I never liked questions with a preset number of answers, as my answer is often different from the available options.
E.g., in the often asked question:
Sex:
☐ Male
☐ Female
I want to answer "Yes".
To be serious for a minute, I often think the world would be a better place if more people had this philosophy. Just look at any political debate...same-sex marriage is a pretty easy example: You've got one side saying the government must ban it; the other side saying the government must approve it...but where's the "Get the government out of my damn bedroom" option? Why must they be involved in that question at all? Any time you see a debate between two or three choices, it's pretty much guaranteed that there's some options being hidden from view. That may come through malice, or through ignorance, or even for a legitimately good reason...but if you're picking only from the options that someone else has given you, then you aren't really making your own decision.
You've got one side saying the government must ban it; the other side saying the government must approve it...but where's the "Get the government out of my damn bedroom" option?
1) "The government cannot discriminate in issuing a certification of your romantic relationship" 2) "The government should not be in the business of certifying peoples' romantic relationships"
Do you really not see the distinction between these two statements? IMO, we ought to leave marriage to the church where it belongs. The only reason there is any debate is because our government, despite its claim of separation of church and state, has adopted its own process for certifying a religious ceremony. When is the last time you saw an argument that a man shouldn't be able to give his male lover power of attorney? Doesn't really happen, because "power of attorney" isn't something that religions have been doing in a particular way for thousands of years, it's purely a legal construct. Even if the government stopped certifying "marriages" and started doing the same exact thing through separate legal contracts, there would be no debate (well, maybe a few crackpots still, but nothing serious) because there would be no way to justify an opposing argument. The entire debate rests on the conflict between freedom of religion and non-discrimination, due to the government trying to be non-discriminatory in the application of a religious concept where religions are free to discriminate.
I agree BTW that the .gov should not be certifying some religious ceremonies and not others; keep big brother out of "first communion" or "last rites" ceremonies just as much as keeping out of marriage ceremonies... or baptisms, or sermons....
However "a legal construct" as the argument is the fundamental problem.
The purpose of legal gay marriage was to rub the noses of non gay people into it for punishment purposes. Sort of a pride parade mentality. Nothing to do with legal mumbo jumbo, just another "look at meeeeeee" event. The legal sob stories were only for propaganda purposes; people too stupid to get power of attorney letters getting screwed for being stupid, not screwed because the marriage laws somehow needed fixing; people too dumb to succeed in the previous legal environment will STILL be too dumb to succeed in the new legal environment, they'll just fail differently.
Note that if you want a legal poly marriage today, you can effectively implement that with multiple agents on a power of attorney, so there's that. I've never researched it, but I would suspect this is how Mormons are tracked down and prosecuted for polygamy, it would seem fairly trivial and obvious way to prove it.
Uh...you basically just claimed there's no issue and then proceeded to demonstrate exactly what the issue is.
A heterosexual couple doesn't need any specific legal knowledge to get married. They just go to the court house, tell the first employee they see that they want to get married, and they'll get directed to the proper clerk who will give them the proper forms and explain how to fill them out. If a homosexual couple walks into the courthouse and says they want to get married and they get told "Sorry, that's not allowed"...then what? Why should they be required to have specific legal knowledge of exactly what rights and responsibilities a marriage contract grants and what other forms of contract might work similar? Why should they have to go find a lawyer to help them navigate that crap when nobody else has to do that?
Why should they have to go find a lawyer to help them navigate that crap when nobody else has to do that?
Flip the argument to the divorce side of the relationship and ask the same question? If its just between two people and Jesus, why are all these lawyers making tens of thousands of dollars off the end of a marriage?
If the averaged legal cost of a marriage from start to finish (finish as in post-divorce) is $5K, or the average total cost of a marriage ceremony/party is $20K before the divorce starts, the real discrimination question is why a gay couple is only charged $100 to fill in the blanks and notarize a DPOA form. The government seems to be unfairly favoring them.
With a side dish of if you want all sorts of government cooperation and benefits from having an official love of your life, fine whatever, its not asking too much agency to invest $100 at a lawyer to make it all go away or far less if you do some google work and expend some effort. From memory I think we "donated" more than the cost of a DPOA to the priest back when I got married as his fee, although I'm sure if we were poor he wouldn't have hit us up for as much of a "voluntary donation". Just saying its kinda a cheap date argument, like "yeah thats my spouse but I won't buy him anything more expensive than a value meal at McDonalds when out on a date" isn't a good propaganda argument.
Also you're still not flipping the argument correctly in that why should a marriage ceremony have Big Brother as a secondary involuntarily required best man, when seemingly more important religious events such as baptisms or Bar Mitzvah are not intruded upon?
You might still have a good argument in there, just don't think you expressed it yet.
Either the government is explicitly Christian and as such should have its nose stuck in the church and government should have policies opposed to non-Christians, or the government should butt out entirely. In my opinion the religious rites I may or may not participate in at church should be none of the business of the .gov or IRS or whatever unless its a tacit admission that all this "separation of church and state" is untrue propaganda. Which, obviously, it is.
Also you're still not flipping the argument correctly in that why should a marriage ceremony have Big Brother as a secondary involuntarily required best man, when seemingly more important religious events such as baptisms or Bar Mitzvah are not intruded upon?
...I'll just quote my previous post here:
IMO, we ought to leave marriage to the church where it belongs.
Although it's true that the post you last replied to wasn't quite making that argument, because that post was only arguing against the idea that the discrimination isn't *really* a problem as long as there's a separate system available with similar benefits. Separate but equal is not equal; we've already gone through that debate in this country...pick one system and stick to it, and the easiest system to stick to is probably to just drop the whole damn idea.
So I think I pretty much agree with you here. Although I will contradict myself slightly to say that there probably is some benefit to getting "government" involved, simply because it simplifies a lot of potential questions later. Same reason that power of attorney does have a reason to exist as a concept, and both are granting a lot of the same rights AIUI. "Divorce" -- or whatever equivalent process -- is probably always going to be messy and complicated if only because "marriage" tends to imply a lot of shared property that you'll have to deal with. There's other contracts to simplify that, but it's nice to have a simple, least common denominator that most people can use without too much extra effort. If you end up arguing this stuff in court later, it's a lot easier for the judge if you've got a signed document rather than having to drag in character witnesses just to prove you were "married". So stop calling it "marriage", but come up with something kinda similar that's available to everyone because it's just a contract without the thousands of years of emotional/cultural ties.
The purpose of legal gay marriage was to rub the noses of non gay people into it for punishment purposes.
The real reason for the push for legal gay marriage was about money. Some examples of why it matters: - Whether it's possible for someone to get on their spouse's employer-provided health insurance plan. - Visitation rights in hospitals. - For that matter, medical decision-making in the event that one partner is incapacitated. - Default inheritance rules in the event one of them dies unexpectedly. - Spousal privilege in the event of a court case. (there's no "20-year-roommate privilege")
But what I'm really confused about is how the gay or lesbian couple down the street from you making it legally official has any effect on you whatsoever. If you don't want to see them kissing or something, don't look. That seems pretty simple to me. If you're really having a problem with it, my guess is that you have some issues you need to work out.
-- The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
Its a horrible design to wedge some religious worship stuff into government regulation. Its just inherently a bad idea.
Consider an alternate world where some cosmic ray bounced the other direction, leading to the government hyper-regulating all of your points but WRT the Catholic sacrament of God Parents for a Baptism, that would be F-ed up and the solution would be to un-F the government relationship, not to merely "permit" a bunch of new legal exceptions for the Methodists god parents and permit, uh, something for the synagogue and so forth. "Well, if you FEEL like you're Catholic God Parents, even if you're not Catholics nor believe in God nor are parents, then you can get the vast privileges and permissions granted to Catholic God Parents as listed in your post above". Its all a bunch of nonsense at a high level.
Doing something dumb is inherently bad in and of itself; slapping a band aid of "OK now you two guys are cool too" is not a serious fix to the problem, regardless how happy/relieved any individual two guys may justifiably be
The other way to attack it, which is pretty valid, is government exists to perpetuate society which must include reproduction. Hence we have things like free public schools, admittedly worth every penny the parents pay, but its the thought that counts. So there's a legit reproductive argument for a childbearing or theoretically childbearing couple who could be realistic role models getting all kinds of "reproductive privileges" that two close friends who like the feeling of gay sex don't earn by virtue of perpetuating society. From a large scale "survival of civilization" the gays tapped out and are not participating and are genetic dead ends. I can see the individual argument that the purpose of the government's laws is tranquilizing individuals, in which case making gay folks happy is useful as a distraction while ruling over them. Its kind of like the miscegenation vs multiculturalism thing, you can only be logically consistent by excluding one or the other, both together does not work, by definition.
An interesting and highly relevant thought experiment would be imagine gay folk invented and perpetuated something of the level of complexity of marriage; would it be appropriate for the Supreme Court to demand equal access for straight people to that theoretical gay construct? Should every gay bathhouse in the country be forced legally at gunpoint to implement "Saturday Straight Day" merely because some straight folk want equal access to something the gays built by themselves and the straights finally badgered the Supreme Court into agreeing that big brother must force the gay bathhouse people to accept straights?
An interesting and highly relevant thought experiment would be imagine gay folk invented and perpetuated something of the level of complexity of marriage; would it be appropriate for the Supreme Court to demand equal access for straight people to that theoretical gay construct?
Yes, of course.
Should every gay bathhouse in the country be forced legally at gunpoint to implement "Saturday Straight Day" merely because some straight folk want equal access to something the gays built by themselves and the straights finally badgered the Supreme Court into agreeing that big brother must force the gay bathhouse people to accept straights?
My understanding is that (1) gay bathhouses largely went away decades ago due to AIDS, and (2) they never kicked people out for being straight - among other things, you can't tell who's straight and who's gay by looking. As far as gay bars go, if you're a straight person who wanders in looking for a couple of drinks, you might get hit on a bit by someone who you don't want to get hit on, but your money is still green and nobody will complain or even know you're straight unless you start a fight or something.
As far as the rest of your point, I'd be totally fine with some other way of legally recognizing close relationships between adults completely absent of any religious baggage, especially when there's actually stakes involved (inheritance, insurance, medical decisions, etc). As an interesting example of a probably non-sexual version of this, after her husband died my grandmother lived with a female friend of hers for over 20 years, and while to the best of my knowledge they were never lovers they were certainly effectively a family after living together for that long, and were largely treated as such.
-- The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:24PM
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:24PM (#717356)
if you're a straight person who wanders in looking for a couple of drinks, you might get hit on a bit by someone who you don't want to get hit on, but your money is still green and nobody will complain or even know you're straight unless you start a fight or something./blockquote
Exactly this happened to me, except for the getting hit on part. Wasn't even obvious at first that it was a gay bar. Enjoyed my drinks at the bar and left.
It has very little to do with sex. It's actually about next of kin, and the legality of same-sex relationships, and as we know there are people who refuse to admit gay people are actually people.
>You've got one side saying the government must ban it; the other side saying the government must approve it...but where's the "Get the government out of my damn bedroom" option?
I've actually written in "Yes" on forms where they as for sex. What can they say? You either get the job, or not - or the grant, or the building permit, or whatever.
Also, write in "Yes" or "Human" in the box that asks your race. We have to amuse ourselves somehow when desk jockeys, bean counters, and pencil pushers get nosy.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday July 24 2018, @04:01PM (21 children)
I never liked questions with a preset number of answers, as my answer is often different from the available options.
E.g., in the often asked question:
Sex:
☐ Male
☐ Female
I want to answer "Yes".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Tuesday July 24 2018, @04:33PM (19 children)
To be serious for a minute, I often think the world would be a better place if more people had this philosophy. Just look at any political debate...same-sex marriage is a pretty easy example: You've got one side saying the government must ban it; the other side saying the government must approve it...but where's the "Get the government out of my damn bedroom" option? Why must they be involved in that question at all? Any time you see a debate between two or three choices, it's pretty much guaranteed that there's some options being hidden from view. That may come through malice, or through ignorance, or even for a legitimately good reason...but if you're picking only from the options that someone else has given you, then you aren't really making your own decision.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 24 2018, @05:22PM (11 children)
You've got one side saying the government must ban it; the other side saying the government must approve it...but where's the "Get the government out of my damn bedroom" option?
It's the second one.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by urza9814 on Tuesday July 24 2018, @06:05PM (10 children)
Consider:
1) "The government cannot discriminate in issuing a certification of your romantic relationship"
2) "The government should not be in the business of certifying peoples' romantic relationships"
Do you really not see the distinction between these two statements? IMO, we ought to leave marriage to the church where it belongs. The only reason there is any debate is because our government, despite its claim of separation of church and state, has adopted its own process for certifying a religious ceremony. When is the last time you saw an argument that a man shouldn't be able to give his male lover power of attorney? Doesn't really happen, because "power of attorney" isn't something that religions have been doing in a particular way for thousands of years, it's purely a legal construct. Even if the government stopped certifying "marriages" and started doing the same exact thing through separate legal contracts, there would be no debate (well, maybe a few crackpots still, but nothing serious) because there would be no way to justify an opposing argument. The entire debate rests on the conflict between freedom of religion and non-discrimination, due to the government trying to be non-discriminatory in the application of a religious concept where religions are free to discriminate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 24 2018, @08:25PM (9 children)
I agree BTW that the .gov should not be certifying some religious ceremonies and not others; keep big brother out of "first communion" or "last rites" ceremonies just as much as keeping out of marriage ceremonies... or baptisms, or sermons....
However "a legal construct" as the argument is the fundamental problem.
The purpose of legal gay marriage was to rub the noses of non gay people into it for punishment purposes. Sort of a pride parade mentality. Nothing to do with legal mumbo jumbo, just another "look at meeeeeee" event. The legal sob stories were only for propaganda purposes; people too stupid to get power of attorney letters getting screwed for being stupid, not screwed because the marriage laws somehow needed fixing; people too dumb to succeed in the previous legal environment will STILL be too dumb to succeed in the new legal environment, they'll just fail differently.
Note that if you want a legal poly marriage today, you can effectively implement that with multiple agents on a power of attorney, so there's that. I've never researched it, but I would suspect this is how Mormons are tracked down and prosecuted for polygamy, it would seem fairly trivial and obvious way to prove it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:23PM (3 children)
Uh...you basically just claimed there's no issue and then proceeded to demonstrate exactly what the issue is.
A heterosexual couple doesn't need any specific legal knowledge to get married. They just go to the court house, tell the first employee they see that they want to get married, and they'll get directed to the proper clerk who will give them the proper forms and explain how to fill them out. If a homosexual couple walks into the courthouse and says they want to get married and they get told "Sorry, that's not allowed"...then what? Why should they be required to have specific legal knowledge of exactly what rights and responsibilities a marriage contract grants and what other forms of contract might work similar? Why should they have to go find a lawyer to help them navigate that crap when nobody else has to do that?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:29PM (2 children)
Flip the argument to the divorce side of the relationship and ask the same question? If its just between two people and Jesus, why are all these lawyers making tens of thousands of dollars off the end of a marriage?
If the averaged legal cost of a marriage from start to finish (finish as in post-divorce) is $5K, or the average total cost of a marriage ceremony/party is $20K before the divorce starts, the real discrimination question is why a gay couple is only charged $100 to fill in the blanks and notarize a DPOA form. The government seems to be unfairly favoring them.
With a side dish of if you want all sorts of government cooperation and benefits from having an official love of your life, fine whatever, its not asking too much agency to invest $100 at a lawyer to make it all go away or far less if you do some google work and expend some effort. From memory I think we "donated" more than the cost of a DPOA to the priest back when I got married as his fee, although I'm sure if we were poor he wouldn't have hit us up for as much of a "voluntary donation". Just saying its kinda a cheap date argument, like "yeah thats my spouse but I won't buy him anything more expensive than a value meal at McDonalds when out on a date" isn't a good propaganda argument.
Also you're still not flipping the argument correctly in that why should a marriage ceremony have Big Brother as a secondary involuntarily required best man, when seemingly more important religious events such as baptisms or Bar Mitzvah are not intruded upon?
You might still have a good argument in there, just don't think you expressed it yet.
Either the government is explicitly Christian and as such should have its nose stuck in the church and government should have policies opposed to non-Christians, or the government should butt out entirely. In my opinion the religious rites I may or may not participate in at church should be none of the business of the .gov or IRS or whatever unless its a tacit admission that all this "separation of church and state" is untrue propaganda. Which, obviously, it is.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:48PM
...I'll just quote my previous post here:
Although it's true that the post you last replied to wasn't quite making that argument, because that post was only arguing against the idea that the discrimination isn't *really* a problem as long as there's a separate system available with similar benefits. Separate but equal is not equal; we've already gone through that debate in this country...pick one system and stick to it, and the easiest system to stick to is probably to just drop the whole damn idea.
So I think I pretty much agree with you here. Although I will contradict myself slightly to say that there probably is some benefit to getting "government" involved, simply because it simplifies a lot of potential questions later. Same reason that power of attorney does have a reason to exist as a concept, and both are granting a lot of the same rights AIUI. "Divorce" -- or whatever equivalent process -- is probably always going to be messy and complicated if only because "marriage" tends to imply a lot of shared property that you'll have to deal with. There's other contracts to simplify that, but it's nice to have a simple, least common denominator that most people can use without too much extra effort. If you end up arguing this stuff in court later, it's a lot easier for the judge if you've got a signed document rather than having to drag in character witnesses just to prove you were "married". So stop calling it "marriage", but come up with something kinda similar that's available to everyone because it's just a contract without the thousands of years of emotional/cultural ties.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @04:50AM
Regardless of whether one of the individuals is an undocumented immigrant, the most obvious legal issue is that polygamy is not legal in the US.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday July 27 2018, @03:36PM (3 children)
The real reason for the push for legal gay marriage was about money. Some examples of why it matters:
- Whether it's possible for someone to get on their spouse's employer-provided health insurance plan.
- Visitation rights in hospitals.
- For that matter, medical decision-making in the event that one partner is incapacitated.
- Default inheritance rules in the event one of them dies unexpectedly.
- Spousal privilege in the event of a court case. (there's no "20-year-roommate privilege")
But what I'm really confused about is how the gay or lesbian couple down the street from you making it legally official has any effect on you whatsoever. If you don't want to see them kissing or something, don't look. That seems pretty simple to me. If you're really having a problem with it, my guess is that you have some issues you need to work out.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 31 2018, @07:59PM (2 children)
Its a horrible design to wedge some religious worship stuff into government regulation. Its just inherently a bad idea.
Consider an alternate world where some cosmic ray bounced the other direction, leading to the government hyper-regulating all of your points but WRT the Catholic sacrament of God Parents for a Baptism, that would be F-ed up and the solution would be to un-F the government relationship, not to merely "permit" a bunch of new legal exceptions for the Methodists god parents and permit, uh, something for the synagogue and so forth. "Well, if you FEEL like you're Catholic God Parents, even if you're not Catholics nor believe in God nor are parents, then you can get the vast privileges and permissions granted to Catholic God Parents as listed in your post above". Its all a bunch of nonsense at a high level.
Doing something dumb is inherently bad in and of itself; slapping a band aid of "OK now you two guys are cool too" is not a serious fix to the problem, regardless how happy/relieved any individual two guys may justifiably be
The other way to attack it, which is pretty valid, is government exists to perpetuate society which must include reproduction. Hence we have things like free public schools, admittedly worth every penny the parents pay, but its the thought that counts. So there's a legit reproductive argument for a childbearing or theoretically childbearing couple who could be realistic role models getting all kinds of "reproductive privileges" that two close friends who like the feeling of gay sex don't earn by virtue of perpetuating society. From a large scale "survival of civilization" the gays tapped out and are not participating and are genetic dead ends. I can see the individual argument that the purpose of the government's laws is tranquilizing individuals, in which case making gay folks happy is useful as a distraction while ruling over them. Its kind of like the miscegenation vs multiculturalism thing, you can only be logically consistent by excluding one or the other, both together does not work, by definition.
An interesting and highly relevant thought experiment would be imagine gay folk invented and perpetuated something of the level of complexity of marriage; would it be appropriate for the Supreme Court to demand equal access for straight people to that theoretical gay construct? Should every gay bathhouse in the country be forced legally at gunpoint to implement "Saturday Straight Day" merely because some straight folk want equal access to something the gays built by themselves and the straights finally badgered the Supreme Court into agreeing that big brother must force the gay bathhouse people to accept straights?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 31 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)
Yes, of course.
My understanding is that (1) gay bathhouses largely went away decades ago due to AIDS, and (2) they never kicked people out for being straight - among other things, you can't tell who's straight and who's gay by looking. As far as gay bars go, if you're a straight person who wanders in looking for a couple of drinks, you might get hit on a bit by someone who you don't want to get hit on, but your money is still green and nobody will complain or even know you're straight unless you start a fight or something.
As far as the rest of your point, I'd be totally fine with some other way of legally recognizing close relationships between adults completely absent of any religious baggage, especially when there's actually stakes involved (inheritance, insurance, medical decisions, etc). As an interesting example of a probably non-sexual version of this, after her husband died my grandmother lived with a female friend of hers for over 20 years, and while to the best of my knowledge they were never lovers they were certainly effectively a family after living together for that long, and were largely treated as such.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:24PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @10:30AM
Both POA and DPOA terminate when you do. At the instant of death your life-partner has no further say in anything, and next-of-kin take over.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 25 2018, @12:45AM (2 children)
It has very little to do with sex. It's actually about next of kin, and the legality of same-sex relationships, and as we know there are people who refuse to admit gay people are actually people.
That's why there a right answer and a wrong one.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday July 27 2018, @12:44AM (1 child)
Sounds like somebody here's been smoking polls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @03:36PM
Still better than ethanol.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:38AM (2 children)
>You've got one side saying the government must ban it; the other side saying the government must approve it...but where's the "Get the government out of my damn bedroom" option?
Welcome to the Libertarian party.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:38PM (1 child)
Nah, I'm libertarian but not Libertarian Party -- those guys just want to be wage slaves to a wealthy dictator.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:42PM
Ditto, it just sounds more pithy the way I said it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @05:52PM
In patient admission forms, sex choices are usually: M F U O
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 10 2018, @02:28AM
I've actually written in "Yes" on forms where they as for sex. What can they say? You either get the job, or not - or the grant, or the building permit, or whatever.
Also, write in "Yes" or "Human" in the box that asks your race. We have to amuse ourselves somehow when desk jockeys, bean counters, and pencil pushers get nosy.