GAY MARRIAGE COMPROMISE, OR IDIOT LOGIC? — “It would work like this: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.”–David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values and the author of “The Future of Marriage” and Jonathan Rauch, author of “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights and Good for America” on their “compromise” for gay marriage.
Qjersey
Any religious organization that accepts public money should NOT be exempt from recognizing Civil Unions for the purpose of employee benefits. In all other cases, religious institutions are under no obligation to recognize Civil Unions or Gay Marriage already.
this religious exemption thing is such a red herring
RDM
Yeah, I didn’t see their proposal as a “compromise” at all, but a free pass to bigots.
Jonathan
Umm… why should there be any exemption for religious institutions? These are civil unions… no one is forcing a church, synagogue or mosque to conduct them. The only possible incursion on any religious institution would be having to afford equal employment benefits (i.e. the option to give a gay partner health care) and I just don’t understand why that infringes on any *religious* issue at all. Chruches are employers, just like banks or other institutions, and should be subject to the same laws. If a church doesn’t want to offer spousal benefits, so be it — but that’s hardly a reason to allow a religious institution to discrminate in the way it offers spousal benefits.
GranDiva
@Jonathan:
Yup.
The religious exemption is mostly about allowing churches to wring their hands and working really hard to energize their base to protest really loudly about same-sex relationships causing the downfall of the nation.
Bill Perdue
Marriage is likely one of the largest source of income and continuity for most cults. That’s why they defend it tooth and nail from innovation. The truth is however that partnering predates these cults by ten so thousands of years. Marriage does not belong to the cults. It changes and mutates as the societies around it grow and die.
The American and French Revolutions established marriage as a civil affair. The industrial revolution began to free up women and children from patriarchal dominion. The civil rights movement and immigrants from all over the world, having beaten back racist opposition to the right to marry people of another culture are now happily creating a boisterous and vigorous mix of genes and cultures unseen since the late Roman Empire.
The very concept of partnering and parenting is mutating to include new kinds of partners and families. The first steps towards color equality, sexual equality and now GLBT equality now have a revolutionary impetus by virtue of the solid opposition of the rulers of this country.
The proposal by Blankenhorn and Rauch is just a reworking of the same bigotry championed by both the Democrat and Republican parties in DOMA and the civil unions’ concept. Separate is never equal, no matter what Bush, der Pope, Warren, Obama or the Clintons say. It has nothing to offer but bigotry codified into law, like DADT.
It may well be that we’ll win the fight for same sex marriage rights but the future evolution of partnering and parenting will likely have to wait until we fundamentally change the current government, which is for now an anti-democratic government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.
CWBarton
How about this as a compromise?
No level of government will recognize “marriage” at all. They will only recognize civil unions performed by a secular official.
Existing “marriages” can be converted to civil unions upon application with a fee of the same dollar amount it currently takes same-gender couples to approximate all the benefits of civil marriage in their state.
Bill Perdue
@CWBarton: That’s a very good idea. It goes to the heart of the matter because it removes the separate and unequal status bigoted politicians like Obama want to impose on us.
But in the real world pandering Democrats and Republicans and the rightwing cult leaders who deliver votes to them will never go along with it since it establishes equality.
rick
it makes perfect sense to me.
rick
stop quibbling over the freaking word! all marriages are civil contracts. if you get all the rights and benefits it is the same thing! in europe you have to get married twice if you want a church wedding, you have a civil ceremony too. but you do not need to be church married.
Tyler
@Bill Perdue: It makes me as mad as it makes you that President Obama doesn’t support gay marriage. But if you think he actually espouses that view; you’re wrong.
@rick: Words a monumentally important. Equal is equal. That may seem overly simple, but as you can seen marriage?civil union. They don’t even share the same letters. But (I think more important in this case) is not the fact that our little gay unions would have a different word, but a fundamental inequality in the rights granted us, and their enforceability.
Bill Perdue
Obama’s said he’s opposed to same sex marriage publically and often. It was one of the center pieces of his campaign. His Minister of Pandering is Joshua Dubois, who like Leah Daughtry and Jimmy Swaggart is an ordained pentecostal bigot.
Dubois began his ‘outreach’ to cultists with revival meetings in the south disguised as campaign meetings but featuring right wing vermin like MaryMary and Donnie McClurkin. Along the way he had kind words to say about the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, George Bush’s ‘spirit’ advisor? Dubois organized thousands of local support groups to draw cultists, aka, christians, into the campaign. What do you suppose all those cultists talked about? The End Times? The price of indulgences? The madonna (the ‘virgin’, not the singing one) etched on a burnt tortilla.
No. They talked about Obama’s sanctimonious statement that “gawd’s in the mix” at Warren’s Saddleback bigotfest. Then they voted.
Now Dubois will repeat, and this time with even more money, Rove’s goal of harnessing religion to politics. He’s been appointed to hand our federal bribes disguised as ‘faith based’ initiatives. In practice, as we’ve seen, it’s the other way around: politics are harnessed to religion and Dobson and scum like him smile all the way to the bank.
getreal
I find the concept of civil unions insulting. It is second class citizenship, all Americans are equal or they aren’t. I don’t think anyone should be allowed to get married if certain citizens can’t I bet that would stop all the pathetic meddling of bigoted people. We need to call our political represenatives to the carpet we have a SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. Marriage equality is imminent and the fundamentalists raging isn’t going to change that. And for the record I am straight,christian, and black.