Posted: Apr 09, 2012 8:43 pm
UndercoverElephant wrote:MacIver wrote:UndercoverElephant wrote:What extra do they gain by doing so?
I'm not gay, so I can only speculate.
But I would imagine it is because they want the love they feel to be recognised as equally important as the love heteros feel. Irrespective of any legal or financial advantages marriages (or civil partnerships) imbue they are fundamentally about the love of one person for another.
I don't understand this argument. What are civil partnerships for? Well, it's because the law treats married couples differently to unmarried couples in terms of their financial/legal commitments to each other. It does so precisely because married couples have made a long-term commitment to each other, based on mutual love. And a civil partnership legally entitles gay couples who want to make the same commitment to each do so. That does recognise, legally, that their love is as important as that of heterosexuals.
No, it recognises that gay couples have the same right to tax breaks and legal protection that straight couples do. The very fact they are called something different proves to me that society does not put the same value on the love in those relationships.
Two reasons. The first is that procreation isn't historically the sole reason people got married (maybe they were already too old to have children, for example). The second is that many infertile couples are already married when they discover they are infertile.
So hypothetically, if a young heterosexual couple who were known to be incapable of having offspring were to fall in love and decided to make their relationship "legal" would you think they should enter into a marriage or a civil partnership? Or do you believe that infertile heterosexuals should be allowed to marry just because they have the opposite sex organs?
And the second is true only if you create cut of points into history that you don't wish to look beyond. Marriage used to be about the coupling of one man and several women. It use to be about a male having ownership of a female. It use to be about a lot of thing we today don't agree with.
I know that. See my last post.
So you admit you are picking and choosing which point in our history to look at to state that marriage is "historically" between one man and one woman? By doing so I don't think you have any right to claim history or culture is on your side. I could say that German politics was historically anti-Semitic if by "historically" I meant the years between 1933 and 1945, and I would be correct. Of course if someone else assumed that by "historically" I meant from the present day back to the creation of the German state they would rightly have a problem with what I said.
But today we have moved on. We believe that marriage is about love. And it is my opinion that the love between two men or two women is just as important as the love between a man and a woman. And if they are equal then they deserve the same name.
They are already equal. They have a different name because they are, erm,....different?
Different but equal?
What's the point in any difference if they are equal?
Personally, I think the government should keep it's big fat nose out of marriage. I don't think married couples of any sexuality deserve any extra legal or financial protection beyond that of unmarried couples. I'm quite happy for people to enter into group marriages with more than one male or female, or both, if that is what they wish. I think marriage is an outdated and archaic institution. And I think the idea of marriage being solely for one man and one woman is so outdated and arcaic it's not even on the time-scale.
But despite my personal opinion of marriage as long as gay people feel they are being discriminated against because small "c" conservative have this idealised view of what marriage is or should be then I fully support their attempts at gaining equality.
If "civil partnerships" were to be legally called "marriages" what effect would that have on your life UE? I know personally, that for me it would have zero effect whatsoever. So I don't give two hoots if it changes.