Well, I agree with you that ideally, marriage would be a religious institution separate from any civil status. You should able to be "married" whether the state sees a union or not, or be civilly bound whether or no any church recognizes it as a "marriage".
But that's not the way it is, and there's really no reason why the state can't do things the way it does, it just adds to the confusion that the state uses the same "marriage" label as does the church.
Most any of the benefits achieved by "marriage" can be accomplished by contract; the big difference is that many of these things are presumed to be the case if you're married in the eyes of the law. E.g., you could contract with your employer that if you die, your pension continues to be paid to your "friend", but if you're married, that's the default status under an ERISA plan. There are also many legal responsibilities that go along with marriage, such as responsibilities for debts your spouse enters into, but you seldom see any ad hoc civil union attempting to contractually preserve liabilities between the "spouses."
Most of those legal rights and presumptions arise from historical husband/wife roles -- women may not have been allowed to work or own property, children were/are likely in a marriage and the wife will stay home to rear them, etc. -- and since those roles have changed, maybe the presumptions aren't valid any more.
The only way we'll ever get free of the legal confusion between religious and civil "marriage" is to also get rid of all legal protections that arise from "marriage" -- neither government nor industry can afford to suddenly provide benefits to "spouses" that have only spousal benefits but no spousal liability. I'm all for eliminating all references to "marriage" in state and federal law, defining identical/mirrored obligations for both (all?) parties in a "civil union", regardless of gender, and letting the "marriage" label go to anyone who wants to use it, apart from any legal status.
Oddly, some of the more "reasonable" (less unreasonable?) opponents of gay marriage trot out the Civil Union Argument: Sure, let them have civil unions, they bleat with sweat beads on their bald pates, but don't let's call it "marriage." Well, that's all "marriage" is, people, in legal terms -- a civil contract. The "marriage" part is between the couple, the friends and family who witness their joining, and their pastor, rabbi, imam or shaman.
I personally believe it should be mandated that gay marriage be legally recognized, but that no church should be compelled to betray its own principles, however misguided I might find them.
All that said, I think the issue is a clasic wedge issue deployed cynically by politicians, particularly Republicans. Face it, senators, etc., are educated, worldly people and it's impossible to believe that they're really that outraged by the specter of gay marriage. Hell, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney both have dear family members who are gay.
It's just a way to rally the more retrograde element of their base -- an element that, as we've seen, is shrinking fast ... even if it's vividly in evidence in the comments section of the DMN.
P.S. Is the photo supposed to illustrate that, if we allow gay marriage, we're opening the door for the legions of men who will hasten to marry their monkeys?
LOL...No, it's supposed to be what I wanted to do to the commenters. But now I have realized that the photo may also alarm John "Box Turtle" Cornyn...
A few fast and furious asides regarding:
1) Ignorance is only bliss to the ignorant.
2) The more people travel more or less exclusively within their own bubble, the more they come to believe that their 'reality' is reality itself.
3) Those who fight inevitable change become victims, not of those they fight but rather, self-inflicted relics...keepers of a faith that has a limited although expansive shelf life.
4) Those who only 'care' about issues that have apparent relevance to themselves are by definition insular.
5) Learning with an open mind about things and people and issues that are ostensibly not meaningful to you makes you a man or woman of the world vs. someone living on the planet.
6) All knowledge being power, the truth regarding endemic homophobia is that the truth threatens no one who has themselves an ability to think and reason.
7) The time has come for gay issues to matter. It’s only been a few thousand years coming. So I would hardly say that after millennia this is ‘too much too soon.’
Cornyn makes a point: The day gay marriage is legalized, not only will men marry Galapagos penguins as the culmination of an ill-advised whirwind romance*; my wife will immediately become a box turtle and I'll be forced to raise my child in a world where all the other children's mothers are box turtles, too. That ain't freedom, Jack!
And, as unresponsive as box turtles can be sometimes -- would a word or two of encouragement kill her? -- it will hardly be surprising if I stray from my marriage bed with an aquatic salamander or a tree sloth.
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* It's odd, no one ever avers that women will rush willy-nilly to the altar with, say, a mud puppy or a common brushtail possum. Always men.
Ah, Daniel -- for women it won't be mud puppies or possums, it will be toy poodles and housefuls of cats.
Rawlins -- if we're just throwing out "fast and furious asides" that don't particularly address any point in the discussion, I'll counter with "just because you care about it doesn't make it an issue for anyone else." I'm not thinking of the instant issue, really, but the Pleasant Grove geographical ambiguity discussion from Trey's blog.
Actually, Bethany, the government is the only entity that gives marriage or any other form of contract any universal binding authority across a plurality of demographic communities or religions. Marriage only became important historically when tracking and universally agreeing about the disposition of the property acquired in marriage, that is, the woman and her property, became important. Prior to that, the peasants could cohabit like bunnies, or be married with crowns of daisies in fields of gold by Reverend Will of the Church of All Things Cool and it would be one and the same, that is, of little worldly importance.
Of course, when Christendom is the sole governing authority, what you say about marriage being a religious ceremony takes on additional significance.
Did somebody say Pleasant Grove? But isn't that a dangerous, grubby land? I read in the paper that living there entails daily buggerings at the hands of a testy homunculus. He's mean!
I think it's anywhere south of 30 and east of White Rock Creek, which I'm just guessing, which is good enough for me. No thanks!
To my earlier post on a plane: If the only people who care about gays are the gays themselves, then the reversal of the current policies and laws will never change. In other words, it takes people who care about something whether it is relevant to them or not. Like us, who recognize how misguided homophobia is, and how important equal rights are for those who seek to have legally recognized protection under the law.
I, for instance, was never a woman but it was I who got mamograms and even birth control covered under our company policies when I was a corporate puma.
PS: According to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there are no gays in Pleasant Grove.
I was never a woman and it was I who got mammograms, too. Or, as my primary care giver called them, "titty twisters." He was mean!
I agree that taking away the "Marriage" label would make this so much easier to deal with. It seems perfectly reasonable from a certain perspective. The problem is, I think, that it has been argued for so VERY long, and so very passionately that, at this point, nothing else will do.
Homosexuals should have the right to equal protection under the law. That's what a rational person is arguing for, or against, but the people screaming the loudest, on both sides, are no longer rational about the issue.
Taking the label away would send the Religious nuts into a frenzy about turning further away from Christianity and other such nonsense.
On the other side, it would seem like moving the goal and making the homosexuals compromise what they've been fighting for, even if it gives them the standards they want.
The Gays deserve to be treated just like straight people; or the other way around. Unless the government just stopped recognizing "domestic partnerships" and forced everyone to pay for the lawyer, as homosexuals have been doing for year, then everyone ought to be allowed to be "married"
As for the separation of Church and State, the Catholics already refuse to recognize all kinds of marriages; no one can make them. Plenty of Churches recognize marriages that the state does not; we can't stop them.
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