What California voters did with Proposition 8 has taken away a right that had previously existed: gay marriage. The issue of gay marriage is apparently very threatening to some people. Some are clearly homophobic, and for these people there is little to be done. For others the objection is based primarily on religious beliefs. Some political leaders, in an attempt to have it both ways, in an effort to calm the concerns of religious fundamentalists, while dangling a carrot in front of gay citizens, have advocated something called Civil Union.
What is Marriage?
While marriage is a formal committed relationship between two people who take commitment vows to love one another from that point forward. The opponents of Proposition 8 would want me to add that the marriage commitment is not between two people, but between a man and a woman, and, until recently that is true. For many, marriage is a religious sacrament, and those who place a religious slant on this topic do so because the commitment vows are made not just between the couple, but also with the community and before God.
What some miss is that marriage is also, and perhaps primarily a legal status. When you are married you have entered into a legal relationship subject to the laws of the land. Marriage is not just a private matter, or you could just privately dissolve that relationship. There would be no need for divorce. Married couples can be a unit and buy property jointly. This means that they share the debt, they share the ownership, and should they seek to end their relationship the governments through the legal system will determine that the rights of all parties are considered and that the division of property is completed in accordance with law. Marriage is also a legal state that is recognized not only all over this country, but also all over the world.
What is a Civil Union?
A Civil Unions is both a concept, and actually exist in a handful of places like the state of Vermont. The idea of a Civil Union was to provide gay couples the same legal rights as married couples, without having to actually call that status marriage. There are a number of problems with Civil Unions, as far as the gay couples are concerned:
The protections of a Civil Union do not extend beyond the border of the state where it exists (such as Vermont) so that if a civil union couple moved to Oklahoma they would no longer have the legal rights they had in Vermont regarding joint ownership of property, being able to be on their partner's health insurance, etc. No federal protections are included with a Civil Union. Civil Unions may offer some of the same rights as marriage, but only on a state level.
To those liberal fundamentalists feel that by allowing Civil Unions they have given homosexual couples the legal protections of marriage while protecting the sanctity of marriage as it has traditionally been defined. In essence, some feel that if they are liberal enough to permit Civil Unions they have set up a separate category of committed relationship that is different from but equal to marriage.
Separate Not Equal
If something has to be separate it is obviously not equal.
When I was a kid there were separate but equal water fountains. The water was the same, so wouldn't a colored water fountain be equal to and the same as a white water fountain? In my past I recall there was a city pool for whites and a separate pool for blacks. Isn't that equal? That is actually the point: if the water is the same, then why must there be separation? The separation is necessary because the people being segregated are viewed as being not like us, not as good as us, not equal to us. If we have the same rights and deserve the same treatment, then the rights and the treatment will be the same, there will be no separation of any kind.
I remember as a kid having to cut a cookie in half and share it with my brother. If I got to cut the cookie, my half tended to be a little bigger. If we learned one thing from separate but equal as it was applied to black and white people is that it was the white people who did the separating, and the facilities were rarely ever anything close to being equal.
The colored restrooms were dirty and substandard. The colored water fountain was not cooled water, and it came from a brass faucet not from a chrome state of the art spigot. The colored school had the old, outdated text books, the white school discarded desks, and on and on it goes.
The concept of equal rights is something that should not be compromised by custom, majority vote, or religious convictions. The only equality is equality. You can't separate out anything and still say it is equal.
The Tyranny of Democracy
I do support Civil Unions for one reason and one reason only: because we live with something called the tyranny of democracy. As long as people can vote the majority can supplant the efforts of minority groups to have equality. Civil Unions can become a baby step toward marriage open and available to all regardless of their race, religion, or sexual orientation. We should not have to take baby steps toward equality, but baby steps are better than back peddling.
California's Rights Robbery
The problem with California's Proposition 8 is that it is not a baby step toward equality. The equality in marriage was already legal there. In California the people were not working toward equal rights, there they had rights that were taken away by the tyranny of the majority vote. Proposition 8 was a ploy to rob people of rights they already had, and that may have been legal, but it was far from ethical, and millions of miles from being fair.
No comments:
Post a Comment