Back for Gay Marriage and Elections

I hope that all of you who used to follow my blog actively have not written me off entirely. I have had my head in a number of other places, and I hope to try to keep up with the old blog again. I have updated the color scheme to new fall colors as well as adding an e-mail mailing list. If you sign up for the list I will keep you notified as I update the site. For those of you who have been checking religiously and finding no posts for many months. . . Thank you! I will do my best to offer more frequent musings from here on out.

Below I have posted an article from todays NY Times. As we sweep forward toward what seems to be a very tense election day, I have had the gay marriage issue on my mind a lot. I currently have no intention of getting married, nor is it something that I had envisioned in the near future. I do feel very passionately about my concerns in this issue.

Marriage is typically defined as a union between a man and woman, and even Webster's Dictionary uses that in the language of the first two definitions. The third Webster account is the one I like best "marriage- an intimate or close union." Our current president has made it abundantly clear what lengths he would go to stop the liberalization of the definition of marriage. The problem I see first is that saying he will ammend The Constitution to stop gay marriage implies that stopping gay marriage is unconstitutional. It says "I will change the language of the principles that founded this nation, to fit what I think is right." I think that the support of a constitutional ammendment is scary.

The conservative response for the demand of gay marriage is a loosely defined compromise for "partner rights." The problem legally is that as long as it is called something different than the union straight people have, it can be treated differently in litigation. Partner rights still means limited rights. So when I hear politicians say that they "take no issue with gay unions, but that it shouldn't be called marriage", it starts to sound like Orwell's 'Animal Farm' to me. "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

Even John Kerry has taken a very safe "love the sinner not the sin" sort of stance on the issue. His interview with the HRC (an organization which lobbies for gay rights) seems to have a pretty supportive tone, but when I watched the final debate I felt glossed over and let down. His record of support for gay issues is so much better than Mr. Bush's record that it seems like he doesn't need to fight for our vote. I sort of wish that "our candidate" would show up.

What Kerry actually said bout gay marriage is this:

"The president and I share the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. I believe that. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman.

But I also believe that because we are the United States of America, we're a country with a great, unbelievable Constitution, with rights that we afford people, that you can't discriminate in the workplace. You can't discriminate in the rights that you afford people.

You can't disallow someone the right to visit their partner in a hospital. You have to allow people to transfer property, which is why I'm for partnership rights and so forth."


I have to wonder if as a lawayer he could have overlooked the loopholes that are created by calling it Partnership Rights. To me it seems like a way of appeasing the people that want to get married while simultaneously making them second class citizens. I have to agree with Margaret Cho "that any nation that would deny a gay man the right to bridal registry is a fascist state."