How about polygamy? Following the California Supreme Court ruling that the benefit of legal marriage cannot be limited to a man and a woman, doesn't this mean that more than two people should also be permitted to marry, say a man and three women or three men or a woman and two men? Maybe the Mormons will be able to return their original practices, which they had to abandon so Utah could become a state. We certainly have secret plural families in NM, and they are not limited to fundamentalist Mormons. Someone should ask Tom Udall and the eventual Dem candidate about polygamist civil unions. Recognizing the practice legally could have avoided the damage done to the children at the Yearning for Zion community in Texas.
I think this is a red herring argument in relation to gay marriage, but will have to get back to it later (work calls)...which I will.
Yeah, next come the comments about dogs and humans and horses and humans, no?
Being a Lesbian, I personally don't care what the civil contract (license) that brings all those local, state and federal benefits and protections is called, as long as the contract provides exactly the same civil rights, benefits and responsibilities that heteros get. What passes for a so-called civil union now is limited to the state in which it's entered into and doesn't have any effect on federal benefits like Social Security survivor or dependent benefits, just for starters. Many other things that are included in hetero marriage aren't there.
Cross the state line and the "civil union" doesn't mean a thing. Get in a car wreck in another state with your partner and you might not be able to enter the ER to see them if they're injured. No guarantees. It's all up to the hosptial personnel.
For most of my life I wasn't interested in gay marriage, partly for the reasons marjorie discusses. However, now that my partner of 18 years and I are getting on in age, things like Social Security, health insurance from my partner's employer, etc. have become much more important and we are very aware of what we're missing legally that other partnerships take for granted.
The ideal solution would be separating civil marriage from the religious ritual as marjorie suggests, but I won't hold my breath. I just wonder why heteros are allowed to get married WITHOUT a church ceremony if marriage is considered a holy sacrament by the state.
Because we're hypocrites?
I didn't mean to raise the implications of the California court decision as a red herring to make a back-handed argument against same sex marriage. I am on the record favoring equal treatment of same sex couples when it comes to the government benefit of the contract of marriage. I raised this as a legitimate question for further discussion. Really, if two people of the same sex can marry because marriage contracts cannot be limited legally to one man and one woman, doesn't this mean polygamy, logically, must also be legalized?
Hi Jim,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to this. I've never actually been asked to articulate my thoughts on this, but I guess I will now. I think this will be incomplete so just consider this a first stab.
Two-person marriage, despite the dysfunction that permeates it or the fact that some people just don't find that it fits them well, is the basic kinship unit of our society--we can see this in the legal rights and responsibilities married partners have to each under the law, not to mention, simply, overwhelming social norms. In this respect, gay people are excluded legally from an essential component of our society, simply based on their gender.
There actually is a significant amount of buy-in for gay marriage in our society. The fact that you see Republicans being ok with civil unions and a large amount of buy-in among Democrats for gay marriage shows that two-person gay relationships are increasingly socially normal across sectors of our society. And given that there is a relationship between social norms and how the legal environment evolves over time, historically, moving in this direction is not beyond the pale.
I think we can look at it in this context without addressing whether or not society wants to confer legal status on other types of kinship units.
As to other types of kinship units, I don't know what the percentage of polygamous units is vis a vis the rest of the population. But I'd argue that our society is nowhere near being structured in a way that would facilitate the proliferation of polygamous families. Its an interesting proposition that legalization of polygamy would solve some of the problems we've seen with the FLDS, but thats really just speculation. There are plenty who think it would not change the patriarchal (by which I mean "sexist") nature of it, including the practice of kicking the excess men out of the community. But regardless, we'd need significant structural change before we could move in that direction as a society. For instance, we might have to revamp what we consider the federal poverty line for families in light of a new sector of family units pushing 20 kids or more. Because along with polygamy generally comes a lot of kids. And then there's all the social welfare policy attached to that. If you consider structure to be a basic reflection of society, then such a change would be significant. And, I don't believe you can make the argument that social norms are anywhere near evolved in this direction.
Musings on what social change would be required if we legalized polygamy would fill a book.
But maybe a page is required with simply allowing gay people their civil right to engage in marriage as our society (as in, United States) currently conceives of it--a two person partnership.
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