October 2, 2008
Neither side supports Gay Marriage!
I don’t either. Don’t call it Marriage! I don’t give a crap about what it’s called. But I want the same legal recognition for my commitment to my partner. Marriage is word play, why can’t we get past it?
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30 Responses to “Neither side supports Gay Marriage!”
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Well, you know I told you I couldn’t bear to watch. But I’ve relented to the extent I’m following via the live-bloggers. And I’m with you, Rick. And I’m just wanting to pound my head against the wall.
“..your good wife who taught for thirity years, her reward’s up in heaven, right?…”
I turned it off, I can’t take any more.
Relieved I didn’t watch, but that’s cold comfort.
I had to watch. And dammit, she did her homework–to the extent she did not sound worse than GWB the past two times around. As I’ve told some friends, I have to give her some props (or a “shout-out”). It’s tough debating when you’re on the wrong side of every issue.
Any word on Lady/Racoon civil unions?
Well, for someone who supposedly “talks straight” to the American people, she sure avoided answering some questions.
I didn’t get to watch the debate. Daryl’s teaching, and I’m home with Mia, and that sort of thing (and my reaction to it) isn’t suitable viewing for a sweet child. So I recorded it, and Daryl and I will try to watch it tomorrow, if we think we can take it.
On the issue of gay marriage, darling Rick, I respectfully disagree with you. I believe it’s important to extend the word “marriage” to any gay couple who wants it. It’s not just word play if we have a different legal term (such as “civil union”) to define a gay couple’s commitment to one another. That echoes “separate but equal,” and I think it’s entirely unacceptable. For god’s sake, what are they so afraid of??
Cindy, gay marriages produce gay offspring.
Cindy, I see the point you’re getting at. For me, gay marriage is an issue like abortion: something that important on a personal level, but inappropriate for government regulation. I have gay for-all-intents-and-purposes-married friends, and the government certainly shouldn’t get in the way of their civil rights. But I think the political debate over gay marriage misses the point; the government should take a neutral stance on our relationships, in that it places them on equal ground.
Nah. Gay marriage is an issue for people who live in the past. It will be a joke that we even questioned whether gay people should be allowed to serve in the military or to marry. Just as it’s a joke to look back at questions of race and equality. It’s a false gravitas that history will show for the farce it is. The only reality is equality. For women, for gays, for all races, for people on every spectrum of the the range of gender…. Only temporal blindness creates the space for controversy.
…and man-made climate change, and progressive income taxation, and the futility of war. Basically, the whole conservative platform lives in 1950s America.
yes.
All this talk calls to mind lyrics, Nature Boy, for me the deepest metaphor of Christ
In whatever form you might take Christ to be, if any:
There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far, very far
Over land and sea
A little shy
And sad of eye
But very wise
Was he
And then one day
A magic day he passed my way
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
“The greatest thing
You’ll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return”
I heard that tune on the jazz station today. Lovely and haunting.
We all live in the past.
Girls marry their fathers. Testosterone fuels wars.
Not viewing the debates for any other reason than you are vomiting in the flowerbed, or answering the door for a pizza is tantamount to allowing the tanks to run over you.
The only hope we have now, since there ain’t gonna be any future, is to add change in thin, opaque layers over what already exists. Fight with what you have and with what they can understand now. That is why the word “marriage” is so crucial. That IS the term for two adults forming a union recognised by our laws.Are you an adult? Are you of sound mind (can you understand and enter into a contract)? Is your partner the same? Then you are entitled to the few laws that pretend to protect us as “one man/one woman” unions are.
I doubt anyone will be laughing in the future.
Issues of race, war, greed, politics, religion have dogged us for centuries and the fight for what’s “right” will continue and will continue to be lost, somewhere, right on up to the end.
I don’t care what you call it, so long as you call it the same thing for everyone (the civil portion of it anyhow. Y’all can keep your religious ceremonies as you see fit.)
Well the realpolitik of it goes way beyond semantics. It’s about inheritance rights, tax status, legal next of kin, protections and rights for the children of gay parents. I was asleep here in Ireland while this debate was happening, just watched a few highlights and it comes across as quite muted, really. So I didn’t hear anything about the topic of gay marriage yet, but I can definitely see how in a race as tight as this one, and with the crazy dynamics involved in it, that controversial issues are likely to be erased from the agenda. It’s just political suicide to do otherwise.
Lucy, controversial issues like gay rights actually mobilized otherwise disgruntled and apathetic conservatives in 2004. Some cynics suggest the subject was amped up in order to incite conservatives and force them from their homes and into the polls. That’s one way to work your base.
Yeah, Michael, it seems they’ll use whatever they can get. It’s pretty demoralising to the process, a lot of what is going on in this election over the past month or so.
I was reading an Obama/Biden back off from gay marriage as an attempt to make him seem more mainstream. I have no idea what the O/B position is on gay marriage, but I can see how Obama’s team would be playing as safe on what they might consider ‘marginal’ issues as they can at this stage. I mean, he is seen as revolutionary enough as it is. I blogged some footage about a month ago of black republicans at the GoP convention, and one of them was talking about her fear of Obama because she “didn’t want to live in a socialist country”. This stuff goes so deep, both lack of understanding of what socialism itself is and what kind of spirit it represents in its essence, and also fear of a fundamentally different response to the socio-economy.
It occurred to me this morning that Palin has a lot of momentum to her, energetically, while McCain is more or less a dead fish trotting out platitudes without any weight to them. Palin is clearly ambitious and ruthless, hoaky but smart, and she’s got to have fought a hell of a lot to get through the humiliation she has been exposed to over the past week or so in particular. So she’s probably been through some kind of catharsis. It seems to me that Obama and Biden are a much more compatible, stable kind of unit. I wonder how this will play out to people. I wonder how much the televisual games matter. From the footage I saw, I thought Biden was pretty great, actually, really human and passionate, and I thought the way he looked and reacted to Palin was pretty cool. But you know, I’ll probably youtube the arse out of this debate, even though I have only got a certain tolerance for all that.
Couldn’t agree more.
Couldn’t agree more.
I’m not sure about that last sentence, but this is reason numero uno why I very likely won’t be voting for Obama, thank you very much.
Jonathan: It seems to me that the pronoun “this” in your concluding remark dangles a bit. Which part of all you have set above it is the antecedent? The “revolutionary” status of Obama? I just can’t see what the concern is here, given that McCain and his ilk represent a greater threat to America’s future than Obama’s “New direction needed” calls and plans.
Specifically, I meant my ‘this’ to mean this:
(Which doesn’t include that sentence about Obama’s ‘revolutionary’ status, which I didn’t really understand and don’t think I agree with.)
Generally, I meant my ‘this’ to mean everything that I quoted here and this issue in general.
Having said that, my saying that I won’t be voting for Obama certainly does not mean I’ll be voting for McCain.
Nader’s the man, baby.
If Obama only represents a turning away from rampant irresponsible greed, toward a truly civic sense of social equality, well THAT is revolutionary in the current US political climate.
couldn’t agree more Lucy. Obama isn’t the problem. what passes for centrism in the US is. we have to regain ground first, then move forward. Obama will do that. Clinton did that.
But there are many reasons why people are suspicious of Obama. Because he is black, because they read his talk as socialist, because they ’suspect’ him of elitism, or intellectualism. Partly fuelled by the weird nature of American politics, where people get hopped up about terms like hope and change, and get freaked out when they have to understand what any of those concepts might actually represent. Obama may not be revolutionary to you, to me or to Clusterflock readers, maybe he just makes sense, or maybe you think he is downright conservative. If you have only ever lived in a rampant rampant capitalist system, then, for instance, the Scandinavian system would seem revolutionary. And change freaks people out. Better the devil you know, a lot of the time.
Jonathan–I’m really not trying to rag you on this, but: your last clarification seems to indicate that there is an issue out there concerning gay marraige, with many opinions about it and much bobbing and weaving about it on all sides, and a long history of concerns related to it–and because of this you are not going to vote for Obama. I still don’t get it. Is it that you think Nader has a kind of “purity” that renders him able to set aside human concerns of all sorts as not relevant to political consideration? I’m all for exposing the political manipulation of such issues, but Nader’s “above it all” bearing strikes me as pandering to an over simplified impulse to debunk and expose. When anybody tries to cast doubt on all things at the same time, an emptiness at the bottom is exposed–particularly when constructive ideas and actions are actually called for. Nader’s bleed off of Gore votes had the distinct effect of putting W in office, with all of his damage done to the very issues Nader said he was fighting for. Wouldn’ t you think that a good hard look at what is actually likely to result from one’s efforts should be considered by a person who is actually concerned about his or her favorite issues? I think Nader doesn’t relly know how to do anything but be Nader. That looks real good when one wants to roll around in knowledge of how bad the man is, but not so good when real effects are sought.
I think, Daryl, that you’re making this more complicated than it is.
I want to vote for an actual liberal, an actual progressive. I don’t want to vote for an in-the-context-of-Democrats-specifically-or-the-faux-two-party-system-generally liberal. And I don’t want to vote for a candidate who moves toward the ‘middle’ to secure the votes of ‘independents’ or even Republicans.
I want to vote for a candidate who supports the legalization of gay marriage. Plain and simple. No conditions.
But to take up some more of your point(s), this issue really does expose the intellectual dishonesty at work in both Obama’s and McCain’s candidacies. I honestly think (though I certainly have no way to know) that both of these candidates think that gay couples should have the same rights as straight ones. But here’s the thing: Either you think that, or you don’t. This (rightfully referred to as separate-but-equal) idea that gay couples should have the same legal rights and protections as straight ones, but with a different word attached to it, is pandering, weak, half-assed bullshit. If one’s concern is the religiosity of ‘marriage,’ one’s concern has no place in lawmaking. And neither does one.
As to the actual effects of one’s efforts: The actual effect of my vote for Nader will be one more vote for a real liberal candidate and one more vote in support of reestablishing an effective two-party system in this country (rather than the one-party-with-two-names horse hockey we have now).
And finally, about the Nader’s-candidacy-put-Dubya-in-office idea, here’s what Nader had to say to that a couple of weeks ago to The Onion’s A. V. Club:
Thanks, Jonathan. I see your views more clearly now. About confronting the “two party system that is really one party,” though, and the idea that Nader has tried and is still trying to hack into and supplant that broken game–it seems like nothing more than an idealized notion that taking a stand on principle will “win” for everybody. What ought to be is for many all there is, while for others what ought to be and what am I actually going to do about it is more to the point. The problem with line-in-the-sand politics is that while you are standing behind that line a larger number of people walk away and end up running the government while you stand there behind that line. To think that different views don’t have to be addressed and listened to and engaged is to not accept the fundamental notions of democracy. The fine notion that one ought to do what is right because it’s right, when taken in a simple way, suggests that there are no different views about what’s right–or that the “wrong ones” don’t count and should simply be ignored.
Say there were three viable candidates in this presidential race, Nader being one of them. If general disgust with the other two allowed Nader to win, then would this be the end of the old two party system? I don’t think so. I think if President Nader valued the work he was doing and wanted to keep doing it, he would become very pragmatic about what it takes to get the votes to be able to do that.
Reminds me a bit of Ian Paisley and the ‘no surrender’ line that he kept going for the best part of 40 years up in Northern Ireland. But even he ended up working hand in hand with Martin McGuinness in the end.
I think maybe I’m lost a little bit now. This—
—is pretty much my point. On most issues, there’s one point of view being espoused by both sides, both parties, both candidates. And on this issue, that one point of view is very clearly the wrong one. See Deron’s comment as I quoted it above.
As far as what would happen if Nader won goes—I’m not really concerned about it. ‘Cause he won’t. Which isn’t the point. The point is that there’s a progressive point of view, and it needs to be represented.
The fact that the guy isn’t allowed to debate, though—while he’s polling between four and eight percent in many states (according to Nader anyway)—is a complete and utter joke.
Having said all of that, I don’t want to come off as a huge Ralph Nader fan. I’m not. I think it’s entirely possible that his work with seat belts in the late ’60s has made the roads less safe, for instance. But he’s the most viable true liberal on the ballot, so he’s where one’s vote goes if one wants to make a point.
I should mention, by the way, that living in Connecticut affords me this luxury. If I lived in, say, Pennsylvania, I might think differently about such things.