With the bumper sticker and commentary war over NC’s Amendment One reaching an absurd crescendo, I feel obligated to lay out my own conflicted position on the matter of nontraditional marriage.
On a personal level, I don’t give a crap. Marry a goat for all I care.
On a cultural level, I don’t know what wider effects gay marriage will have, and neither do you, and I don’t fault people for being suspicious of advocates claiming that nothing will change, despite being a drastic change to a centuries old cultural tradition.
What I really object to is the attempts to find support for gay marriage in existing law. Gay marriage may be terrible or the most wonderful thing in history, but it is not something that can be reasonably found in our legal code or cultural history, and if an activist judge can find justification for it in existing law, then he can find support for anything in existing law. I believe this amendment is a bulwark against this kind of nonsense and I support it on that basis.
If we are to have gay marriage, then supporters should do the right thing and have a law passed by majority. I would support this law.
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This deck chair would look so much better over there! ;)
#WarOnDistractions
Hey, it’s either this or eating dogs.
It’s the season of Media Chaff…
Same Sex Marriage is covered under the Interstate Commerce Clause. Duh.
I agree. Particularly since we’ve been through this before. Marriage was significantly reformed with the introduction of no-fault divorce. All these same arguments were made. One side turned out to be right. But they’ll never get an apology, and the consequences will never be reversed. At most, we can use the experience to make us think a little more carefully before trying to reform marriage again. But it looks like we won’t be doing that either.
I’m personally against gay marriage, but not against the idea of legally-equivalent civil unions.
Like you, I have no problem with laws being passed in a constitutional fashion, ie passed by a legislative majority and signed into law by an executive. If gay marriage were enacted into law this way, I wouldn’t like it, but I would accept it because it followed the established procedure–and if I don’t like it, I (and those who think like I do) have the right to try to get it changed.
I DO have a problem with activist judges making law by judicial fiat.
The way I see it, everyone is fighting about “Marriage”, but each side is fighting from different uses of the word.
The majority of those against gay marriage, are resisting from the religious meaning of the word. (Whether or not the person is inherently a religious person is irrelevant.) They see a marriage as being the joining of two hearts (or souls) together, til death do they part. And they don’t want to share something that their religion celebrates with people who will use it in ways that their religion finds blasphemous.
Then you have the folks on the other side, for whom “Marriage” is a legal term, and it confers certain legal rights & obligations. The two persons can be legally considered to have entered into a contract, and from that point on, everyone is required to treat either one equally in reference to anything that can affect them. (You know, all the legal stuff. Joint bank accounts, filing taxes jointly, automatic inheritance in the event there is no will, etc.)
There are a lot of people who think they are being reasonable when they say that there should be an equivalent civil union for gays, but they are OK with not letting them get “married”.
Hasn’t this country already tried “Separate But Equal” and found it to be fine in theory, but reprehensible in practice? Why do any of you think it will work better this time?
If a man & woman can appear before a priest, take part in a religious ceremony, and then be considered IN THE EYES OF THE LAW, as being “Married”, to be treated as one legal unit. Then there is no basis for restricting those who choose to bump matching parts from acquiring the same legal rights.
If you still insist that it is not right to allow gays to be “married”, and insist that only a civil union is acceptable, then to avoid that whole “separate but equal” thing, then everyone will have to seperate the Marriage portion from the civil union part. (And no, you can’t have one person presiding over both actions.) Then you have to rewrite all of those ordinary contracts and things that refer to “husband and wife” and change them to “civil partners”.
Starts getting complicated pretty quickly, doesn’t it?
AJD, those oridnary contracts will have to be re-written regardless.
Or are you going to pick which lesbian is the husband?
“If we are to have gay marriage, then supporters should do the right thing and have a law passed by majority. I would support this law.”
Well, yeah, only now they’re gonna have to overturn a constitutional amendment and then have a law passed by the majority. That oughta be easy!
tweaker
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