During dinner tonight, my boyfriend and I were talking about California passing Prop 8. I'm a staunch liberal, and bisexual. He's a moderate and was raised in a very strictly religious and conservative family. His family is Independent Baptist and he went to a bible college for two years before being caught making out with his girlfriend, which he was expelled for.
Anyways, we were talking about the whole issue of gay marriage. From his experience with the Christian community, he believes that the reason why we have such a problem getting the majority of the population to go along with gay marriage is because of the word marriage. To many Christians, marriage is a religious institution that should only be between a man and a woman. So how do we get around this without having the whole separate but equal problem?
I believe that instead of pushing for equal marriage rights for homosexual couples, what we should do instead is push for the abolition of the state sponsored marriage. If a couple wants to get married, let them go to a church. If a couple wants to join together legally, let them get a civil union. Transfer all the rights that the state sponsored marriage currently has over to civil unions.
I think if we tried to push this, it would help immensely with getting equal rights in partnership for homosexual couples. Christians would not feel like their sacred institution of marriage was being violated, and homosexual couples would get the same rights as heterosexual couples.
What do you all think?
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Thoughts on the Issue of Gay Marriage.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/10336
Weekly Feministing Newsletter
Feministing RSS Feed
While I think this is a good idea (I've actually had it myself :) ), I think its just skirting an issue and not addressing the language needed.
The problem is that "marriage" (the word) is entrenched to such a degree into our shared cultural understanding that it's impossible to separate from the state sponsored vocabulary. If we started this plan right now, it would still take generations for "marriage" to mean "church wedding" and "civil union" to mean "marriage," you know? And the separate but equal civil unions are not quite equal in the eyes of society.
Therefore, I do think that the only way to truly get equality for same sex marriage is to have it called and considered the same as "traditional" marriage.
I don't understand why any Christian would think that they should have exclusive use of the term "marriage." Governments, not to mention other religions (including ones that practice polygamy) have been in the marriage business just as long, if not longer than any Christian religion you choose to name.
Besides, the term "marriage" conveys community acceptance and recognition of a relationship. The term "civil union" does not have that elevated social status. I daresay that many heterosexual couples who don't want to get married in the church would indeed be disappointed to have their relationship relegated to the lower status "civil union" when the reality of their relationship is exactly the same as a "marriage."
F.Y.I. If you leave the term "marriage" to the churches, then gay marriage would still happen. Some of the more progressive churches do this. Others are thinking about doing this.
Separate but equal is not equal. Taking rights away from one group to placate another is despicable. The poem by Niemoeller is a good way to describe what can happen:
In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
> Besides, the term "marriage" conveys community acceptance and recognition of a relationship
Hmm, does it mean that the majority of CA voters don't want to accept and recognize homosexual relationships as "full" marriage? They just don't want to. I doubt they frown upon homosexual couples but... what are valid arguments that could affect their reluctance to allow same sex couples inside "marriage domain"?
Godzilla, I think you're missing my point. My idea would not take away rights from anyone, nor promote a separate but equal institution, it would be doing away with one. The whole point of doing away with state sponsored marriage and creating state sponsored civil unions which EVERYONE would participate in, is eliminating the whole separate but equal thing.
Plus there wouldn't be any law saying that you couldn't refer to yourself as married, even if you only went with the state sponsored civil union and not the church sponsored marriage. And yes, gay couples could still get married in a church that would be willing to marry them. But there's no way that anyone could say that this solution would force churches to marry gay couples.
i think you're right.
i'm part of a gay-positive church and i know tons of gay Christians and gay-friendly Christians who attend churches of all denominations.
It seems to me that the majority of christians themselves are not homophobic, but are simply afraid of their churches losing their rights to practice freely- regardless of the issue.
So your solution seems very practical. Marriage can be defined by churches however they want to define it BUT state determined civil unions should provide an equal union for any 2 adults who want it. I can't imagine any legitimate objection to this from either side.
The thing about "churches losing their rights to practice freely" has nothing to do with same-sex marriage itself, but rather with the lying ad campaigns in support of H8. These campaigns said, for example, that churches would be forced to marry same-sex couples. That is absolutely not true. Churches do not have to marry anyone they don't want to - the Catholic church, for example, won't marry divorced couples or childfree couples.
Given the small margin by which H8 passed, I wouldn't be surprised if it were pushed over the top by people who would otherwise have voted NO but who were tricked by the lying advertisements into thinking they would lose their own freedom of religion.
Just a point of clarification - while the Catholic church usually won't marry divorced couples, the idea that they won't marry childfree couples is not correct. Certainly some churches disapprove of childfree marriages, but the whole point of no sex (and thus no children) out of wedlock means that, ideally*, all couples that are to be married will be childfree - at least to start with!
*this is not my idea of 'ideal', merely the stance of the Catholic church.
By child free, do you mean couples who do not intend to have children? If so, I believe that is up to the priest performing the ceremony. I was married in a catholic church and we insisted on no "obeying" the husband and no "going forth and multiplying"--our priest had no problem with this.
I like this idea, because that would mean that homosexuals COULD marry, i they married in a church that accepted homosexuals, but under the government it would be called a "civil union."
So the government would call ALL marriages civil unions. And the individuals could decide for themselves if they wanted to call any indivudal union a marriage, or a civil union. But to the government, they would be identical regardless.
Well, it would mean that religious homosexuals could marry. Churches aren't just open marriage offices, and a couple of, say, atheist homosexuals might well be reluctant to join a religion they don't believe in just to have their relationship blessed in a ritual they find meaningless.
Marriage only exists when it's recognized by some societal authority that is ACCEPTED as an authority by the people getting married. For a lot of people, churches, synagogues, etc. fulfill that role instead of or in addition to the government; but for those of us without strong ties to a religious community, the government is the only real option. And for irreligious homosexuals who don't live in Massachussetts, there's no option at all.
(I went and wrote this, then noted that Godzilla-is-coming already basically made the same points above. Oh well.)
Exactly!
One other consideration is the sheer tonnage of present law that assigns rights and protections based on terms like "marriage" and "married". Getting rid of state usage of the term "marriage" would require re-writing all of these laws, from the federal level through the states on down to cities and towns, opening up each one for review and revision. Far simpler to work on passing constitutional amendments that define marriage as between "consenting adults, regardless of race, sex, or gender identity". It's politically no more difficult, and sounder practical policy.
Also, I think that, in the time it would take us to successfully argue for undoing the legal concept of marriage, we could just as easily have redefined it to be a more inclusive social institution, regardless of religious persuasion.