UsaSatsui wrote:

Klimbatize wrote: The anti-gay movement is bigotry. This is a civil rights issue and I wish more people would drop the "I don't care either way" approach because your fellow citizens are being treated differently based on nothing they can control. It's no different than judging someone based on race, disability, or gender. I think when it comes to rights, most people are firmly in support of gay people not being denied them. But marriage isn't on that spectrum in my mind - you don't have the right to marry someone because you're attracted to them.

There are rights and benefits that come along with marriage, and that's a big reason why there should be marriage equality. So when I say it's discrimination I mean people are being denied the right to, say, visit the person you've been in a monogamous relationship with for years in the hospital after a certain time because they are not legally married. People are not allowed to share insurance because they aren't allowed to get married. People have issues in probate court because even though they lived with someone for 40 years they were never allowed to get married.

And don't give me this civil union bullshit. That was tested in states like New Jersey and people were still denied basic rights that married people were allowed (such as in hospitals) because people didn't fully understand what the hell a civil union afforded people. Let's cut all the confusion out and just allow everyone to get married.

Why do we need a different name for it on a legal basis? I'm not saying we need to force churches to marry gays, but legally everyone should have the same right to get married. The different name thing is silly. There is no point to it except to keep it separate but equal. It was illegal for blacks and whites to get married in the United States for the majority of this country's existence, and some states had laws against it as recently as the 70's. When they finally did allow it, wouldn't it have been weird to demand a different name so as to keep it separate but equal? I've said it before--maybe they should have forced a black and white couple's marriage to be called "gray marriage". You know, so we can tell the difference.

It's the same thing for people not wanting to calling it "marriage" when two people from the same sex want to get married. Get over it, gramps.

Syd Lexia wrote:

My stance is this. I don't think marriage should be recognized by the government at all. I think civil unions should be the only form of interpersonal union recognized by the government, and that they should afford all of the benefits currently afforded by marriage. Also, any consenting couple of legal age should be able to get a civil union. Priests who perform the sacrament of marriage will unfortunately not be able to sign civil union certificates, as it will be illegal to deny an consenting couple of legal age a civil union. After your religious marriage, you will have to file civil union papers separately on your own time.

Cool.

Now that we're not working in hypotheticals, since this country is nowhere near the point where it doesn't recognize marriages and this will never come close to happening in our lifetimes, let's be more realistic.

To achieve the same goal of what this idea does, which is give everyone the same rights of marriage without forcing religious institutions to change their practices, let's just go the simple route for the time being. Allow gay marriage to be recognized by the government and not force religious institutions to perform or recognize them. Done! And we didn't even have to dig up hundreds of years of laws to do it.

There are a lot of things that could be "perfected" if we could start from scratch, but we have an established set of laws, and something like marriage isn't about to be erased from those books. So let's work with what we have, shall we? It'll be about a thousand times easier and we achieve marriage equality far sooner.