Subscribe to Breaking NewsRuby-Sachs: Why Not Go For Everything But Marriage Everywhere?
Though it looked likely, it was still nice to see the official announcement that the “everything but marriage” ballot initiative passed in Washington State. Now, I know that Washington is a much more liberal state than Maine and equating the two would be a mistake. But I wonder, how much the removal of the word marriage assisted in the ballot victory?
Not that I believe marriage without the term is sufficient. It’s not. Legal distinctions between groups based on personal characteristics like sexual orientation matter even if the distinctions don’t result in a concrete rights disadvantage for one group. But, if we could create a national situation where civil union-like status existed for all same-sex couples, we’d be in a pretty good place to start a Supreme Court legal challenge.
Once the relationships are the same, there would be a good equal protection argument in favor of adding the word marriage to both kinds of relationships.
That’s how it happened in Canada: fight for civil unions first, get marriage second.
Washington might just have proven how sound that strategy is.
I’m sorry but part of your story is incorrect. I’m Canadian and followed every moment of the homosexual marriage bit here from the start to the sweet end. We never had any form of civil unions. Ever. A couple went to court (I think it was Ontario) and sued for the right to marry. They won. Thats how it happened. Many other provinces followed suit with couples all over Canada suing and winning. No losses. Only a few provinces remained when it finally became law all over Canada thanks to our liberal government at the time.
This occured not because of a step by step program but because our courts follow our charter of human rights unlike many American courts.
I’m sorry that we didn’t win in Maine. The most murderous institution on the face of the Earth – the catholic monstrosity, won again.
But in my unofficial polling of “good but moderately conservative christians, and yes some catholics also, I’ve learned one thing…
Many religious people see marriage as a “contract with God”. So when you try and change that situation, you get a total gut reaction among some people, their minds are blocked. But the people in the middle – there are some of them – often say “anything they want re gay rights” or “we need to stabilize gay relationships” (make you as miserable as I and my Fem wife are
, but PLEASE DON’t call it marriage”
Sorry, this is fact. It will be interesting to see if the Maine group goes for an expanded civil domestic partnership bill like that which won in washington state.
As for myself, well I’ve sunk $75k into CA, ME, and other battles. Money my dear wife would like to use to fix up her “shabby” house. God help me if she really knew how much money went into these battles.
I’m a political realist – a lesson learned since the butcher of America – George W’s reign of terror – came to be.
Adn I’m not going to toss tens of thousands of $$$ into gay MARRIAGE battles any more -especially where there are state referendum laws. Most of my contributions going forward will be for progressive candidates – almost all dems.
But there are at least 15, prob 20 million gay people in this country. It is your turn to get all of them active in politics – I’m only one guy and a cog in a big wheel.
If half the gays, let alone the str8s, contributed $10 each to the Maine and Wash state efforts, that would be $75-$100 MILLION, instead of the $6 mil collected by those two campaigns. And prob we would have won maine, because we could have bought up ALL the TV cable time, and froze the freaks out. Which the other side did to us in CA to some extent w/ prop 8 advertising.
So, my friends – it is up to YOU to get active in politics, support progressive candidates with you money and your time, and stay home a few days a month from the gay bars (yes I go to them occasionally with gay friends) and work on winning. And please stop pissing about Obama, or you will have the fucking fucking pope picking the supreme court justices, and the best thing you can then do is move to eg a wonderful country called Canada.
And avoid being a victim of the Jesus Taliban turning America into a big afghanistan. The real war on religious fundamentalism should begin at home.
That is the choice. The world doesn’t muddle through – think WWII, where people who would be my second cousins dissapeared thanks to the religious fuckers who hated Jesus own people, and that got hitler elected.
Off your butts, do something get active. and yes you can make a difference, and sometimes in the future, the hate in the name of God church buildings will be museums and monuments ot mans inhumanity to man.
And names like Benedict / Ratzinger will become curse words in our lexicon.
@ Montrealbren. –” I’m fighting for the benefits. Brazen self-interest. I want the same relationship benefits that my parents got, period.” Then you are not fighting for Civil Unions. Because your parents marriage came not only with the legal benefits of civil marriage, but the social benefits as well. The cultural aspect of this cannot be ignored. THIS is exactly what the conservatives are fighting against. Not the “word,” the meaning behind the word. One of the most understood social concepts we as a society have. Say it to your self, or let someone point out a couple and say the word. Married. In a split second a thousand images and concepts fill your head. Love, commitment, union, family, ceremonies, courtships, lives entwined, legal protections, standing before friendson and on and on,..aaaah, is there any word that comes with so much cultural and social relevance? And I’m not talking religious. Let a couple who has met an hour previously get married in some Vegas drive through wedding. Even if they have known each other for 61 minutes, they need only say, “We’re married,” and the entire world fills in the blanks. With the utterance of a single word they have built a skyscrapers worth of information around themselves to anyone they meet. Nobody asks, why, who, what, where, for how long. It just is. Married. Enough said. Accepted as true and understood in it’s totality.
Yes, the legal side is HUGELY important, but marriage is also about love and recognition and sharing of lives with our loved ones and that one special person, and that flip side is AS important socially as the other. It’s a concept we’ve grown up with long before most of us even thought the word gay or knew we were different. How many weddings, films, stories, songs, books, commercials, valentines days, christmas’s, thanksgivings, proms…image after image, ceremony after ceremony, grandparents, aunts, uncles, mom and dad, even church…. creating a word, “Civil Unions” it means nothing more to us than it does those who can legally wed. It means we’re different, not as good and that our love, our lives, our sexuality is not as good, and that we are now and forever excluded from one of the most important social constructs there is. Do you think parents will extoll the benefits of Civil Unions? “And if you happen to be gay, don’t worry, you can Civilly Union yourself!” Or is it just more reason for young people to feel different and excluded?
Again, I say this because I HAVE a civil union and know it’s not the same. Ask any person in America with a Civil Union, Domestic Partnership or whatever made up word it’s called where they are from, if they feel “Equal”. If those around them see them as equal. I too used to believe it was “only a word,” that as long as I had my legal rights it would be enough. How wrong I was.
It’s like suggesting to Rosa Parks, “What’s your problem? You’re not walking and you get there the same time as the rest of us, what does it matter where you sit?”
> That’s how it happened in Canada:
> fight for civil unions first, get
> marriage second.
Well, not exactly, although close. There was never any such thing as “civil unions” in Canada. What there was was common-law marriages, whereby people were deemed to be common-law partners once they had cohabited for a certain length of time. Such couples got, and still get, most of the rights of legally married couples, but not all. This status started with straights, but eventually the courts ruled that gay couples could get common-law status too. That made it much easier to get full marriage legalized for gay people later.
On the notion that German and British examples apply to the US – They don’t. We are much, much more litigious in the States.
On the notion that CUs are inherently unequal to marriage: says who? They need not be, right? There’s no set definition for CUs, thus there’s no inherent inequality. If this is indeed a fight over a word (marriage), then I wonder if it’s worth the fight. I’m not fighting for a word – I’m fighting for the benefits. Brazen self-interest. I want the same relationship benefits that my parents got, period.
CUs are just as illegal as marriage, I believe, in most of the 31 states that have voted against gay marriage: they all seem to include wording that stipulates that the state not recognize “marriage-like” relationships…like civil unions. Given that CUs have no federal definition, they just might be our Trojan Horse.
And if CUs do not grant us the equality we want, then we will sue. Drewski’s argument that this was the “problem” for civil rights from 1890 to 1950 can be seen in another way: it is the template for success. After all, once we get marriage or CUs, it’s not like homophobia will go away, right? Racism didn’t go away after the 1950s, or 1960s, even though our laws finally became palatable. If you think this social issue WON’T take half a century to resolve itself, then you have a much rosier view of Americans than I do.
I think it’s fine to argue for CUs. If indeed they end up causing “separate but equal” discrepancies (ie. adoption, inheritance, taxes, or hospital visitation rights are NOT included) then I do believe that the extremely litigious nature of Americans will come in very handy. We will sue for equal treatment.
Any acceptance of CUs has to be considered in the context of the relationship benefits accrued: if CUs offer samesexers the benefits of marriage (different in name only), I don’t care if its called a Cornholer Abomination Union – as long as I get the same benefits my parents did.
Am I the only one who sees the insanity of this notion? You want the legal precedent for this? It was a Supreme Court case. Plessy v Ferguson. That was the case that established Jim Crow.
The many (MANY) court battles over civil rights had an impossible task from the 1890s until the 1950s. If you’re separate but theoretically equal, then you have no grounds to complain about your functional inequality, because the law says you are theoretically equal.
If you accept this premise–that you can fight for marriage based on the presence of civil unions/domestic partnerships–then you are arguing against 60 years of civil rights law and court cases. Anybody here who thinks that some of the wingnuts out there wouldn’t jump on the opportunity to start chipping away at civil rights law, you need to put down the spray paint and take a breath of air before your brain dies.
NO. HELL NO. You can’t have partial civil rights. Accepting that sets up a collision with the Civil Rights Act, as well as with 60 years of case precedents. In other countries, you might be able to get away with this notion, but this isn’t how the US legal system operates. In fact, judges across the legal spectrum would very likely throw out such an argument precisely because it DOES create a special right–and that right is a lesser right than the one that the law bars us from. I’m sure as hell no legal scholar, but I wouldn’t need to be. This is a bad idea–unless somehow you’re in favor of resurrecting one of the most embarrassing verdicts in Supreme Court history, one which was used more than any other to justify continued inequality and denial of Constitutional rights.
Marc Luxenberg Said: “I’m not worried about the European stalling of Civil Unions, as state and federal circuit courts could demand full equality with properly timed and placed lawsuits.”
You should be worried, especially after California and Maine. The situations in both States clearly demonstrate that the courts are only as effective as the voters allow them to be.
One of my neighbors in Scotland was very cold towards me and my partner when we first bought our house here, but over the past couple of years he has warmed to us. I wouldn’t say he’s entirely gay friendly, but normally within a day of our return to Scotland he stops by to catch up and chat to us.
A few months ago he asked if we had considered getting married. I told him that we had wanted to do so for many years, but the law did not allow us to marry. He seemed very taken aback by this and said that he’d heard we could have a civil partnership, which is essentially the same thing. I tried to explain to him that while a civil partnership grants us similar rights and privileges to marriage, it is not the same, but no matter what I said he simply didn’t get it.
And therein lies the danger of this strategy.
Some people will believe that civil unions are an acceptable compromise and will consider the gay community ungrateful and unreasonable for demanding more. Some people will simply not understand that there is a big difference between a civil union and a marriage. Some people will even believe that we should feel special because a unique form of union has been created just for us.
Point is, the apathetic, the indifferent, those sitting on the fence on this issue will find it easier to vote against gay marriage laws if we already have civil unions. They will not understand the inequality. They will not understand why we need marriage.
If a strategy like this were to be employed we would need to be able to tell people, in no uncertain terms, why civil unions are not enough. We would need to explain why civil unions are different to marriage. And we would need to be able to explain why we need to be able to marry.
And, of course, we also have to acknowledge that for some in the gay community this is not an all or nothing fight. For some, civil unions are perfectly fine. They would like marriage, sure, but they are more than happy to settle.
I’m not saying that this is a bad idea. I think it would be a massive step forward for the United States. I just think that if we are not prepared we could find the fight for full marriage equality is even harder once we have civil unions, not easier.
Don’t worry about the European situation by all means, but be aware of it.
We all hate to compromise idealism, but I’d settle for a big step with Civil Unions. First step: standardize nomenclature. I’m not worried about the European stalling of Civil Unions, as state and federal circuit courts could demand full equality with properly timed and placed lawsuits [Like the Marriage Cases in the Cal Sup Ct] We’ll have a patchwork until the USSCt is up to it, but it’s no worse than we have now.
Emma, you’re right. Washington has given me this notion as well, and I live here.
It’s merely a case of practicing an ‘A rose but any other name’ philosophy. We go for this first, persevere in the love and what we have, BUT we never stop fighting for full equality.
Civil unions first. Marriage clicks into place soon after (See: Vermont for example). And then we hit the Federal level- assuming that hasn’t been brought down by the time civil unions become universal.
My two cents worth. I got my “civil union” in Germany. This was the idea there as well. Get the thing that “bothers the hetero’s the least” and later they’ll pass marriage. WRONG. Not only did they in the end not create a 100% equal law, they had to ditch some “things” to get it past the conservatives, not a word has been spoken since about either equating the to OR making marriage legal for both. 8 years now (I think), and nothing. Not a word. What did happen is that the “average” person, if they paid attention at all, thinks we have the same rights, and any time it is brought up revert to the “Are those gays never satisfied? What the hell do they want now? They got marriage!” Except we didn’t and still don’t and stil don’t have the equal rights. England suggested the same thing. How much closer are they? Not at all, because the “majority” has moved on and with the legal rights, the gay community can’t muster the energy, clout or money it takes to make a push for marriage, for all the same reasons as in Germany.
And for those of you wondering, (although it’s nice to have most, or al of those rights), I know EVERY SINGLE DAY it’s not a marriage. People know it’s not the same, they don’t treat it the same or respect it the same. Federal laws don’t accept it, state laws don’t accept it, international laws don’t accept it, the average person doesn’t accept it.
bama-stu Said: “I think our leadership needs to look at the United Kingdom for inspiration.”
Oh dear God no – that sentence is wrong on so many levels. First of all, “our leadership”? Who the hell are you talking about? The gay community has no leaders. It has some high-profile advocates. It has some well-known activists. It has no leadership, and should have none. Forget about waiting for your “leaders” to take notice – if you want something then stand up for yourself and use your own damn voice to make your demands. Don’t rely on some fictional leadership to speak on your behalf.
Secondly, the United Kingdom is not the place to look for inspiration. Look to Canada by all means, but the UK should not be the example the US follows. I live part time in Scotland, part time in New York. I have seen the situation in the UK first hand. There was a hell of a lot of pressure from gay lobbyists, activists and groups to legalize gay marriage in the UK. The government gave them civil partnerships…and the majority seem perfectly content with that. Has there been any debate in the House of Commons on the subject of gay marriage since? No. Have there been any major marches or demonstrations demanding gay marriage since? No. Has there been anything in the media about the prospect of gay marriage in the UK since? No.
It is as though people have decided that civil partnerships are the answer and there’s no need to even consider more.
While I agree that pushing for “everything but marriage” in every State could be a valuable first step towards legalizing gay marriage across the board, you have to make sure that the pressure is maintained. Push for civil unions first, but make damn sure that efforts are doubled once you get them.
The danger of this strategy can be seen in the United Kingdom. Rather than looking to it as an example, learn from the mistakes and consider it a warning. Once you have civil unions, many will ask why that’s not enough for you. Make sure you have a damn good answer ready and waiting.
I agree in principle, however I’d like to ask, if we weren’t pushing for marriage would civil unions have as much support as they do now? I’ve read and heard many times our opponents argue that we should be happy with civil unions. If we view this as a negotiation it seems to me like they’re compromising. Everyone will tell you when you’re negotiating you need to ask for more than you expect to get what you want.
I think our leadership needs to look at the United Kingdom for inspiration. The UK has civil partnerships that give all the benefits of marriage, without using the term marriage. We should push for civil unions at the state and federal level … then time will be on our side.
Then how about every couple that lives in a non-marriage state, head off to a marriage state and get married. Once you get home, flood the state and federal courts with lawsuits demanding our rights as human beings and citizens of the United States! I can just hear the national LGBT leadership crying about how there will be a backlash. Well guess what? There’s already been a backlash – look at the state constitutional amendments. Only when we fight, fight, fight for our rights will we get our rights!
That’s something I’ve always believed…Born and raised in Canada when I discovered I was gay, I never realized how lucky I was to live in a country that recognized my rights. However I’m sure the US will achieve this as well, it doesn’t have to be called ‘marriage’ to hold the same power and protection…how cares about the name? Let the crying little kid have their candy. By letting those (conservative bigots out their) keep their sacred marriage, we can call the Union something else entirely and achieve a major first step!
Gotta say, I’m glad you’ve floated the notion that it might be OK to pursue Civil Unions.
You’re right about Canada, and I’ve been living here for 6 years: separate but equal will, eventually, be defeated… But we’ve got to get to that point first. Americans won’t ever willingly allow us to be seen as their equals: we’re not – we’re a minority. We know full well that a popular vote will never give us what we seek. That ain’t how civil rights work.