Amen gentlemen.

To these activists, the fight for gay marriage is the mirror image of the right-wing conservative Christian lobby for family values and feeds into the same drive for a homogeneous, orthodox American culture. The Stonewall confrontation and early gay rights movement, after all, was about the right to live an unconventional life, and to Mr. Dobbs and others like him, marriage is the epitome of convention. He said that he does, however, support civil unions for all as a replacement for civil marriage.

Perhaps there are some who are content with living "an unconventional life", but I am not one of them. I always thought that the point of the gay rights movement was to secure the same rights for ourselves that the majority enjoy. I never thought that all our efforts were just so that we could "be different".

To those in the gay community who aren't supporting same-sex marriage I would remind them that no one is going to force them to marry unless they choose to. If they want to continue to live a life of "free love in the clubs, of hooking up at bathhouses and reveling in promiscuity," then fine for them. But that is not the life I want for myself, nor do the majority of gay people that I know. I did the club thing in my younger days, and have had my share of casual sex, but in all honesty such "freedom" is sorely lacking insofar as it meets my own personal and emotional needs. It is OK if there are some gay people who don't want to get married, but I'd like to think that the rest of us could count on their support in winning what I see as the final battle in the gay rights movement. Once marriage is secured then everything else will fall in place. (IMHO, anyway.)

yes, well, some just love to lump all into one category, makes it so nice, tidy and simple. if it were realized that glbt were of all different colours, politics, beliefs etc. that would complicate things.

marriage is a modern patriarchal 'invention' , much different from it's pre-christian (and other religious) tribal roots. some choose it in the gay world as a bond and 'right', others choose it for the tax benefits. others reject the notion for many reasons, just as many straights do for themselves. it all boils down to choice.

thanks for pointing out that marriage is not supported by all glbt's.

Yeah, all that stuff about marriage being "patriarchal" is great, but there's rhetoric and then there's reality.

When your partner is laying in a hospital bed in a coma wouldn't you rather have the undeniable legal right to visit them and even to make medical decisions if necessary? Such rights are part and parcel of marriage and require no additional legal gymnastics to secure. Currently (outside of Massachusetts) none of us have such protections in our relationships.

Marriage is about protecting our relationships, our homes and our families. We can debate the patriarchal nature of marriage, the diversity of family arrangements, etc. later. Right now there are thousands of same-sex couples who have no legal protections, no legal rights and no respect from the governments to which they pay taxes. My (adopted) uncles, Dwayne & Mark, have been together for over 30 years(!) and deserve the same rights that any heterosexual couple married for five minutes takes for granted.

ditto on what Jonathon said. Look, we all like talking intellectually about patriachial structures, and blah, blah, blah, snore. The real issue for most of us just trying to live our lives is whether we will be stopped by society from doing so. You have the freedom to fuck until the cows come home, we just want the right to become a part of structure you might like, but it should be our choice, not yours and not a bunch of christo conservatives. freedom doesn't mean freedom to choose your choice. it means freedom to choose whatever choice is right for each of us.

ditto on what Jonathon said. Look, we all like talking intellectually about patriachial structures, and blah, blah, blah, snore. The real issue for most of us just trying to live our lives is whether we will be stopped by society from doing so. You have the freedom to fuck until the cows come home, we just want the right to become a part of a structure you might like, but it should be our choice, not yours and not a bunch of christo conservatives. freedom doesn't mean freedom to choose your choice. it means freedom to choose whatever choice is right for each of us.

"It's impressive not because gays can now do like the straights, but because gays can now do, period."

That's a good line.

Jonathon - of course you should have the ability to visit your partner in hospital, I doubt any of us who are against the focus on same-sex marriage think that you shouldn't. I think it's a common misperception that if you're anti-marriage, you're therefore anti-family or anti-love.

Personally, I'm a foreigner living in the U.S., if the Federal government recognized same-sex marriage, it would be much easier to stay together with a U.S. citizen partner if we got married. So it's not like I don't understand what rights marriage carries, or don't appreciate the importance it has to many same-sex couples.

However, just speaking for myself, I think that marriage, even if extended to same-sex couples, creates too narrow a definition of love and family. The point is that the push should be for a much more inclusive idea of who has rights/permissions, and whose relationships deserve protection. Rather than the broad brush of marriage, which excludes the deserving (right now same-sex couples, but also many other relationships of care, love and dependence) and includes the undeserving (those married-for-five-minutes folks). After all, if you are in a relationship of trust and care with someone, what does the fact of your sexual relations (or lack thereof) have to do with whether or not you should visit them in the hospital?

One of the insights of feminism that the LGBT movement is heir to has been the decoupling (no pun intended) of sex from love and (no less important), the decoupling of sex from reproduction. This is not some abstract conceptual academic point, but has real consequences on people's lives every day.

We are not just legal entities. We are whole people, whose lives are structured not just by law, but by social attitudes and norms. To say that "if you don't want to get married, then just don't" is to oversimplify the situation and ignore the effect that an institution like marriage has on everybody in society, whether married or not, especially when its normative force is backed up by the state.

johnathon, mingerspice has said things very eloquently and i'd like to affirm her ideas. we have different laws in canada regarding common-law relationships and rights, so visiting a partner in the hospital is not the same . however i winter on the big island of hawaii and was quite distressed when a straight woman's common law partner died in the hospital and she was not informed, it had to go through his parents first. this further emphasizes what mingerspice is saying.....reform needs to come from a societal 'whole' rather than looking at things from status quo dictates.

Sorry to be simple, but the bottom line for me is: if you want to marry you should, but WHY would you want to? You can go to a lawyer and set everything up so you don't have to ride the "status quo" cruise. Blaze your own trail. I also believe that we're spending a lot of effort to attack "they're" most heavily defended fortication without much hope of success and it's costing us all as a group and on a personal basis.

ACTII: You cannot secure all the rights and privileges of marriage through private contractual means. A notable one, of course, is immigration. Another one (less dramatic, perhaps) is tax breaks. Healthcare is another one.

Of course, there are alternative political solutions to these problems as well, which is what the "beyond marriage" petition is advocating, I believe.

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