And yet, put it that way to a gay marriage opponent, and I guarantee you a sizable portion would respond as follows:
A: You're against gay marriage? So you don't think gay partners should share the same legal status when making medical decisions, in property rights, or work benefits?
B: Wow, I never thought about it that way. No, I think they should share all of those benefits.
A: So you're for gay marriage?
B: No, I just think all of those rights should be granted outside of the marital context.
That's the frustrating part about this issue...it's basically all semantics. The simple solution would have been to remove all recognition of marriage by the government and replace it with the concept of civil unions between any two consenting adults. There shouldn't even be a requirement of a romantic relationship...why should the fact that two people have sex or live together have any bearing on how they file their tax returns, how medical decisions are made or how property is disposed of? Hell, there's plenty of married people who are separated and no longer having sex or live together and yet they enjoy the legal perks of marriage.
Once you limit the government's role to recognizing a contract, albeit one that's common and standardized, between two adults, marriage becomes the domain of the church. If your church wants to deny marriage to homosexuals, the first amendment gives them the right to do that.
Your "simple solution" would require the invalidation of all straight people's marriages. Politically, that's about as toxic as proudly saying you are going to be building a pre-school on top of a nuclear waste dump.
Exactly. Reading this thread, I get the distinct impression that many posters have never even interacted with someone who disagrees with them on some of these issues. As someone who grew up in the midwest, I've seen this exact exchange happen countless times.
Riding on the back of the bus gets you to the same bus stops, clearly. Yet we rejected Jim Crow laws decades ago as unsuitable in our modern society.
Letting some citizens ride on the 'civil union' bus, and others on the 'marriage' bus is what's at issue. Its still wrong to discriminate in this way, especially if the majority vote to give themselves the better seats.
I imagine its hard to feel the humiliation of sitting in the back of the bus, if you never have to do it yourself. It took Rosa Parks to make it plain to all of us, that the institution was racist, intentionally belittling and wrong.
A: You're against gay marriage? So you don't think gay partners should share the same legal status when making medical decisions, in property rights, or work benefits?
B: Wow, I never thought about it that way. No, I think they should share all of those benefits.
A: So you're for gay marriage?
B: No, I just think all of those rights should be granted outside of the marital context.