sucks his cock.
It’s not mandatory currently, in the US. A (married) couple of friends of mine went on a tour in China and Pakistan recently. The Pakistani embassy only approved her visa after he gave his permission. (Note that I haven’t tried getting a visa for Pakistan so don’t know that it wouldn’t involve getting the permission of, say, my father, but I doubt I’d have to get my partner’s permission.)
Marriage as a concept carries a lot of historical and social baggage, even just within the US. Why do more women than men change their names when they get married? Surely as many men marry women with “better” (however better is defined in the circumstance) last names as the other way around. I don’t want that as part of my relationship.
Civil unions have the advantage that, because they’ve been open to gays from the start, they’re harder to peg as “X buys Y” transactions. Who buys whom when two men or two women marry/get unionized/etc?
That having been said, I don’t have any problem with the viewpoint that others take that they are reclaiming marriage and moving it away from its nastier traditions and that the word and social acknowledgement, etc mean something to them. And a marriage license is cheaper than a lawyer to make sure that your power of attorney, wills, etc are up to date.
Basically, my post was simply an answer to Ron’s question “why not just marry” from the point of view of one person who doesn’t want to marry.
Chris: Maybe I am missing something here: My marriage is a civil marriage, executed in a courthouse, without mention of a god or anything else that even remotely carries the scent of religion–as far as I remember; I don’t, for example, recall the precise words said by the person before whom we signed the contract. Neither of the religious traditions into which my wife and I were born would recognize our marriage as legitimate within the context of the faith. And we have precisely the same rights, etc. as people who are married in whatever church they choose to get married in. How would changing the name of my marriage to civil union so that people who are religious and who care about such things get to keep the word “marriage” for heterosexual couples, at least in a legal sense–good luck with getting people to refer to those who are joined in such civil unions, assuming they are ever legalized and institutionalized, as anything other than married–where is the harm? (I am not thinking, for now, about any form of plural marriage–polyamorous, polyandrous, polygynous, etc.) In other words, there is already a legally recognized form of civil marriage, what’s wrong with calling that a civil union and extending it to include same sex couples?
I’m sorry, I usually agree with most of you, but I’m really not seeing much of a difference between the arguments I’m seeing here and arguments commonly made by gay marriage opponents. For instance, this comment from Richard Jeffrey Newman:
How would changing the name of my marriage to civil union so that people who are religious and who care about such things get to keep the word “marriage” for heterosexual couples, at least in a legal sense…
…seems to be an argument used very often by homophobic conservatives. “What’s in a name?” they say. “As long as they have the same rights, then who cares what it’s called? Besides, they can call it marriage in their personal lives, but they shouldn’t make the government endorse their lifestyle!”
I don’t think I have to point out that gay rights activists have been fighting for a long time for the right to have their unions recognized, by law, as “marriage.” This word clearly means a whole lot to a whole lot of people. I understand that under your plan, Amp, that all people would at least be equal. But we’d also be taking something important away from everyone in order to do that, and I don’t think that’s necessary or desirable. I also don’t really see what the point of such a plan would be, other than to appease those who don’t actually give a crap about equality.
I know that everyone here cares deeply about this issue and has given it a lot of thought, probably more than I have, so I hope this comment didn’t come across as arrogant. I almost feel wrong even arguing with such committed activists on this issue at all. I’m just genuinely confused by the reasoning here.
Chris:
Except that marriage comes from religion, not the other way around. In other words, hanging onto the word marriage, even only in a legal sense, giving it the kind of importance that you do, you are, I think–and I am typing quickly here, so I may need to think more on this–on some level validating precisely the religious ideology that opposes marriage equality.
I do need to think about this some more, so I will stop there.
Having two different names for the (purported) same protections – be they called marriage or called civil unions, domestic partnerships, reciprocal benefits, or whatever the current fad is for “you’re not as good as us” – is born of bigotry and causes (by design) discrimination by the state. We’ve been here before, and most of us will agree – at least on principle – that separate is not equal.
There’re sets of very, very thorough laws dealing with two adults who form a household – their responsibilities to each other and to the state. These laws are not perfect, but I don’t think that we should have a separate set of laws for every type of permanent two-adult household. Although some people, like my partner/wife (depending on jurisdiction), think we should have a la carte type of system – i.e., you sign a state-scanctioned contract with a list of things you’d like included in the agreement, but exclude those things you don’t want to sign on to. I’m not quite so radical as that!
As to what the state calls the contract, and Amp’s proposal – if someone were giving me the pen to write the laws I’d also call them all civil unions . . . in order to get something so religiously significant out of our civil laws.
But as you say, Chris, lots of people (both straight and queer) are really attached to the M word. I think that we’ll probably end up with the umbrella of civil marriage eventually covering same-sex couples. Because I think that anti-queer-marriage people won’t really care enough about keeping up this discrimination up, the term “same-sex marriage” is now saturated throughout our language, and the folks (both queer and straight) like Dianne and me who don’t want the religious baggage of “marriage” probably won’t have the political clout to get us all civil unionized.
Oh, and before someone calls me on this – no, I don’t care if two sisters can get a civil union, or your brother with his grandmother. Some conservative religious groups (seeing the writing on the wall, I think) are saying “no special rights for deviants, but we’ll allow very limited reciprocal benefits for ANY two people living together” and some gay rights groups feel that this is an end-run-around gay couples (i.e., not recognizing that queer couples are MORE important than two sisters living together). I’m not sympathetic to their arguments.
If I had the pen the state would provide one reciprocal benefits contract (at a time) to each adult citizen.
In Australia, we already have this. Couples (only couples, not poly families) receive the same benefits as married couples regardless of gender. Gay couples can’t marry, but my girlfriend and I are legally the same as my brother and his girlfriend, and my other brother and his wife – we can share our taxes, family tax benefits, Medicare and pharmaceutical safety nets, superannuation etc. The only area where this does not apply is adoption and IVF, which is to be reviewed – this was a sop to the anti-gay conservatives to get this through the senate (note – not all of Australia’s conservative Liberal Party are anti-gay by any means, and many in the Labour Party *are* anti-gay). There are also some dodgy bits in immigration law, also under review. But basically, marriage is largely irrelevant except as a personal or religious statement, as it should be.
Marmalade wrote:
I don’t know if this was directed at my comment above, but I want to use it to ask my question again, perhaps more clearly. As I understand it, everyone who gets married in the US needs to be married civilly; in other words, even those who get married in a church, whatever church, need to file the same kinds of forms my wife and I had to file, get the same kind of (state appropriate) license, etcetera. We get to call our legal relationship a marriage because we are a heterosexual couple, and because the religious term has been carried over into the civil arena, but it is, in essence, as a matter of description, a civil union, is it not? (In other words, I do not here mean “civil union” to signify the legal agreement that is distinct from marriage; I mean it simply as a descriptive term.) People who are married in the eyes of whatever god or gods they believe in are also allowed to call their relationship a marriage, legally, because they have the same legally documented civil union my wife and I have, not because of whatever ceremony they took part in in their church. We just carry over the religious term “marriage” to the civil arrangement.
So, if the government were to decide to separate the religious notion of marriage from everything that is involved in the civil contract that all currently married people had to execute, and decided to call what that contract created a “joining” (and I am not arguing for this term; I am using it simply to avoid the linguistic awkwardness of figuring out how to say “We got _________” and fill in the blank with whatever form of the word union you like) and that “joinings” could be entered into by same sex couples (again, for the sake of simplicity, leaving out the question of plural marriage), how does that harm same sex couples who want to be “joined?”
The question of whether or not they could be “married in the eyes of god or gods” would then be thrown back onto the churches, and that argument would be a huge one that would likely change the face of at least all three monogamous religions, but it would no longer be a civil, legal argument about the rights and responsibilities involved in forming a family.
Oh, no. My posts were a garbled (and very over-edited) response to Chris about why some people who care so much about gay marriage would be happy to drop the M word and force everyone into civil unions. For many of us it’s just about equality, but for other people marriage equality really IS about having state-sanctioned access to the M word.
Well, many many queer people get married in churches but are not able to get civil marriages. I suppose you mean that they need to be married civilly in order to get the government goodies.
They have the religious marriage but not the civil marriage – lots of het couples have the civil marriage but not the religious marriage. It actually seems like religious discrimination for the state to acknowledge the religious marriages of some sects and not others.
It’s interesting that church lingo does not still permeate all of our civil law, only marriage I think – we get a civil birth certificate and not a civil certificate of baptism, and a civil death certificate too.
And I think that the vast majority of tbe government benefits did not exist in civil law (at least in the US – I don’t know about other countries) until the rise of the federal government in the 1930s when the social state came into being, and many of these civil marriage laws have really filled out in the later 20th century to cope with divorce complications.
(Although, I do have an interesting paper trail about my g-g-ma who had to provide formal documents to the feds that she had been married to a civil war casualty in order to get her $8/month pension).
But I don’t understand this:
Why would it change these churches? Don’t they already define who they marry?
I think it is a bit silly to talk as though marriage were somehow a religious institution that had only recently become a civil institution. Almost all known cultures have an institution that is recognizably marriage, across almost all know religions and across cultures that are largely a-religious (both traditional and modern). Marriage is first and foremost a social institution designed to handle a) sexual desire and b) the having and raising of children. As a core social institution, it has religious trappings in most societies, since religion touches all of life in most societies, but marriage clearly is secular rather than religious in origin.
As an example, Buddhism has no religious marriage, but societies in which Buddhism is the dominant religion do not lack marriage as a social institution.
As another example, we have centuries of common law marriage laws to ensure that people who act married get treated as married people, where acting married is not a matter of religious behavior, but of secular behavior.
As still another example, religious marriage of same sex couples has been a regular occurrence in the US for nearly 40 years, but the secular authorities have only recently in a few locations begun to view the secular relationships of religiously married same sex couples as civil marriages. Religious marriage is already open to same sex couples, the question is whether civil marriage will be open to same sex couples.
Robert to the contrary, I don’t believe that there are more than a tiny number of people who oppose civil same sex marriage who would change their minds if the proposal were to allow same sex ‘not-marriage’ as well as opposite sex ‘not-marriage’, while doing away with civil marriage. For one thing, the proposal is meaningless. Whatever the heading on the ‘not marriage’ certificates says, whatever the text of the law says when referring to ‘not-marriage’, everyone and their cousin is still going to call it marriage, and if they didn’t, if we eventually did change the English language so that marriage was called civil unions, people would soon thereafter start going to their religious officiants asking to have their civil union solemnized. Furthermore, anti-gay religious people don’t want to prevent same sex couples from having religious marriages (that horse has already left the stable), they want to prevent them from having civil marriages.
Unlike Chris, I am not offended by the civil union for all proposal because it would treat same sex civil unions as second class (religious marriage is available for same sex couples in many religions and is still unavailable to same sex couples in the anti-gay religions even where same sex civil marriage is well established). Instead, I am offended by the pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism of it.
On the other hand, I can understand why Chris finds the suggestion that we should have to change the name of marriage if we are going to recognize the marriages of same sex couples. That shit is pretty obviously offensive.
I think I’d better clarify:
It is not my proposal that we should get rid of the word “marriage” for what the government recognizes. I don’t think that would be politically viable, as I said in comment #2 on this very thread. It would just be another tool used by Republicans to bash gays.
I did mention the “government gets out of the marriage business” proposal, when asking Ron a question. But although I am curious to know what harm Ron thinks would be done by such a policy, it is not the policy I favor.
I’m pretty sure you’re joking. But to answer seriously, just for the exercise:
The Catholic Church, and in fact all religious institutions which perform marriage ceremonies, would lose tons of income if the strong connection between civil marriage and religious marriage were severed. The various churches have ignored the “get gov’t out of the marriage business” folks only because the policy is a non-starter.
But if the policy were ever to be taken seriously by Congress, the cry would ring out from every Bishop’s office, every mega-church, quite a few synagogues, etc etc, to stop Congress from attacking marriage. And Congress would fold so fast there might be friction burns. To think otherwise is to have no understanding of reality, frankly.
In the US, there is only one realistic path to legal equality for same-sex couples, and that is equal legal marriage rights. If you don’t favor that, then you’re not in favor of real equality.
Although I agreed with the rest of your post, I disagree with this phrasing, for a few reasons.
1) Designed by whom? The word “design” implies a designer, with the intentions you describe. How do you know who designed it, and what they intended?
2) There are lots of marriages which don’t include children, in our society and many others. I’m not sure that marriage can be “first and foremost” about something that is in fact optional. Ditto for sex.
I’d say that marriage’s most essential function is family formation. This can include children, and that is indeed one of the purposes of marriage. But since family formation — or, as I put it in the OP, making two people into each other’s closest relations — is part of all marriages, whereas child-rearing is part of only some marriages, I see see family formation as more central to marriage than child-rearing.
The structure has developed to accomodate, and has grown around, the dyadic rearing of children; neither is required for the other, but it’s only a happy coincidence that structures that work well for couples without children also, by and large, work well for parents.
Similarly, sexual exclusivity is neither exclusive to marriage nor physically required of it, but even in U.S. jurisdictions where adultery isn’t a criminal offence it’s grounds for divorce, and the right to divorce is one of the fundamental rights of marriage.
Marriage must be primarily about children, because if it were mainly about property, companionship, or sex, nobody would put up with all this bullshit.
Marriage must be primarily about children
Then why is it legal for people who can’t have children together to marry? 80 year olds, people who have had sterilization, people who never intend to have sex with each other all can marry, even though they have no chance of conceiving. They can adopt, but so can same sex couples. So if marriage is about children that’s all the more reason to make sure that same sex couples can marry and, if marriage is good for children, to encourage them to do so, especially if they intend to adopt and/or have children through surrogates.
because if it were mainly about property, companionship, or sex, nobody would put up with all this bullshit.
I don’t know, people will put up with a lot of bullshit for property, companionship, and sex. But in places where the social pressure to marry is attenuated, fewer people marry (ie Sweden), suggesting that marriage per se may not be a desired state for many people.
Thanks for the replies, everybody. I am starting to understand your stances better now.
Charles S.–
As a core social institution, it has religious trappings in most societies, since religion touches all of life in most societies, but marriage clearly is secular rather than religious in origin.
I agree, which is perhaps why I am not convinced by the “let’s leave the word ‘marriage’ to the churches where it belongs” argument. The word “marriage” has clearly grown far beyond that. And since legal marriage, while often coinciding with religious observances, does not require them, I don’t think a convincing case can be made that any government involvement in marriage is a violation of the separation of church and state–the government is neither endorsing nor restricting the practice of any religion in this area.*
Unlike Chris, I am not offended by the civil union for all proposal because it would treat same sex civil unions as second class (religious marriage is available for same sex couples in many religions and is still unavailable to same sex couples in the anti-gay religions even where same sex civil marriage is well established). Instead, I am offended by the pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism of it.
On the other hand, I can understand why Chris finds the suggestion that we should have to change the name of marriage if we are going to recognize the marriages of same sex couples. That shit is pretty obviously offensive.
I agree with both parts of this–I don’t actually think that the civil marriage for all plan would treat gays as second-class citizens, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I know nobody here would ever suggest a plan that did this. My problem is that while everyone would be equal, it wouldn’t make very many people happy. In fact, I think it would actually add fuel many common conservative arguments, such as the one I mentioned earlier as well as the “changing the definition of marriage” and “trying to take marriage away from straight people” arguments (both of which have no basis in reality as of now).
I still think that anyone who would rather have a civil union rather than a marriage should be able to do so, of course. But forcing everyone to fall under either system is wrong and runs counter to a progressive society which values choices.
Ampersand, I’m sorry for mistaking the intentions of your proposal. However, I hope I was able to answer your “what would the harm be” question. You are right that it is not politically viable, but for me that is secondary to my real problems with the plan, which is that it isn’t fair to people who value the term “marriage.” But regardless, I guess we agree on the important thing:
In the US, there is only one realistic path to legal equality for same-sex couples, and that is equal legal marriage rights. If you don’t favor that, then you’re not in favor of real equality.
*As long as they are not making marriage laws based on religious beliefs, i.e. anti-gay laws. I know most states currently are doing this, but I am referring to the general principle behind government-sanctioned marriage rather than the current reality in the United States.
It’s interesting that while lilacsigil let everyone know that Australia provides a ready example of a country where marriage is legally irrelevant – one whose culture and legal system are reasonably similar to those of the USA, no less – no one is inquiring about how that is working out, what the rationale behind the change was, what political and legal arguments were successful and why, whether there have been any “harmful effects” etc.
As for the question: if people want the rights and protections, why don’t they just get married?
Because they don’t. Maybe they’re waiting to save up money. Maybe they don’t want to perpetuate an institution that has tended to support patriarchy. Often, they just never consider it. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t committed to each other. Maybe there are power issues in the relationship, such that one partner refuses to marry the other to deny them the security of access to marital division of property and spousal support and child support.
You can say “why don’t they get married?” all you like, but when you look at the facts of what actual cohabiting relationships are like, it’s clear that many, if not most are in fact functionally the same as married relationships. There are cohabiting relationships which lack commitment, but those can be distinguished in legislation by specifying a length of time past which cohabitation becomes legally significant. If a couple is living together year after year, they do become interdependent, they do function as a unit, and they do consider themselves a family. If it is in the state’s interest to support marriages – even those may lack commitment as well – then it is in the state’s interest to support cohabiting couples as well.
To those who oppose the recognition of common law relationships: Look at Canada and Australia. What are the negative consequences of the policies of these two countries that the United States needs to avoid?
If there are two systems, marriage and domestic partnership:
If they’re both the same, it’s redundant. By definition.
If they’re both the same, but only het couples can marry, it has the effect of making people in relationships other than heterosexual dyads into second-class citizens, even if het couples don’t have the option of domestic partnership. It falls out this way because “marriage” was the term used in (arbitraily) 1985 and “domestic partnership” was not.
If they’re supposed to both be the same, but aren’t, the system fails at equality, particularly if certain types of relationship are excluded from one or the other.
If they’re not supposed to be the same, and only het couples can marry, It actually makes people in other relationships into secund class citizens.
If they’re not supposed to be the same, and anyone can do either, it doesn’t go far enough. Make it cafeteria-style: match the rights of marriage to the duties (where applicable) and let people who want the whole package for their relationship get married and people who don’t file paperwork for the bits they do want.
That’s a long way off at best, though. Meanwhile:
MissaA:
Well, then, why don’t they get married? I can understand not getting married because you want a different sort of thing than what marriage is (legally speaking), but I don’t see the point of being married without getting married if you have that option.
I’m not opposed to multiple parallel tracks with at least one (and preferably all) available to anyone who wants it regardless of the mix of sexes (or genders, depending on jurisdiction). I’m just not sure what the benefit is to the people involved.
They get to feel edgy and alternative.
My wife argues for a cafeteria system . . . but I wonder how it’d work in practice legally. It seems that people would have a tendency to not opt-in to things that’d become important later (for example, in custody disputes). Then they’d go to a judge to dispute the issue and the judges would defer to the traditional arrangement in many cases (for example, “yes, you didn’t opt-in to child support, but now that you’re divorced we’ll give it to you anyway for the good of your kids”).
It seems that most of the protections that people take issue with are those that protect children or the non-working spouse. I don’t know if we (as a society) would want to let people opt-out of those. Although I guess we have pre-nup agreements . . .
Of course, the anti-marriage-equality people have been saying this for years. The system would have to change for this to work. For example, my wife and I (CA state flavor of marriage) cannot sign a paper to opt-in to Social Security joint benefits.
I do think that most people would just want the standard model marriage. Just like I think a standard public option health care system would work well. Many people just don’t have the time and energy to fuss over all the fine print.
@ Hershele Ostropoler
It doesn’t matter why people don’t get married. When an unmarried couple lives together for several years, they are like a married couple. I’m stating that as a fact, not an argument. Therefore, why should the state treat them differently, when their needs are the same, and they perform the same social function? There is no reason.
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I am fine with gay marriage — as long as gay couples are not given the same insurance and other monetary benefits as straight couples. The reason straight couples are given insurance benefits is that there is always the possibility that they might get pregnant and therefore one of them will have to miss work for some time. Therefore they are given couple-insurance as a way to “insure” that even during that time that one of them has to miss work, the family as a whole has health insurance including the children. Yes, this is even true for infertile couples — the chance is always there that they might suddenly become fertile. It has happened before. Nobody is 100% infertile.
Gay couples never have to worry about accidentally producing a child. A gay couple consists of two able-bodied people that are each capable of working and supporting himself or herself, and there is no biological imperative for which they would have to insure. If they want to have children, it is always planned for and often only arrived at with a great deal of effort — adoption, etc. Therefore, they can also plan to save money and buy insurance separately for the child.
Old people who might newly remarry get retirement pension and all that good stuff, even though they are definitely not going to produce any children. But that is fine because they have already worked all their lives and they have earned their golden years. They are no longer able-bodied potential workers. That’s why we have social security.
I think gay people should be able to marry, visit each other in the hospital, oh sure, all of that stuff, why not. But insurance is a state issue that will put the burden of paying for it onto all other people in the state.
Oh, and there’s also the issue of this:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp?page=1
Anonymouse @51 – may I ask for a citation here? I mean, you give a pretty explicit, clearly laid out argument for what the historical reasons for financial benefits for marriage are. It shouldn’t be difficult for you to prove it. Can you provide any historical document by a government or other public institution, giving the potential for accidental pregnancy as the reasoning behind their implementation of laws or regulations benefitting married couples?
Now, it’s worth pointing out that even if you are entirely correct – even if the possibility of accidental pregnancy was the one and only reason in the mind of the creators of current marriage incentive systems – then your argument still boils down to “the status quo was arrived at for a reason, so we shouldn’t change it”, which, in itself, is a rather easily defeasible argument. But before that argument can be engaged with, it’s worth knowing if it’s true or not.
After all, it’s rather easy to come up with post-hoc rationalizations for the status quo. And, if one has an agenda, then it’s easy to tailor your post-hoc rationalizations specifically to be usable as an argument to advance your agenda.
So, evidence please. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find when the current laws for marriage benefits were passed, and then it’s just a matter of finding records of the discussions that led up to them. Can you point me towards the documents that back up your categorical claims?
@Anonymouse,
It simply isn’t true that no heterosexual couple is 100% infertile. Yet you’re not proposing that women who have had hysterectomies or men who have had their testicles removed should not receive insurance rights. A pair of 80-year-olds isn’t going to become accidentally pregnant. And it’s always possible a woman-woman couple might experience an accidental pregnancy. This doesn’t work as a hard-and-fast distinction.
I’m not certain which rights you are inclined to deny, since you seem to equate health insurance with costs to the state and society. Are there any other rights you’re inclined to deny to same-sex couples, or is it only insurance through a partner? (Incidentally, it’s more than a little dismissive to call basic rights afforded straight couples “that stuff, why not,” as Lisa Pond’s case demonstrates–see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/health/19well.html.)
I’m currently unable to get a U.S. visa for my partner, though he can do it for me in Britain. Bringing him to the States might impose costs on society? Should I be denied equal rights as a U.S. citizen because we’re not going to get pregnant accidentally? Or is the issue only health care? Or is it only state-subsidized medical care? Following your logic about the same-sex couple who intentionally adopt, surely we should also deny insurance rights to an opposite-sex couple who successfully contracept and whose family is entirely planned. Only couples who become accidentally pregnant should receive insurance rights.
You’re not entirely wrong that certain social goods, like health insurance, developed in tandem with policies meant to foster (heterosexual) nuclear families. But the current U.S. system of health insurance is of relatively recent vintage, and it doesn’t map easily onto some kind of pan-historical, trans-cultural system of marriage. Supposing it does is, as Eytan Zweig writes, a post-hoc justification for the status quo.
Quebec province as well. Our marriage rate has plummetted heavily since the 1960s, but especially since the 1980s. Now people cohabitate without marrying a LOT more.
This mainly comes from rebellion against Christianity from French-speaking (the majority of the province) people due to a certain high-profile politician (Maurice Duplessis) heavily abusing the church’s unofficial power up until his death in 1959 (he stayed in power over 20 years, with the last 15 being in a row). He was so right-wing that the backlash made the province extremely left-wing, very secular and against conservatism.
We still have the pressure from parents to pop grand children, but not to marry.
Here, child support is automatically awarded depending on custody, marriage or not. There’s kids under 18 or kids who are in school over 18, then there will be child support probably.
But spousal support is opposed here. If any cohabiting relationship of more than 1 year (this is the common law threshold here) becomes “exactly like marriage” and breaking up means having to pay spousal support for years…people simply won’t cohabit unless they’re ready to accept that cost. They’ll find some buddies to be with as housemates, because obviously it doesn’t work as a couple now.
Master Goldwater was for that arrangement, saying it’s only fair that the lower-income spouse be subsidized in every break-up where cohabitation occurred. Most people in the province find this ridiculous.
And now the Supreme Court of Canada will decide for us, apparently.
Stuff says common law couples have to “declare their relationship” for it to count, and other stuff says it automatically becomes that way after a year, declaration or not. So you wouldn’t need to say, file taxes jointly, to be considered together for common law purposes. The latter (automatic) is the scary thing for many. They wouldn’t get the benefits (like joint taxes and insurances), but would get the costs (spousal support) of a marriage.
@MissaA – I believe that straight couples who live together are different from straight couples who are married. The difference is that a married couple has made a decision that they want to be married. They made a commitment to stay together.
Most straight couples who are living together are doing it because they are not sure they want to stay together forever and so they are not getting married.
Treating a straight couple that lives together like a married couple is unfair to them because it doesn’t let them chose to not be married.
There are some straight couples who live together who want to be together forever. That’s fine, but I don’t think it’s fair for the rest of the world to have to read their minds. If you want to be treated like a married couple and you’re straight, you can get married.
Just a picky thing here, but I attended a Buddhist marriage ceremony once. It seems to me that in some sense, marriage is part of the Buddhist religion in actual practice.
I do think that marriage lite undermines marriage laws.
Marriage as a social institution is about the rights and responsibilities society gives to a married couple. Married people make a commitment to stay together and take care of each other and any children the have. This benefits the community.
In return the couple gets benefits like health insurance, social security benefits, the ability to bring someone here from another country, etc. It also serves as a quick way to sign up for a whole lot of things like who cares for you when you’re sick without having to remember to fill out all the different legal forms. And if you do break up, you have some protection.
It’s not really fair to give the same benefits to straight people who aren’t willing to make the commitment. And if straight people who get a civil union are making the same commitment as marriage, why not get married?