What am I missing?
Mar. 4th, 2009 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjThe whole Prop 8 thing starts again tomorrow at the CA supreme court. So I'll indulge in just one related head-scratcher before returning to silent fuming and angsting. There's this one alleged "compromise position" that I regularly see people suggesting, apparently based on premise that people who oppose same-sex marriage (hereinafter abbreviated as SSM) are more hung-up on the "marriage" part than the "same-sex" part. That position is some variant on "we should cede ownership rights over the word 'marriage' to religious institutions: the state should perform only civil unions and only religious institutions should be able to create 'marriages'."
Setting aside the long prior history of persecution by the anti-SSM folks who now claim that it's only the use of the word 'marriage' that bothers them. Setting aside the curious absence of any history of these same people objecting to pairs of atheists or non-church-goers using the word 'marriage' for their civilly-sanctioned unions ... as long as it's an opposite-sex pair. Setting aside the question of how the government could cede ownership of the definition of a word to the class "religious institutions" without violating the establishment clause. Setting aside all other questions, I have to wonder whether the folks suggesting this "compromise" are stupid or disingenuous.
Has it not occurred to them that there are religious institutions that have no problems with blessing and solemnizing the unions of same-sex couples? And therefore that this "compromise" would not in the least satisfy the anti-SSM people because there would still be large numbers of same-sex couples who would "own" the label "married"?
Has it not occurred to them that this "compromise" would remove ownership of the label "married" from vast numbers of opposite-sex couples in state-sanctioned unions who chose not to involve a religious institution in that union? And that these two effects in combination, rather than decreasing the number of people unhappy with the state of affairs, would vastly increase that number?
Or do they think that somehow the category "religious institutions" to whom they want to cede ownership of the word 'marriage' would automagically be interpretable as "those religious institutions who would never ever actually apply the word marriage to same-sex couples"?
Am I missing something?
Setting aside the long prior history of persecution by the anti-SSM folks who now claim that it's only the use of the word 'marriage' that bothers them. Setting aside the curious absence of any history of these same people objecting to pairs of atheists or non-church-goers using the word 'marriage' for their civilly-sanctioned unions ... as long as it's an opposite-sex pair. Setting aside the question of how the government could cede ownership of the definition of a word to the class "religious institutions" without violating the establishment clause. Setting aside all other questions, I have to wonder whether the folks suggesting this "compromise" are stupid or disingenuous.
Has it not occurred to them that there are religious institutions that have no problems with blessing and solemnizing the unions of same-sex couples? And therefore that this "compromise" would not in the least satisfy the anti-SSM people because there would still be large numbers of same-sex couples who would "own" the label "married"?
Has it not occurred to them that this "compromise" would remove ownership of the label "married" from vast numbers of opposite-sex couples in state-sanctioned unions who chose not to involve a religious institution in that union? And that these two effects in combination, rather than decreasing the number of people unhappy with the state of affairs, would vastly increase that number?
Or do they think that somehow the category "religious institutions" to whom they want to cede ownership of the word 'marriage' would automagically be interpretable as "those religious institutions who would never ever actually apply the word marriage to same-sex couples"?
Am I missing something?
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 04:27 pm (UTC)However I think that those naive folks are being purposefully tricked by a small number of people who came up with that mantra exactly for the purpose of tricking those folks.
I'm still burning with anger at the guy (whose name I've forgotten) who started our own campaign, saying "we are only ..." and "we would never ..." and convinced too blasted many folks, and the day after it passed -- carried, I feel (and hope) by many many folks who believed his lies he DID start to try to take away all the benefits provided by companies (like my employer) for SSDPs.