Candid

The selective tradition is going to help me out on this one:

I don’t (want to) believe in legalized gay marriage. I don’t (want to) believe in legalized straight marriage. Initially, I didn’t understand why the government is involved in marriage. It seems like something that should be relegated to the realm of the spiritual/religious/cultural/personal. Civil unions make enough sense between consenting adults; why don’t we just replace the legal term “marriage” with “civil union”?

I do believe in working in the system you’re stuck in, however, so I won’t begrudge anyone for getting married.

Now, here’s where it gets fun:

What about the benefits of marriage? You know, the ones the government hands out. Well, we could just extend all those same benefits currently handled under marriage to any people in a civil union. But, wait, wait, wait; it doesn’t stop there.

What about people who want to civilly unionize with their whole neighborhood? Who are we to judge that behavior as aberrant? What are we, the moral gatekeepers of society or something? It’s not fair to tell people who want multiple partners that they can’t because that would be just as discriminatory as what we currently do to gay couples in this country (for the sake of argument, let’s just gloss right over the fact that the way multiple partners has usually panned out in history was one man, multiple wives, perpetuating a patriarchal system that denied power and personal choice to women).

Unfortunately, I’m not sure we can ethically tell these people that, no, they can’t have multiple partners. As I mentioned in the first sentence of this entry, we could appeal to the, admittedly, selective tradition that defines relationships as those existing between two individuals (most societies have done it this way, excluding rich asshats and royalty who thought they deserved more wives–read: patriarchy).

So, we can certainly discourage the practices of polygamy and polyandry, but good luck. I think the best we can do is remove all government benefits from civil unions of any type (people would throw a fit over the lack of tax benefits, lack of hospital visitation rights, lack of access to other legal materials, etc., etc.).

Basically, we can’t remove the government from the equation, unfortunately.

However, just because there are potential problems on the horizon doesn’t mean that we should recalcitrantly continue opposing gay marriage. If we operated under that logic, we’d never progress. For example, do you really think Republicans in the mid-1800s weren’t freaked out about where all the freed slaves were going to find employment and how injecting an additional 4,000,000 wage-earning individuals into the economy would affect the nation? Oh, I’m sure the thought crossed their minds. They fought to free the slaves, anyway, because it was the right thing to do.

Why are we still telling grown adults that they can’t get married because their genitalia don’t fit together like children’s toys?