Gay Marriage to Alfred: Your Thoughts

i think we should have a legal system based on what animals do and don't do

omg animals don't have capitalism

The Island of Dr. Morbius

Gay marriage legal in Vermont via both houses overriding the governor's veto. NOW let's see where the complaints come from.

i think we should have a legal system based on what animals do and don't do - Legalize cannibalism!

Nice touch:

Among the celebrants in the lobby were former Rep. Robert Dostis, D-Waterbury, and his longtime partner, Chuck Kletecka. Dostis recalled efforts to expand gay rights dating to an anti-discrimination law passed in 1992.

"It's been a very long battle. It's been almost 20 years to get to this point," Dostis said. "I think finally, most people in Vermont understand that we're a couple like any other couple. We're as good and as bad as any other group of people. And now I think we have a chance to prove ourselves here on forward that we're good members of our community."

Dostis said he and Kletecka will celebrate their 25th year together in September.

"Is that a proposal?" Kletecka asked.

"Yeah," Dostis replied. "Twenty-five years together, I think it's time we finally got married."

This is going to be a none-issue in 5 years.

make that 'non-issue'

make that "nun-issue"

Support gay nun marriage.

I already do!

I support it by subscribing to, er, "speciality" websites...

Now where's yr "judicial activism", wing-nuts?

I predict a Fox commentator will propose removing Vermont from the USA within a day.

You know, I actually kind of love the fact that the right-wingers and running scared and feeling like the country is changing without them in a very frightening way. Welcome to the last 8 years, assholes.

Now where's yr "judicial activism", wing-nuts?

Sounds like the spin is "money bought this one," but doesn't that argument work better in cases like Prop 8?

The only person pushing that money meme is the one guy I've been able to find in all the articles who was working against this in Vermont. Sour grapes laughability -- even Rod Dreher is saying things like "This is how it's supposed to work (even though I hate it and we're all going to hell oh help complain complain etc.)"

It is to laugh.

honestly the most ridiculous and blood-boiling thing i've ever seen

Those would seem mutually exclusive to me, but I tend to pretend people don't exist.

the "rainbow coalition coming together in love" part is major lols, it's like some kind of Xtian PLUR/rave gone wrong. Somebody link the weather girls parody file already.

wow that made me really angry

^^^^^LOOOOOL

was coming here to post this.

Just a note here: obviously, most ilxors know that people like me exist, but...

I am a homosexual against gay marriage, for essentially the same reasons I find the cries to repeal 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' so sickening: it is evidence that homosexuals, after being consistently oppressed and subjugated by western capitalist democracy, just want into the big ol' club. As if getting married under the state's capitalistic rubric legitimizes love of another person.

There is also the element that is perhaps most important, in my eyes: marriage is a religious term that has been adopted by the state in order to bestow benefits and privileges on certain people. Why not just rid the state's structure of the word 'marriage' and bestow these benefits and privileges to all who have made and committed to official contracts detailing their partnership? All presently-existing and future straight 'church' marriages would be seen as 'civil unions' under such a rubric, and the gays would get the benefits we so RIGHTLY deserve, but without the bullshit of the word 'marriage.'

Perhaps what I am arguing, more succinctly, is that people need to change the terms of debate-- make the fight about benefits and equal treatment under the law, not about a word which, whether you agree with it or not, belongs to religious groups and religious groups first.

Why not just rid the state's structure of the word 'marriage' and bestow these benefits and privileges to all who have made and committed to official contracts detailing their partnership? All presently-existing and future straight 'church' marriages would be seen as 'civil unions' under such a rubric, and the gays would get the benefits we so RIGHTLY deserve

^^actually i more or less agree with this, but i kind of wonder if it's an even harder sell than gay marriage..

It is, but mostly because dumbass motherfuckers STILL don't get the whole 'separation of church and state' thing.

As a straight dude who would like to get married someday, I bristle at the idea that the word "marriage" "belongs" to religious groups. There are plenty of practices and ideas that started as religious rites that no longer are strictly religious and have passed into secular culture; for me, marriage is one of them.

Also, it's fine if you yourself do not believe in gay marriage or marriage in general, but does that mean that you will not fight for the rights of other gay couples who feel differently? Kinda weak, imo.

^

Perhaps you're missing the point: I reject the idea that getting married under the state's capitalistic rubric legitimizes love of another person. If you believe in that legitimization, gay or straight, fine, but I'm not helping you get down on your knees to suckle at a toxic teat.

I mean, I know people here in SF who were screaming stuff like LOVE WILL PREVAIL and LOVE OVERCOMES ALL when Prop 8 was passed, and I was appalled. Love and marriage are not commensurate with one another, as we all know.

I agree with the idea that the government should not be in the marriage business and that stripping that language from the law is a good idea, but until that happens, I would rather gay marriage be legalized so that gay spouses can receive medical benefits and see their loved ones in the hospital and be equal under the law and etc.

yeah, practicalities first, semantics second.

Table, I get the impression that you're really invested in thinking and living outside of hegemonic American culture (e.g., moving to San Francisco because it's the "most European" city in the US, criticizing Obama for being a slave to capitalism, etc.), which makes me feel like you oppose gay marriage mostly because it would make your own homosexuality somewhat less subversive.

Perhaps, jaymc, but when so much of gay identity revolves around disgusting consumer culture, it would be a breath of fresh air to not feel so subversive, as it would mean that there are others who find the Castro or most parts of Boystown or most parts of Chelsea (etc etc) kind of sickening.

Perhaps, jaymc, but when so much of gay identity revolves around disgusting consumer culture, it would be a breath of fresh air to not feel so subversive, as it would mean that there are others who find the Castro or most parts of Boystown or most parts of Chelsea (etc etc) kind of sickening.

Sorry, tabes, but jaymc OTM in this one.

yeah, he is right, but i don't really feel like wanting 'my own homosexuality' (ie homosexuality coming from an anti-hegemonic point of view) to be less subversive is a bad thing. it raises issues as to how i am any different than some be-Prada'd body fascist queen who wants to get married, but i think that the answer is that my values are different--

Most of the gay dudes I know who got married did so because they have been with their significant other for a long time, and it was important to them. Not because of Prada or whatever.

Anyone who thinks that marriage is about "legitimizing love" has not thought very much about marriage and, if married, has not been married long. Marriage is all about social ties and obligations. That is why it is done in the sight of witnesses, with formal oaths that spell out those obligations.

Couples in love tell one another whatever they want to share, in private. Deciding to get married entails telling everyone outside the confines of that couple - not simply that they love each other, but what their future intentions are, very publically. Because marriage is public business, not just a private feeling.

An op-ed from the NYT today that as a (black and white) biracial queer of sorts I can very closely identify with.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09thrasher.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Iowa’s Family Values
By STEVEN W. THRASHER

IF it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.

In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage. My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)

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Of course, the desire to define relational rights and responsibilities with a partner, to have access to the protection that this kind of commitment affords, is rather conservative. But it’s a conservative dream that should be offered to all Americans. Though it takes great courage for gays to marry in a handful of states now, one hopes that someday, throughout the nation, gay marriages, like my parents’ union, will just be seen as marriages.

It’s safe to say that neither the dramas of our family, nor its triumphs, could have been possible without the simultaneously radical and conservative occasion of my parents’ civil marriage in Iowa. And so when the time comes, I hope to be married at the City Hall in Council Bluffs, in the state that not only supports my civil rights now, but which supported my parents’ so many years ago.

yeah, but guys, the important thing is, I'm not helping you get down on your knees to suckle at a toxic teat.

no siree

yeah, he is right, but i don't really feel like wanting 'my own homosexuality' (ie homosexuality coming from an anti-hegemonic point of view) to be less subversive is a bad thing.

But wasn't jaymc saying the opposite--that he feels like you want to be more subversive and that's why you oppose gay marriage?

the conflict, in some ways, is that i think these rights are obvious and self-evident, and shouldn't even have to be bestowed by the state, as if they were some sort of gift.

yes, the op-ed piece is right. but i just fear that with the advent of these rights finally being bestowed, gays will become as complacent, as zombified as the rest of the population, if they're not already. that is, by accepting the rights given as parcel to this 'conservative dream,' i fear that gays will simply be subsumed (and assumed) into the larger cesspool of the capitalist dream.

so, it is not the right to marry that i am opposed to, really. it is the results of what will happen when these rights are finally given.

Most gays are already part of the capitalist dream, table -- or want to be. Since gays are as boring, awful, and predictable as our het brethren, there's no reason to project Genet-esque fantasies of subversion on them.

In my milieu it's subversive enough for an openly gay man to mingle and fuck freely amongst straight society -- and keep my identity.

tabes i think it's pretty selfish for you to be against gay marriage because you want all gays to be 'rebellious' or 'different' - imo you should want gays who would like to have the same rights as straights to be able to have those rights because of they deserve them, regardless of what the gays will 'turn into' after