Matching Mudflaps
If you're a regular reader of my blog, by now you're likely aware of California's gay marriage ban, tempers are flaring, opinions are mounting, and once again I feel it has become incumbent of me to save America from it's citizens.
The crux of the debate is this, homosexuals feel that their not being allowed to marry is discrimination and folks belonging to various religious groups feel that marriage is a sacred act and thus should be subject to their rules. Now smarter people than I have made points that marriage might not be so sacred, but that argument leads to problems. Marriage is steeped in fairly universal traditions and rituals, a ring, a white dress, a kiss, some glass tapping, the details vary but they're ritual, and every ritual is sacred to someone. To say that rituals are not necessarily sacred opens up a can of worms that no one here wants to go fishing with and marriage is obviously a ritual, so therefore it's not up for contention that those who say 'marriage is a sacred act' have a valid point.
However, divorce is not so sacred. Divorce is the right of all married Americans given to them by law, and it is exercised by a great many of them. In 2005 over half of the marriages performed resulted in a divorce, there is no ritual to a divorce, no religious pomp and circumstance, simply legal proceedings.
Gays and lesbians have been denied the right to divorce by the California government, and while the constitution does not list divorce as one of the inalienable rights and freedoms granted to all it's citizens, it does say that people are allowed to be secure in their own persons free from discrimination as long as they break no laws.
Homosexual acts are not a crime in America, being homosexual is not illegal, so why are gays not free to lose half like everyone else? This is State sanctioned discrimination based on religious bias which violates several of the core principles the United States Constitution was founded upon. These days the constitution seems like more of a pirates code of vague "guidelines" than the foundation for the laws of a great nation, but I still take it seriously and believe it should be adhered to, and when push comes to shove I believe the American people are with me in that belief. Therefore, if this gay divorce ban is to hold and be constitutional, homosexuality needs to be outlawed.
As long as Americans are not willing to make homosexuality illegal, this gay divorce ban is outright unconstitutional discrimination and gays have an obligation to protest it, which puts everyone who doesn't really care for the homosexual lifestyle in a tough spot because they are the ones who pushed for this ban. Their actions are only stirring the pot and bringing the thing they abhor out and in their faces, whereas if they could swallow their pride and compromise the whole issue would just go away and they wouldn't be confronted by it. But there are principles at stake here.
The solution is in the etymology. Marriage is a word that carries a lot of meaning, like Christmas; it has religious significance even though it is used to refer sometimes to acts that are not religious in nature. The answer is in creating a new word. In the case of Christmas, the Jews say "Hanukah" and the Atheists say "Ski Trip".
Thus, the solution to this entire issue is so simple that the fact that no one has implemented it means that I deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. Instead of using the term "marriage" when referring to a gay or lesbian civil union, it should henceforth be called "Matching Mudflaps".
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I like Mexico's law, where there is CIVIL marriage, and RELIGIOUS marriage, and some couples will have a church marriage without the legal protections provided by the legal, and some will have a legal without ever entering a church, and the church can marry whomever it likes.
The two don't have to be one and the same.
That's the early 1990's, just to clarify.
What a beautiful sentiment. *sigh* No one care anymore. That would be a great day.
haha, yeah there are a lot of things we don't care about up here, but watch out when we do care about something :-P
I can't believe that in this day and age they actually made a law against oral sex. Those are the type of laws you see in those "you cannot spit on the left side of the sidewalk except every second Tuesday in months ending in Y" type of lists. I knew that various acts were in fact illegal in different states, but to actually add to the lists nowadays is ludicrous.
Hey everyone,
It's just occurred to me- do you think this was the REAL reason Dorothy left Kansas??
And her little dog, too?
; )
The USA is a Democratic Republic. Specifically so the majority doesn't rule. The Loving's versus Virginia made it legal for interracial marriage in 1967. When I went to elementary school there were white and black drinking fountains until the Supreme Court (activists judges) stepped in and corrected a horrible wrong. When slavery was abolished a full 60% of the population were pro slavery. We had a Civil War to end slavery.
Originally marriage was a civil contract to ensure property sharing by the family of the bride with the family of the groom. When the Old Testament took it on you could have as many as 6 wives.
Somebody needs to tell the Religious people that they do not own the rights to the worship of a higher power. The freedom of religion provides that you don't have to have one if you don't wish to and to provide special treatment based on religious beliefs goes directly against the concept of that freedom.
Early settlers fled Europe to escape religious persecution. Only to inflict it on their fellow humans in as many ways as they could possibly figure out while enjoying tax free gathering places and bully pulpits to spew their hate in.
Technically the Government has no say in "church marriages". They do however control Civil Unions and they should mandate that all marriages must be performed civilly and then additional ceremonial weddings may take place based on the faith of the people involved. The main reason "Civil Unions" haven't worked is because so many laws specifically say "Marriage" so by that definition the discrimination is allowed to continue.
A conviction for sodomy (including oral sex) requires that the person register as a sex offender. That includes statutory rape between an 18 year old boy the day after his birthday and a seventeen and 364 day old girl the day before her birthday. He must also register as a sex offender even though in one day it would be completely legal.
If you take a look at most of the people that push for anti sex legislation they are generally not able to participate and their bitterness is part of what drives their forced repression on others. If they can't get any, nobody can.
The moral issue fails when you look at marriage statistics. 50% fail. 75% end up in infidelity. 50 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. 97% of rape is heterosexual. Most of these fine moral issues are predominantly heterosexual but love is immoral.
Every person should be allowed to fuck up their own lives to whatever degree they are able to.
Having shared Matching Mudflaps for 18 years means that I have been partnered longer with the same person than the President Elect of the USA. And the Vice President Elect.
Have they got Big Brother watching over the marital bed yet?
i do like Matching Mudflaps better than the term marriage:)
i do wish the whole Obama as next president thing hadn't been overshadowed (for me) by this horrid business
if religious institutions insist on basically legislating other people's lives, then they really should be taxed
It may confuse people, but when a priest or minister says something like "And so, by the power vested in me by the State of Massachusetts and Almighty God, I now pronounce you man and wife", that one sentence is doing two things at once. If he doesn't have the proper paperwork he can't say the "the power vested in me by the State" part. If a Justice of the Peace performs just the civil marriage he doesn't say the "and Almighty God" part, or the "in the eyes of God and this congregation" or whatever religious formulation is used.
At one time in Massachusetts it was illegal for a clergyman to perform a civil marriage. That had to be done by a magistrate, justice of the peace or other civil servant. Religious and civil ceremonies were separate affairs as they are in some other countries.
The other thing that many people miss is that it is important what you call the civil relationship. Because civil marriage exists as a specific type of contract and relationship, there are thousands of laws that convey rights and obligations upon married couples, everything from how you file taxes to who can be denied visitation rights in hospitals. If the law doesn't say that it applies to civil unions and there isn't a law of some sort defining that all rights and obligations granted in a specific jurisdiction (and there is no such law for the federal jurisdiction), then it matters whether what two people have is a "civil union" or a "civil marriage".
One of the troubling things about some of the laws and constitutional amendments that have been passed in the last few years attempting to deny civil marriage to same sex couples is that it is not always clear that the writers of the legislation are fully cognizant of the distinctions and are attempting (unconstitutionally, given the separation of church and state) to legislate what both forms of marriage are.
I don't know a lot about California constitutional law, but prop 8 appears to be fairly simple. It consists of two sections. The first names the law, and the second reads "Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution, to read:
Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." California also has a domestic partnership law that applies to same-sex and some senior citizen couples. Such a partnership grants all of the rights and obligations of (civil) marriage, but is not a marriage, so as I understand it isn't affected by this amendment and if all of the rights and responsibilities of marriage are covered by domestic partnership, then the only difference that Prop 8 is largely linguistic.
What same sex couples lost by Prop 8 is the right which they had for a while to have their relationship recognized and considered as a valid marriage. They have been relegated to "seperate but equal", which unsurprisingly they find as unacceptable as "separate but equal" was in racial terms. At least within the state. They may also have lost more if they travel to other states and nations, whose laws may recognize marriages performed in other jurisdictions but not marriages. That is a fluid situation which I wouldn't hazard a guess on.
For myself, I am greatly saddened to see California which briefly joined us in Massachusetts in recognizing the rights of same sex couples, rescind that, even if they only fall back the "small distance" to full domestic partnership. The campaign was essentially one of imposing religious definitions on civil law and I think that is wrong. If one church recognizes religious marriage between same sex couples and another does not, to restrict which of those marriages are recognized before the law as valid seems like imposing undo constraints on the church only some of whose marriages are valid for civil purposes.
The success of Proposition 8 is a direct indicator that mankind is stupid and selfish and pathetic. No one would argue that abolishing slavery or giving women the right to vote was wrong -- are gays less human than blacks and women? Considering that black voters supported the measure by a ratio of more than two-to-one, it would seem it only takes a few decades for people to forget what it was like to be so openly persecuted. Should we reinstate slavery? Remove womens' suffrage? Abolish the 40 hour work week and the minimum wage? Of course not, because taking away rights is UNAMERICAN!
So I guess the only logical conclusion is that being gay is a crime, as is every aspect of being gay. Good call, man.
The Loving case happened within my lifetime and within my memory. At about the same time the Catholic church decided to recognize as valid marriages performed by other Christian denominations. A good friend of mine was considered a bastard by the church until we were teenagers. The arguments against miscegenation that I read and heard were very nearly exactly the same ones that are used against gay civil marriage today. The arguments against blacks and whites serving in the same units a few decades before were the same ones one hears today against gays and straights serving in the same unit.
It may be hard to imagine people treating blacks and women the way gays are treated but it did happen. Many of us remember it. That's what made some of the coverage of the election of Obama so moving. To hear Representative John Lewis, whom I first knew of as a young man brutally beaten in Selma Alabama, and as the chairman of the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) talk about how he and Rev. King never really even thought about the future in which a black man would be president. They were just worried about riding in the same cab or using the same waiting and rest rooms as whites, about being able to vote. To first see him as a distinguished Congressman, and then watch him tear up at the news of Obama's victory was deeply deeply moving.
Look up "Bloody Sunday", when Lewis was brutally beaten by state troopers and sheriff's deputies with the nation looking on. That was 1965. 22 years later he was elected to Congress and 22 years after that he will watch Obama sworn in as President. Believe me, the black community has not forgotten what it means to be persecuted. Rather, they are stunned at how much things have changed.
The problem is not forgetting what prejudice was like. The problem is identifying with the next group that came along. Back in 1965 many of the people who failed to support the blacks were my own Irish, or the Italians or the Jews, all people who knew what it was like to be discriminated against and should have known better than to discriminate against the blacks. But, these attitudes are so ingrained, so unconscious that it is always hard to see how your group's plight is reflected in the next. Some do. The Kennedys probably fought all the harder for black civil rights because they remembered the "Irish and dogs need not apply", and so on.
All aspects of being gay may not be a crime, but being gay is still to many a crime or immoral or sick or icky or pervers or even just plain evil. And it is so because of popular "wisdom" that is actually ignorance, or habit or tradition or failure to question what "everyone knows".
If you look at Prop 8 today it is disheartening that it got over 50% support. If you look at it from the perspective of only a few years back, it is astonishing that nearly 50% voted against it. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight to get it repealed, that we shouldn't work for marriage equality and all forms of LGBT equality, just that it will, as it has been, be a hard road to travel until one day we look back and are astonished that we got there.
I worked with Mass Equality to fight our own initiative amendment that was the equivalent of Prop 8, and we beat it, beat it by conserted grass roots effort, by the diligence of our representatives and sadly enough a bit of Constitutional game playing. One of the most inspiring orators in that process was state Rep Byron Rushing, a black man who reminds me of Frederick Douglass. He's a man who certainly sees the progress of history and the parallels between the black and gay struggles. Not everyone does... yet.
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You've crystallized my point right there. In essence, we are no different than we were generations ago; we just have new targets for our insipid prejudices. I'll say it again: pathetic.
These changes all happened in America because it was a special place, a place as Lincoln put it, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. And in his day it was still a question whether any nation that different from all the others on the earth could even survive. It was a unique experience, to have a nation that was dedicated to a proposition, any proposition, rather than just created out of the power of one man to say that this is a nation because I am powerful enough to be its king and my army controls to these borders.
You can be disappointed that it takes time to realize all of the implications of the few truths that we hold to be fundamental, or you can marvel at and celebrate the fact that if you create a country based on a few ideals and the notion that those ideals should be applied and should guide the laws that it results in progress that on the historical scale is rapid and profound.
I tend to call myself a "Progressive" politically because I believe in the progress that results from principles and reason, and I tend to take the glass half full view of all of the above, but I recognize the frustration that there is still quite a ways to go. That's why I was so moved to watch John Lewis the night Obama won the election. They asked him if this was what he and Dr. King and the other black leaders had envisioned 40-50 years ago and how it felt to see it happen. He said it was more than they had even thought of. They were thinking, he said, of buses and taxis, drinking fountains, waiting rooms and rest rooms. His eyes welled up with tears as he talked about it. a little over 40 years ago, the police beat him on national TV for daring to speak out publicly about blacks being allowed to vote, and here he was, a Congressman for 20 years watching a black man be elected to the highest office in the land, something no other non-African nation has done. And that is moving because it illustrates how fast this change is, really.
I don't think we are pathetic, I don't think evolution has slowed. I am so proud of how far we have come, that a nation so conceived and so dedicated connot only "long endure", but can thrive and become the most powerful on earth, and change not only itself but the rest of the world. Principles and reason can, and do, and have change the world. Yes, we have far to go, but look how far we have come. I have been so frustrated and angry over the last 4 years becuase they threatened to reverse that, to make us nothing but the world's bully boy, to start putting laws on the books that limit the rights of the people rather than the power of the government, to stop the progress.
Proposition 8 is horrible. It is vile. It is a betrayal of everything that we have stood for all these years. It is a backslide from principle and reason and a brake on progress. In it the citizens of an Americcan state have voted to rescind a right that a group of people had won recognition for. That is profoundly and deeply wrong. It is wrong not just because of the impact it has on the LGBT community, but because any group can be singled out for have rights taken away. Our constitutions should be about protecting the rights of the people and chartering and limiting the power of the government that acts for us and never never about denying rights.
So, yes, there are reasons to be frustrated and angry, but they are because we have turned around what has been a long long march of progress, because they have sullied the remarkable progress that has always marked this land, not because there hasn't been progress, not because people are pathetic and always do bad things. It wouldn't be a betrayal if there weren't a positive record to betray.
I was so proud to be from Massachusetts the day that the commonwealth's Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same sex couple had a right to marry. I hadn't expected it that soon. I am so proud to be an American with a black President elect. And it angers and saddens me to see Prop 8 pass. We need to change that. It deeply needs fixing.