And then there's this news.

For a group that, historically, is known for having had some non-traditional views on marriage themselves, this sounds a lot like glass houses...

The marriage thing needs to be taken care of federally and with an iron fist. Period. These "religious" (I don't recognize the mormon "faith" as a religion) groups can self-delude themselves at their own places of worship instead of being allowed a voice to influence public matters.

Hopefully another supreme court fight can strike down the Prop 8 amendment. I'm disgusted with the travesty that just transpired, and I'm not gay nor do I live in California.

In theory, this can also be seen as a case of one faith (multiple faiths actually) trampling on the rights of another - and now the Californian constitution doing the same. A State marriage should have nothing to do with religion. If your particular faith wants to promote inequality, that's its business, but the state shouldn't be following suit or enabling it.

Freedom of religion is only a good thing when it protects the interests of your particular religion according to some. For faiths that do support same-sex marriage, there's no freedom here. In addition of course to a non-faith-based civil union which would require only one's personal freedoms being respected.

I'm surprised we're not seeing motions to repeal women's right to vote.

It would be nice if that happened, but there's a fundamental discontinuity there: The state issues the marriage license in the first place, and marriage has always been generally considered a "state" thing. The federal government doesn't regulate the marriages themselves, so why should they regulate a given state's criteria for recognizing that marriage?

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see this problem fixed, and the only way it'll get done is if the federal government puts its foot down. I just don't see how it can. When the republicans tried to get the opposite thing passed, it didn't work.

Edit: Oh wait I forgot about this one.

Isn't it ironic that, of all groups, the Mormons, with their history of polygamous marriage, are the driving force behind this movement to protect the sanctity of marriage as defined by the religious right, i.e., one man / one woman?

Here's an idea... let's see if we can't get a constitutional amendment prohibiting Mormons from marrying. Let them see the issue from the other side of the prejudice line.

tanstaafl.

That's what I meant when I said glass houses.

I say the Democrats offer Republicans a law banning gay marriage as long as it also bans heterosexual second marriages. If you're gonna "protect the institution of marriage" let's go the whole nine, right, boys?

To be fair, the reason they were polygynous in their seminal stages was to increase their fecundity. Homosexual couples cannot become gravid at all, much less recurrently. So there is some measure of cogency to their contention.

(Take that, Peter.)

It's my opinion that was simply an after-the-fact retcon of the reasoning behind their reversal of policy. At least that's what it reads like to me.

It's known that a big chunk of the money (and possibly the majority of it) for Proposition 8 came from out of state.

The two biggest contributors were Utah (Mormon) and Connecticut (Knights of Columbus).

A Mormon friend of mine also spent considerable time canvassing door to door for Proposition 8. I presumed that everyone in his church was doing the same.

This issue is baffling to me from multiple directions.

Why do states have to get involved with any type of marriage in the first place? (including heterosexual)
(If your main answer is "for the children" then recall that a large proportion of children are born "out of wedlock" and we already have laws on the books to deal with custody, etc. in those cases.)
Why do churches believe a ruling on this has any impact on their faith?
Why do gay people believe a Civil Union with identical legal status to marriage in terms of property rights, hospital visitation, and child custody wouldn't be "good enough" if it wasn't called "marriage"?

Granted I have never run these questions by any of my ultra-religious fundamentalist friends or either of the two "married" gay couples I know (one lesbian couple, one consisting of two males).

I guess I just don't care enough about this to bother listening to rhetoric from either side.

Just seems like there are lots of raw emotions here and, as I said, these legal fights on this subject baffle me.

P.S. A friend from India tells me that (at least in his region), the marriage laws are even funkier.
If you are Hindu, you are allowed one wife. If you are Muslim, you are allowed four wives.
I suppose having only three would be overly restrictive. And having five would be sinful.
Or maybe you're just being greedy (or a glutton for punishment, depending on your perspective).

P.P.S. A few months back, California reinstated the terms "Bride" and "Groom" on the wedding forms by popular request.
It seems a lot of people found "Party A" and "Party B" to be insufficiently romantic.

A marriage is a legal contract. Contract law is handled by states. Rather than having a unique contract for each marriage, it makes a lot more sense to have a single contract for everyone. If you want to argue that you don't need a legal contract, feel free to not get married. I don't even see any reason why a church wouldn't agree to perform the ceremony of your choice, if you believe that you need religious certification.


I cannot speak for homosexual people, but my personal opinion is that "separate but equal is inherently unequal".


The Koran allows for up to four wives, specifically in situations of widows with children. So there is some basis for the difference. Note that polygamy is (civilly) illegal in many Muslim-majority countries.

Well, obviously: churches mostly have nothing to do with faith, but power.

As Bitt said, "state" marriage is a contract. It should be treated as such, with parties signing a form saying "we agree to support each other, share property acquired from now on, have joint custody of children..." etc. Note that, if we push this to logical consequence, there is no good reason to restrict the contract to two parties.

I think that state should deal only in civil unions, i.e. all "state" marriages should be called the same (I personally don't see why the word cannot be "marriage", but don't see why is it so important, either). Then, the couple (or group) would have the choice to have legal contract, religious (or other) ceremony of their choice, or both (or neither, of course). As a concession to churches, an arrangement could be made that in the case of religious marriage compatible with the state one (and all should be such, as people should be free to stipulate conditions of nuptial agreement as they wish), the church simply notify authorities the their members entered into the contract. OK, the state will wish some standardization, but that's technicality.

Bonzi

That's how it works here in The Netherlands. The only legally recognized marriage is the civil one - if you want to have a religious ceremony, feel free to have one, but you *do* need to have a civil servant perform the legal civil procedure for it to count.

The same or similar is true for many other countries as well. I did some research into this when we decided to get married "abroad." We ended up getting married in Portugal, where I was born.

In Portugal there is one religious ceremony that is recognized by the state, a Catholic one. Any other religious process, or for that matter a lack of one, requires a civil ceremony for legal recognition, usually at the local office of the Civil Registry for the region.

We were lucky enough to have the civil registrar come out to marry us on the beach in April, something the Catholic Church would never consider anyway. The ceremony had no mention at all of anything religious in it, so we were actually quite free to style it ourselves beyond the paperwork procedure required by the state. In fact because Portugal's changes in procedure, you don't even have to sign anything as part of the ceremony - the signatures were already taken at the time of the application for the process here at home at the consulate a month before.

Prop 8 should be thrown out on the sole basis that it was tainted by parties outside of the state.

This seems to help clear it up a bit. The main reason for the legal fighting is the portability of the agreement. Civil unions are legally only recognized in a few places (The linked document only has Vermont, but there are others), and as such, those agreements can only be ended in those states. The other big concern seems to be status under federal programs and rights laws for married couplesthat don't apply to civil unions.

Wikipedia also has a decent summary.

That's basically true in the US, too, with the qualification that religious leaders are allowed to officiate the "ceremony". They basically work as a notary public in this instance. (Note that the concept of a notary public in the US is apparently a lot more restricted than in the rest of the world; they exist solely to witness and certify oaths.)

I think I am agreeing with Bonzi on this one, and perhaps agreeing with you as well.

The states should provide contracts. Evenly.

Call them marriage. Call them petunias. Call them by some long inscrutable bureaucratese name. I don't care.
But the religious aspects of it should be handled by your faith of choice (or optionally no faith),
and the legal part of the contract has no connection to your temple/synagogue/hall/church/ashram/commune.

All the state should care about is who gets the money when it goes bad or someone dies.
And who is committed to take care of whom and for how long.


Agreed. I'm not proposing separate but equal. I apologize if that is what my earlier post implied.

I'm proposing that the state provide one type of contract
and you can feel free to overlay whatever religious overtones on it that you wish.

You can get a license and not be sanctified by a church.
You can get a ceremony at a church and chose not to enter into a legal contract, though I doubt many people would want that option; it shows a certain lack of commitment.

(And of course your church can choose to refuse to perform a ceremony if you don't fill out a binding contract with the state,
submit a declaration of beliefs, or swear to eat pomegranate every second Tuesday, that's their right).



Oh I understand the religious origin of granting different marriage rights to holders of different religious beliefs.
I just wanted to point out that I think this highlights the fundamentally ridiculous nature of the state weighing in on this.
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't sign up for "Separate But Unequal".

If I hold religious beliefs saying I can split my assets and commit my support to a harem of 25 women,
then the guy down at the courthouse should just look at me, raise his eyebrow, say "are you sure that's what you want?"
and then cheerfully write up the contract
...without caring whether or not some man in a funny hat or silly costume has said it is OK by doing a magic dance or reading some poems from an ancient book or scroll.

A small post-election footnote compliments of my sister:

My parents are 87 and 90 years old. Both 1st-generation children of Catholic immigrants from the Azores and from County Laois. Mom, one of 2 surviving sibs (out of 14) has difficulty remembering if you called 10 minutes ago; Dad's memory is pretty good but his vision is pretty shot, he is seriously aphasic and he has been in and out of the hospital this past year.

While he could no longer see Tim Russert, he was a loyal listener of Meet the Press and Tim's death was a serious blow.

Dad's back in the hospital right now, but he managed to get out for a few days around election day and both Mom and Dad got a ride to the polls in the assisted living center's van.

"The Captain" has seen a lot of this world but remained a real "townie" at the core. I think, though, that the ghost of Tip O'Neill was looking down on these two Reagan Democrats.

They both voted for Obama.

This really *is* huge. Transcendent.

Do you argue that ministers should be unable to act as a notary of the marriage contract? If not, that's basically the way it is now.


Well, you asked why gay people are not okay with a "civil union". And the answer is because the state currently calls those "marriages". If you get a contract that says "marriage" if you're marrying a person of the opposite sex, and a contract that says "civil union" if you're marrying a person of the same sex, that is separate. If you want to say that all such contracts should be labelled "civil union", I think that the gay community would be fine with that. But you didn't include that sentiment in your question.

Honestly, all of this is based, in my opinion, on an antiquated notion, which is that a pair of people who take care of each other must have a romantic relationship.

Imagine a pair of siblings. One really just wants to stay at home and be domestic. The other wants a career, but has no interest in dealing with a household. Why can they not live together and deal with a household in the manner of a traditionally married couple without having a romantic relationship? Of course, the answer is that they can. But they don't get the benefits that the state provides to married couples. Chances are that the sibling with the job cannot extend his or her health insurance to the other sibling, for example. Why shouldn't this situation be recognized?

Now, what if, instead of siblings, they're just friends who met at school? Why should that be different?

Now what if those friends also happen to have a romantic relationship? Well, now you're talking about a "traditional" marriage. (Assuming they're of the opposite sex.)

What this comes down to is that the state is determining your legal ability to be married based on whether or not (you claim) you're in a romantic relationship. Which, when you think about it, is just ridiculous.

While my own feelings about some of this are a bit muddy, the outcome of Prop 8 in California seems like a huge step backward. Imagine that; huge turnout for Obama contributes to a win for a campaign funded by out-of-state religious interests. Backwards.

I have a couple of thoughts/questions.

Since I am an ordained minister, I have offered my services to acquaintances re; weddings. But I thought: do states such as Washington and California require that I ascertain the sex of the parties? If one of the parties decide that they are "male" or "female" at any given moment, why should I question that? I need to research that.

OK, I know that this doesn't really confront the issue, and it doesn't do well on the "separate-but-equal" front, but it's a thought.

Secondly, I have been looking at the WA State AG and secretary of state's Web sites to see what the requirements are for initiative petitions. I have some thought of gathering signatures for a petition that would prohibit Mormons from getting married in the State of Washington

Well noted. I was doing the same mistake (including, say, a five-member commune, but not your, in hindsight obvious, example of siblings).

I think that's unduly harsh towards the Mormons. I was raised in one of the (non-fundamentalist) splinter groups that formed out of Mormonism, and, while I agree that the genesis of the church came about for reasons other than the claimed piety, the modern church is really a far cry from what it was in the past.

That said, I'm certainly not defending their beliefs, let alone their involvement in Prop 8. I'm incredibly proud of Paul Martin for passing C-38, and only wish that the elected leaders in the USA had as much insight into this issue as he did:

I assume this is the "Charter" to which he refers?

That'd be the one.

And thanks of course to Trudeau for it. So far the best Prime Minister of my lifetime. It would have been something else to have had experienced PET in his prime face of against GWB.

I don't believe that all 50 states treat a "civil union" as identical to a "marriage" in all legal or contract law respects yet.
I think that California has since 2000 or so, but I don't think that is yet uniform across every state.
But with that done, I certainly wouldn't care who acts as a notary.


That is exactly what I meant in my original post on this topic when I said "I don't know why the state is involved in 'marriages' at all".



Fully agreed. That was my point.
The state can deal with contracts.
They can leave the romance and religion to other parties.

Very few states have anything that matches the concept of "civil union" other than marriage at all.

I didn't realize we were having a semantics problem. You're saying that the thing that we currently call a marriage contract should be a "civil union" contract and that the term "marriage" should be excised from any civil application. Okay. I'm not going to argue with that.

Continuing on the topic of prop 8:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/justbeta/3010014488