dreamer_easy | (no subject)

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drhoz: Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

I have yet to hear an explanation of how extending the legal protections, privileges, and responsibilities of marriage to serious, dedicated gay couples would affect my own legal protections, privileges, and responsibilities.

What's more, I'm impatient with patently false arguments that gay marriage will destroy freedom of religion or opinion and the family unit. The latter is a particularly bizarre argument: how will legitimising and supporting stable two-parent families lead to more single parent families, polygamy, etc?

If - when - gay marriage is legal, Christian churches would no more be forced to marry Adam and Steve than they would be to marry Jon and I. Teachers will not be forced to teach acceptance of homosexuality in the classroom. (See A Commentary on the Document "Six Consequences if Proposition 8 Fails", which debunks lies about the November California referendum on banning gay marriage.)

Jon and I have no children and are unlikely to have any children. If anyone is attacking our marriage, it's the opponents of gay unions who insist that the purpose of marriage is to produce offspring.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't see that cultural traditions, or legal abstracts, need protecting. They exist regardless of what we do. People are worth protecting; ideas are beyond our ability to harm.

I cannot see how the right, or lack thereof, of consenting adults to enact a mutually agreed contract should affect my marriage or my family. Consequently I see no reason why people should be restricted from doing so on the basis of sexual orientation.

It does occur to me that when marriage is legally defined more broadly than 1 man + 1 woman that some people may choose, for whatever reason, to apply to have their particular arrangement solemnised by a religious official or institution that does not recognise their arrangement, making such an application either out of ignorance or in provocation; and that depending on the legal terrain, should the religious official or institution refuse, they may expose themselves to legal action on the basis of discrimination. I feel that religious officials and institutions should be protected from such legal exposure. Actually, I think discrimination is important. However, I also think this is a separate issue, and should not be used as an argument to resist universal legislation permitting unconventional marriages.

If churches in the US are forced to marry gay couples, it will be - as far as anyone seems to be able to find out - the first time they've ever been forced to marry anyone:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/us/27right.html

“The idea that we would be forced as clergy to perform a marriage that was against our conscience, or that a church would lose its tax-exempt status, is ridiculous,” said the Rev. Karen Sapio, the minister of Claremont Presbyterian Church in Southern California. “If you look dispassionately at the record, there are a lot of churches with policies that are at odds with civil law.”

She continued, “I have not heard of a single Catholic church forced to marry someone who has been divorced, or a rabbi forced to perform an interfaith marriage or an evangelical church forced to marry a couple who has been living together.”

Nor, apparently, have the proponents of the gay marriage ban heard of any such thing, or we'd be hearing all about it.