Civil unions: more on less

Religious?

"Marriage is a religious ceremony"?

No, not intrinsically.  It's a civil arrangement.  Nobody is required by law to have a religious ceremony when they get married; that's merely a choice.  Why do these people keep obfuscating the issue?  It's maddening.


"In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant."  The Colbert Report

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by: Lev Raphael @ Fri Feb 02, 2007 at 07:12:46 AM CST

This is ridiculous. . .and in my opinion,

just a symbol of the travesty that our government, which is supposed to represent all citizens and equally protect all of us, has become under the influence of the American Taliban.

Marriage is a "religious" ceremony? Give me a fucking break! If that was REALLY the case, the state should have been forced to recognize any same-sex marriage performed in the United Church of Christ or the Unitarian Church or the MCC - but because the state licenses marriage, those religious institutions were not allowed to hold "marriage" ceremonies - we had to call them "commitment" ceremonies.

Sometimes I get so damned weary of the constant smokescreen tactics of heterosupremacists over what should be the simplest notion about providing protections for every citizen. And now the Republicans act as if they have suddenly discovered that "single" people are getting ripped off by the state by the complicated system of legal documents required for them to make the smallest fucking decision about experiences that are HUMAN and not limited to some "designed-by-God" relationship named "marriage."

It seems to me that those churches should be suing the pants off of any Republican who tries to play that "religious ceremony" card of lies - and that we should be demanding that, if marriage is indeed the domain of the church, that straight couples who get married in churches be forced to adhere to that church's divorce policies without being able to walk out of the place at will and seek a more convenient solution from the state.
But it also makes me want to scream at Republicans to explain just how they view the "marriages" of some 40% of the population who use justices of the peace - because apparently Republicans view these civil ceremonies as counterfeit marriages which should never be due the same rights and obligations that "God" intended be provided to the religiously superior.

So many of those statutes which con-artist con-servatives claim to be "incidents of marriage" were never, ever designed to be exclusive rights of marriage anyway. You know, we live in the year 2007, and these fucking clowns are still trying to act as if the American landscape is made up of family farms where the children are required to stay forever and push the mule-drawn plow through the earth. Those statutes were often originally written in the 19th century as a means to ensure smooth transitions of property and limit fights within "families" over property, health decisions, and funeral arrangements. Their utter refusal to accept the fact that a majority of Americans move a long distance away from their "families" and construct new relationships based on the economic and social reality that our corporate structure has REQUIRED these moves is an abomination to me. That is the reality for the majority of American "families" and these legislatures are negligent in their duties when they pretend we all live like it is 1880.

What is even more amazing is that, over 20 years since I first starting attending funerals of young friends who were dying because of AIDS and witnessing the vulture fest that their heterosexually-superior families conducted while stripping the unrecognized partner of property and pronouncing their relationship as sinners, our community is STILL having to fight for the goddamed basic dignity of having control over our own lives and relationships. Of course, this is all while we are expected to fork over our fucking tax dollars to support some heterosupremacist government which "doesn't believe in discrimination" but happily demands we endorse their superior "religious" beliefs that we are condemned to hell.

And these people continue to talk out of both sides of their asses. On one hand, we hear about the deeply spiritual nature of the "God-ordained" heterosexual fuck fest, while they worship their own golden peepee by passing constitutional amendments which reduce "marriage" to nothing more than a born-into gender identification image. Marriage isn't about love and devotion. It isn't about commitment. It isn't even about stability or raising families to them. It is merely a complicated system of a thousand or so special privileges afforded to people who present the IMAGE of being heterosexual.

One of the most common arguments used during those "marriage" debates is that any man (gay or not) can marry any woman (gay or not) and plug into the system of privilege. The fact that con-servatives even bring up that argument proves that marriage is nothing more than a virtually meaningless social image in which Republicans believe people should be human and spiritual sacrifices to some false God who believes pretension is always preferable to reality.

I would wager that if we did a survey of the relationships of people in these state legislatures, that a highly disproportionate number of them are heterosexually "married" - and I wonder if it isn't time that we stop voting for these special interests-for-themselves-only clowns. All of my voting life, every heterosupremacist candidate for every public office has wheeled out pics of the "family" - the obligatory snapshots of the wife/husband and the smiling, happy children - as if that statement alone should be another reason to elect them. And so what kind of laws are these asswipes going to pass?

We have about two dozen states now which have declared that the 20 million gay Americans in this country are forever legally "single"- forever banned from even petitioning for the simplest right to make an automatic decision about our very lives and property and relationships and LOVE - unless we pretend we are heterosexual. These same states, and their "married" hetero legislators, have shown little interest in the needs of over half the population who are legally "single" - and the Religious Right continues to demand that more life decisions be the exclusive domain of "married-only" people.

Well, there is something intrinsically wrong about an institution which has to pad itself with so many special privileges as a bribe for basic government protections. That doesn't promote stability - it promotes tyranny and government hegemony over the most basic of life experiences for gay persons. And we've put up with that crap long enough.

There is no "religious" interest in exhuming one partner's dead body and moving it to some undisclosed location simply because some fucking "legally-recognized family member" has decided they want to play weeping Madonna-saint. And there is no fucking excuse for my government to pretend that somehow a rapist, murderer, spousal abuser, child sexual predator somehow possesses more character simply because he is heterosexual and therefore is entitled to more dignity at his fucking funeral and when he's put into the hospital. Has anyone ever noticed that not a single "religious" person, not a single legislator, not a single straight public official, seems to have ever addressed that discrepancy?

How, exactly, is the promotion of the "marriage" for a serial rapist adding to the "God-ordained" stability of society? And how is it that a child sexual predator is not only allowed to "marry" but produce his own damned child to abuse?

I'm sorry, but to me the real crime is the utter refusal of con-artist con-servatives to recognize that gay Americans are entitled to be judged on the basis of our individual character, not the direction our damned peepee points. And a society which is still incapable of understanding that notion has no business calling itself "free."

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by: kevinbgoode @ Fri Feb 02, 2007 at 08:40:14 AM CST

Don't apologize

There is nothing for you to apologize for in what you wrote.  It was a wonderfully written piece.  I only wish I could write like that.

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by: HDBiker @ Fri Feb 02, 2007 at 08:46:54 AM CST

[ Parent ]

thanks, as always Kevin

For supplementing my late-night compositions with your well-written rants.

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by: Pam Spaulding @ Fri Feb 02, 2007 at 09:01:55 AM CST

[ Parent ]

Holy Sweet Mary, Mother of God!!!!!!

That's the best fuckin' thing I've ever read!!!!  How do you do it, Kevin?!  You said every thing I was thinking and then some.  The only thought I had left was OMFG!  ;)

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by: callie @ Fri Feb 02, 2007 at 20:55:00 PM CST

[ Parent ]

"Marriage is a religious ceremony," Clegg told the AP.

Then an investigation needs to be launched immediately, because I was legally married once in N.H. and the guy who did it was a justice of the peace, licensed by the state, and he was distinctly un-religious (and also got drunk on the champagne)

Seems the Speaker doesn't know the laws of his own state.

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by: tiponeill @ Fri Feb 02, 2007 at 09:22:21 AM CST

CUs for gays + straights

This is interesting.  If they're going to do the stupid and make CUs, it's best they allow in straights.  If they do, I predict one or both of the following:
1) few to no straights will stoop to getting this inferior legal contraption, thus highlighting how stupid and unequal it is.
2) any straight couple getting a CU will raise holy hell wheh they find they're 'legal strangers' the moment they step outside NH.  When the straights start the complain about the shoddy contraption that is CU, things will change for the better.

Lurleen on Twitter

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by: Lurleen @ Fri Feb 02, 2007 at 20:10:00 PM CST