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(no subject)
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
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
no subject
and i guess if a provision specifically said ‘“marriage” shall henceforth be a term reserved for religious institutions’, i'd have to oppose it, but 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.
no subject
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...
no subject
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.