PMomma reminded me about California's groundbreaking move, and it inspired me to write a little about the subject. First of all, yay, California! In practical terms, I'm all for gay marriage. I don't see how anyone could look at anti-miscegenation laws and the case law striking them down, and then argue that gay marriage can be banned. Just fifty years ago, people were panicking over mixing of the races, and claiming that the definition of marriage meant two people of the same race. Sound familiar?
However, I have to say that I think the government should get out of the marriage game altogether. Those "civil unions" that some fence-sitters advocate? The government should indeed provide civil unions - to everyone! Part of the hysteria over gay marriage is that "marriage" is steeped in religious history. Since it seems impossible to disentangle the word from religious trappings, shouldn't the government keep its hands off entirely? Two people who want to get hitched should be able to go to a government entity and get certified as a couple, in order to ease financial and legal issues. If they also want to get "married," they can do so in the house of worship of their choice. There, now everyone's equal under the law, the government isn't entangled with religion, and the homophobes get to keep their sacred vocab word.
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Musings on motherhood, parenting, breastfeeding, and less controversial topics such as religion and politics, from (what I hope is) a rational point of view.
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- Christy
- North Carolina, United States
- I'm a full time mother, a non-theist, a skeptic, a breastfeeding advocate, and all manner of other things that tend to annoy people. One of my goals in life is to examine all my beliefs and adjust them to conform with reality as we can best define it.
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3 comments:
Oops, accidentaly posted on wrong post. For this one...Hmmm, what a world that would be if everyone were gay.
The big problem with making everything a civil union would be the straight married people who opposed having their marriages change names. Plus, you'd still have a disparity between people who were both civil-unionized and married, and those who were only one or the other. (I guarantee you that there would be people out there who refused to have anything but the religious service, who would then complain about not having the same legal rights as the ones who had the civil unions.)
Alison, you're right of course. People complain enough when they're not allowed to inject their religion into government activities - imagine the howling if their brand of nuptials was actually removed from government sanctioned unions!
I still think it would be the right thing to do, but I agree it will not happen any time soon.
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