(no subject)

[gaudior]

I was talking to a (moderate, politics-wise) friend this evening about gay marriage. He advanced the idea that everyone, straight and gay, should have civil unions, which include all the legal rights and responsibilities of marriage, but don't use the word. Instead, the word "marriage" should be reserved for religious institutions, which can then decide for themselves whether they will perform same-sex marriages.

This is not a new idea. This is, in fact, an idea which I myself advanced early in the debate, and someone told me, "No, that's a bad idea-- no-one will vote for it."

But it just keeps coming up. I've heard the idea proposed half-a-dozen times over the last few years, always by relatively moderate people, all of whom seem to think that they've come up with it on their own.

And I do know a number of arguments as to why people want to insist on actual legalized gay marriage (not the least of which is that it seems entirely likely to happen, and soon)(and all the difficulties involved in things like, say, Catholic hospitals not wanting to allow unionized queer couples visitation and adoption on their premises). But I find myself curious about the numbers.

So, o my (admittedly biased) sample:

[Poll #1452891]

And this raises the question-- if it turned out that a majority did favor this plan, should same-sex marriage advocates change tactics? Or not?

Discuss!

--R

(Upon request, I have added the following questions, for people who like the status quo in New Jersey, here. That's, civil unions for queers, legal marriages for straight people. Unfortunately, lj will not allow me to revise a poll, or add another poll to a pre-existing entry-- otherwise, I would edit this into the original.)



ETA: Okay, so, on further reflection, I clearly did not think this entry through very thoroughly at all. It is, as many people have pointed out, a bad poll, poorly worded, and unlikely to get results which are in any way representative of the general population. If I were being a real social scientist, this would have been my test-run, in which I found out all the things wrong with the poll before revising it, running it by another test pool, and then taking it to a large, anonymous, randomized sample, preferably with multiple methods of reaching participants of a good range of demographics.

Which was clearly not my intent. Honestly, I just wanted an ideas-check-- "Hey, I've heard this idea from a bunch of people, but I don't see any moves towards it-- howcome? Is it a bad idea, and if so, why, so that the next half-dozen times someone proposes it to me, I'll have ideas about what to say?" Or it might have been possible that it was a good idea, which for some reason no-one had proposed, in which case, I might have wanted to take more action. But I didn't have a real agenda besides finding out what people thought, and looking for more ideas.

So, my apologies for taking so long to respond to people's interesting and insightful comments-- I was somewhat overwhelmed by just how many responses I got! But. Onwards.

--R

Comments

[navrins]

Today, certainly not.

Could it be worked towards and achieved in 10 or 20 or 50 years? I don't know. I certainly don't know how.

Would it be easier to achieve than legal-civil-union-for-all? Or less threatening than legal-marriage-for-all to those currently opposed to gay marriage? I don't know, but I think those are interesting questions.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Makes sense to me.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Marriage is between people, but it's also between the people on the one hand and the community on the other -- it's not just "Chris loves Pat" it's "we all recognise that Chris and Pat are a family now, yay!" It used to be perfectly reasonable that this was marked with a religious ceremony at the church door in communities that all shared a religion and place of worship. These days this makes less sense.

Yes, that's really true. It's awfully unclear these days exactly what's being invoked when we say vows-- God? Our families (esp. our mothers-in-law)? The community we work with? The community we play with? The neighborhood? The law? When all these things were more or less the same and united, the question didn't come up-- and now that it has, we don't know what to do with it, in part because we're trying to maintain the illusion that "marriage" is something which has been exactly the same lo these many generations.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

I voted yes, but that's not the only way I might vote. I'm most concerned with getting these legal rights to people in relationships whether or not they're queer or straight, and less concerned with what that relationship is called. I'm willing to believe that there's some better solution out there, but I'd take this one if it were offered.

That's exactly and precisely how I feel.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

weirdquark: Yes. That is true. And a very good argument to use against the fuzzy logic I was using in asking the question ("Queer people will care about this more than straight people.") Because it's a) not true about all straight people, b) insisting on wild generalizations which just don't fit people's identities or complex ideas about identity. Which I for-gods'-sakes should know by now. I think you're quite right to define it as a civil rights issue, which can be defended purely on the basis of justice for all.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

True that.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

i take it what you meant by that was that the term ‘marriage’ would have no legal weight and that the state would make no effort to define or regulate it - that basically any private institution or individual (religious or secular) could make its own decision about how to use the word.

Yes. Actually, now that I think about it, I suspect that this would undermine the roots of traditional marriage a lot more effectively than same-sex marriage would. Because it would mean that if the neo-pagans wanted to perform group marriages, or the Church of the Subgenius wanted to unite this man and this pineapple in holy matrimony, they could do that. Hm. That's actually a pretty good argument against this idea as being appealing to the moderate majority...

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

As I said in person but would like to say in public, my apologies for misunderstanding/misrepresenting your position in making the revision-post, as well as for my generally not-thinking around this post and comments.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

I would like to say again: this was a terrible poll. It was not intended to be good science, nor intended to be presented as such. But I had not realized just how terrible a poll it was until lignota, angstnokami and weirdquark made the very salient points they've made above. And you (eredien) are quite right that the attempted changes I made were not useful either, and that it does show my biases very clearly.

Sorry, folks. No conscious intent, just lack of forethought.

Edited to make it clear I was responding to eredien.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

I was merely trying to assist [info]lignota and [info]gaudior in understanding each other's points.

Thank you. It is much appreciated-- civil discourse is always my preference here, and I rely on y'all to call me on things when I'm not living up to my own ideals, as well as helping the dialogue be productive by adding clarity.

[zdenka]

Accepted. :-) And I apologize again for being crabby.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

I think this would make a lot of sense, but it also makes sense to have a societal default for people who aren't on top of things enough to make legal designations of different people. Is it not legal right now to hire a lawyer and designate people to do these things?

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

However, if it gets people to agree to DO IT, actually give ALL the rights to queer couples, I don't care if it's called "LOLCATS", so long as it's there and enforced.


Heh. While I think that people have made a number of good points above for why, politically, it makes sense to push for full-fledged "same-sex marriage," I agree wholeheartedly with this statement.

Also, I totally want a ritual to celebrate my lawful wedded LOLcats...

That dweam wiffin a dweam...

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Laughing out LOUD.

Grin.

[alaria-lyon.livejournal.com]

Well, we just looked at a dictionary, that was written in 1986, pre-debate -

Marriage: 1. the state of being married; relation between husband and wife; married life; wedlock; matrimony 2. the acting of marrying; wedding 3. the rite or form used in marrying 4. any close or intimate union 5. the king and queen of a suit, as in pinochle.

SYN - marriage refers to the state of, or relation between, a man and woman who have become husnad and wife or to the ceremony marking this union; matrimony, a formal word, applies specifically to the religious sacrament of marriage and stresses the rights and obligations of the marriage state; wedlock now applies specifically to marriage a legal relationship.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Because it would mean that if the neo-pagans wanted to perform group marriages, or the Church of the Subgenius wanted to unite this man and this pineapple in holy matrimony, they could do that.

Just because the meaning of a term isn't held down by law doesn't mean it isn't held down by custom and by language itself. If "marriage" is no longer a legal term describing a legal arrangement which confers certain legal rights, then the meaning of the term depends on how people use it.

In this case, it's a matter of the circumstances under which people are willing to treat other people as if they were married. I don't think the odds for the pineapple are very good. For other situations, it depends on who it is that you need to treat you as if you were married, and how. I don't think unhinging the word "marriage" from law really changes this picture — explaining to your parents (for example) that you want to marry someone of the same sex/a different race/a different religion/several people/etc. will always be something that needs to be negotiated socially.

I think that people who would be bothered by this are, at some level, not bothered by the idea that "now gay people can get married", they are bothered by the idea that people will act married who are "not really married" according to their worldview. What does that mean? People are really socially married if the people close to them treat them like married people. People are really legally married if the state gives them a marriage license, but this isn't (really) about being able to call yourself "married", it's about a specific package of legal rights and responsibilities which (as we are discussing here) could be made available under another name.

That leaves the religious sense of marriage. Of course this should be no business of the law, but there are people who don't seem to get that, and besides it's interesting. I am not aware of any religion that treats people married otherwise normatively but under the auspices of a different religion as "not really married" as a matter of course — and no surprise, as that would have made pluralistic society (even at the rudimentary level of merely having social contact with neighboring groups) impossible. Religious groups are social groups, and religious marriage is the religious component of social marriage in the same way that saying grace is a religious component of eating. As a moderately devout religious eclectic, I personally believe that the phrase "married in the eyes of G♥d/the divine/etc." has a real meaning which closely tracks the sense of social marriage defined above.

Also note that, for first amendment reasons (plain ol' freedom of speech as well as freedom of religion), nothing prevents the above-mentioned religious groups from performing the above-mentioned hypothetical marriage rituals, and calling the people (or fruits) involved "married", now. However, nobody is thereby legally obliged to treat them as married in any of several specific ways.

[eredien]

It's hard to make lj polls that are useful for any kind of real--or even quick-and-dirty--data-gathering, even if the data being gathered is not important. I'm on an lj scifi book group that has had trouble using the polls for something as simple as picking the upcoming month's book from a list of options.

I want to reiterate that I don't think that gaudior presented the poll as a scientific one, and I don't think that anyone else who's commented here is assuming that it was; it's just that these are salient points for anyone who is trying to collect data via any poll, for any reason at all; I am actually planning on bookmarking this thread to look at in the future before I do any lj polls on my own journal because I think the discussion was awesome.

Side thought: I got this mental image of gaudior wearing a pristine white lab coat, holding aloft a beaker, clicking "add poll," and saying, "ha-ha, it's scientific now!" :D

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Is it not legal right now to hire a lawyer and designate people to do these things?

Well, no, actually, in large stretches of the country (Virginia being the most notable and egregious) it isn't. Unless the person is biologically related to you or married to you in such a way that the state recognizes it. I don't think the law in VA will last much longer as in an attempt to make it illegal to will things to a same-sex partner they have successfully managed to make it illegal to leave things to a charity, but there it is.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Ah, true. Good point. Oh, Virginia.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Side thought: I got this mental image of gaudior wearing a pristine white lab coat, holding aloft a beaker, clicking "add poll," and saying, "ha-ha, it's scientific now!" :D

Laughing out LOUD, me.