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

So, as a person in a same-sex relationship, I've always been amused/appalled by the insistence of slash and yaoi writers that one person in such a relationship must be the top in bed, at all times. It doesn't make sense. I know a very few people in relationships where this is usually the case, but even then it always seems so much more flexible than the writers make it out to be.

So, in order to deconstruct the idea a bit (as well as because I thought it would be fun last night at about 3am*) I am proposing the Great Uke-Off. (This is inspired by the Anime Emo Awards, which were just awesome.) Basically: I'm going to list frequently-slashed couples in all manner of fandoms (anime, live-action, books, etc), and ask you, o gentle readers, to vote on which member of the couple tops. Then in the next round, I'm going to pair all the resulting tops with each other, and ask you to vote on which member of each new pair tops (and pair all the resulting bottoms, ditto). And so on and so forth, until we have the Ultimate Uke and the, um, Supreme Seme. Or something along those lines.

You're welcome to only do the ones you know, or the ones you could even vaguely conceivably see as this being conceivable. You are also welcome to explain your logic in the comments, or make suggestions as to other pairs, or such.

( Let's vote! )

I shall post the next round tomorrow (Friday) at noonish. Voting is now closed. Go vote on today's!

* Okay, yes, I did have a fever. And still do. But I'm sure that has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Really.

In a comment to a recent post of mine, homasse described "White Woman Syndrome," or WWS, a phenomenon discussed on a lot of the minority-focused forums on lj. She said that the usual explanation people there come up with for why White women sometimes act like complete, entitled twits is that "White women, being considered the ideal for beauty and such, fully expect the world to love them and make everything perfect for them because they were the Perfect Little Princesses, and when it's *not*, they can't deal." She says she's not sure she buys this completely, but she can't deny the phenomenon.

Neither do I, and neither can I. ( But I think I have some ideas about where it comes from. )