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I've always thought "anti-gay marriage = anti-gay" as being a false equivocation. Can someone convince me otherwise? Heck, at the very least there are people

• ywgdana 13y ago
  Because marriage isn't just some symbolic institution. Denying marriage to couples radically, unequivocally, directly harms them in legal matters like being able to make medical decisions during emergencies, property rights, benefits at work. So when someone is "anti-gay marriage", then yes they are taking a position that will harm gay folks. So yes, it is anti-gay.
  • peeters 13y ago
    And yet, put it that way to a gay marriage opponent, and I guarantee you a sizable portion would respond as follows: A: You're against gay marriage? So you don't think gay partners should share the same legal status when making medical decisions, in property rights, or work benefits? B: Wow, I never thought about it that way. No, I think they should share all of those benefits. A: So you're for gay marriage? B: No, I just think all of those rights should be granted outside of the marital context.
    • curun1r 13y ago
      That's the frustrating part about this issue...it's basically all semantics. The simple solution would have been to remove all recognition of marriage by the government and replace it with the concept of civil unions between any two consenting adults. There shouldn't even be a requirement of a romantic relationship...why should the fact that two people have sex or live together have any bearing on how they file their tax returns, how medical decisions are made or how property is disposed of? Hell, there's plenty of married people who are separated and no longer having sex or live together and yet they enjoy the legal perks of marriage. Once you limit the government's role to recognizing a contract, albeit one that's common and standardized, between two adults, marriage becomes the domain of the church. If your church wants to deny marriage to homosexuals, the first amendment gives them the right to do that.
      • tommorris 13y ago
        Your "simple solution" would require the invalidation of all straight people's marriages. Politically, that's about as toxic as proudly saying you are going to be building a pre-school on top of a nuclear waste dump. I wrote a long rant about this a while back: http://tommorris.org/posts/2555 http://tommorris.org/posts/2555
    • JoeAltmaier 13y ago
      Riding on the back of the bus gets you to the same bus stops, clearly. Yet we rejected Jim Crow laws decades ago as unsuitable in our modern society. Letting some citizens ride on the 'civil union' bus, and others on the 'marriage' bus is what's at issue. Its still wrong to discriminate in this way, especially if the majority vote to give themselves the better seats. I imagine its hard to feel the humiliation of sitting in the back of the bus, if you never have to do it yourself. It took Rosa Parks to make it plain to all of us, that the institution was racist, intentionally belittling and wrong.
    • nilkn 13y ago
      Exactly. Reading this thread, I get the distinct impression that many posters have never even interacted with someone who disagrees with them on some of these issues. As someone who grew up in the midwest, I've seen this exact exchange happen countless times.
  • smsm42 13y ago
    I know there are sizeable number of people who support giving gay couples all the property, legal, etc. rights under "civil union" umbrella but oppose calling it "marriage" under religious or cultural or any other notions. I personally think governmental sanction on marriage is a problem here and as soon as people are ready to do the right thing - meaning, take government permission out of this voluntary contract and leave the government only to be notified that such contract happened and not permit or deny it - all the problem goes away. But I certainly can see that these people I describe above is not for limiting legal rights of gay people in medical decisions, property rights, etc. but they object to that being called "marriage". This is their position, and denying its existence does not really help anybody.
  • exodust 13y ago
    ywgdana, your definition of marriage is joined with legal matters, but don't assume others will share the same definition. Little girls don't dream of having "property rights" they dream of "getting married". And you're wrong that anti-gay marriage = anti-gay. I take offence to that. I don't give a damn about marriage in general. But I DO give a damn about gay folks, their rights and equality. I have very dear gay friends, and care about them deeply. But I don't put marriage and their rights to make medical decisions in the same boat, and nor should you. Instead, you should be voting and fighting for those legal rights to be extended to same-sex couples, and leave marriage completely out of the equation. "Marriage" is an old-fashioned tradition, very much about a bride and groom and the beginnings of starting a family, kids and all the rest. That's what it is.
  • daveqr 13y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=gays+who+oppose+gay+marriage https://www.google.com/search?q=gays+who+oppose+gay+marriage Easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys when you think in black and white, isn't it?
• bluthru 13y ago
  What's the reasoning for denying same-sex marriage? Why are gay citizens equal enough to have equal tax laws but not equal marriage laws?
  • parsnips 13y ago
    Better question: Why should your relationship status give you better tax benefits than being single?
    • ahomescu1 13y ago
      IMHO, children. Married couples get tax benefits as an incentive to get married and have kids. I find it weird that this argument has so far been completely ignored by either side in the pro/anti-gay marriage discussion (at least as far as I've seen). Disclaimer: I'm single, so I'm not arguing for these benefits. That's just what I always thought the reason was.
      • dragonwriter 13y ago
        > Married couples get tax benefits as an incentive to get married and have kids. Married couples in the US most get tax benefits to the extent to which they have a significant imbalance in income, and it seems to be a lot more connected to the idea of traditional division of labor (one partner working in the trade economy while the other provides in-home support for that partner) than children, per se. They are tax benefits that directly subsidize children, but they aren't conditioned on marriage. > I find it weird that this argument has so far been completely ignored by either side in the pro/anti-gay marriage discussion (at least as far as I've seen). The idea that the civil benefits of marriage are inherently tied to the purpose of promoting reproduction are rather central arguments in the anti-same-sex-marriage camp; this was, in fact, the main argument for Prop. 8's constitutionality offered by its proponents.
        • JoeAltmaier 13y ago
          Yeah the children thing is a red herring. Couples may get married in every state who are past the child-bearing age, or even infertile.
• saryant 13y ago
  Even Lincoln defended laws which required Northern free states to return escaped slaves to their owners in the South.
• mtrimpe 13y ago
  Go watch any of the videos of gay husbands and wives who were denied access to the hospital to witness their loved ones die. That gay men and women weren't allowed to bring their partners into the country is another major one. Edit: Thank you for the downvote whomever you were. Mission accomplished; you managed to hurt.
  • bertil 13y ago
    My experience is that a lot of the people who opposed official recognition of gay couples don’t connect the two, even when faced with such a case. Few people have been in a situation when that actually was a problem, grave enough to require family presence, and the family would refuse to share information, or the nurses would block the way. The principle of it is wrong, but opponents don’t connect the dots.
  • peeters 13y ago
    You misunderstand; I never said I was against gay marriage, and don't need convincing. I just think people need to be more careful when they ascribe motives (being "anti-gay") to political views that might incidentally oppress people ("anti-gay marriage"). That kind of in-your-face aggression makes people defensive and withdrawn, rather than engaged and ready to be convinced. It's like if someone is for strict crack cocaine punishments, and somebody just saying "well being blatantly racist toward African Americans is unacceptable". Maybe they just hadn't yet connected the dots from their political position to the incidental impact it has on people.
    • mtrimpe 13y ago
      Crack cocaine vs African Americans is rather more indirect though. Being anti-gay marriage directly means "I want gay people to not have the following rights: x, y and z," and in that sense it is directly anti-gay. It's not as severe as criminalizing being gay or even putting the death penalty on it, but it is definitely anti-gay. P.S. I never meant to imply you were against gay marriage; was just pointing you to the most convincing argument.
      • 13y ago
• ForHackernews 13y ago
  > Was every single person who was against emancipation "pro-slavery"? Yes! What other position could there be? You either think human beings can be owned as property or you don't. I guess theoretically you could have favored some sort of gradual emancipation over immediate freedom, and there were some at the time who argued that freed slaves should have been returned to Africa. But those are still just variations of an anti-slavery position. You can't be against emancipation without being pro-slavery any more than you can be against animal cruelty but pro-dog fighting.
  • peeters 13y ago
    Sorry, to be clear I meant "against emancipation" as "against a particular political proposal to enact emancipation". Maybe call it "capital 'e' Emancipation", for my lack of knowledge of American history. Obviously you're right that to be against the idea of emancipation is to be pro-slavery. But to oppose a specific political position is much more nuanced. There were many people who opposed Obamacare on the grounds that it didn't go far enough. You couldn't automatically say they were against universal health care. Many people oppose legislation that they would otherwise support because they are rolled up in an omnibus bill they can't support, or because the devil in the details would make it counterproductive to their cause.
• JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Yeah slavery was ok, as long as you didn't have to be one.
• aredridel 13y ago
  Maybe, yes and no, respectively.