Gay’s can now legally tie the knot in two states.
Of course, there are a lot of people who don’t like this, and already there are movements to collect petitions to add an amendment to the California state constitution to reverse this court decision. Not so amazingly, the same people who decry activist judges when they rule for the equal rights of an unpopular group, also laud them when they rule in their favor (pdf) on other issues. So my (straight) mother and I had a discussion about this while sitting at Denny’s.
First, let’s completely get rid of marriage as far as the state is concerned. The state really has no current purpose for supporting, or even recognizing, the sacrament of marriage. Many arguments against allowing gays and lesbians to marry stem from the fact that it is a sacred institution meant to join one man and one woman in the eyes of God, family, and community.
Fine, I’ll buy that. Let the sacred communion remain sacred and let the religious ceremonies stay outside of my government. Marriage, as currently recognized by the federal government, is easier to enter into than a leasing agreement on a new Honda Civic. The fact stands that the no-fault divorce has done more to destroy and degrade marriage than anything any gay or lesbian could possibly do. Marriage is more like the equivalent of “going steady” from 50 years ago. So lets us completely revoke all state recognition of marriage (grandfathered of course to protect those who are already married). It is a religious ceremony to be handled by the church of your faith.
Let us have, instead, a civil … um…partnership? I specifically don’t want to call it a domestic partnership, or civil union, because those phrases will forever conjure up images of gays and lesbians. I want a new word to describe this relationship that does not connote a particular arrangement or pairing. This partnership can be formed between any two persons of legal age to enter a contract. They may be a man and a woman seeking a state recognized relationship to compliment their religious sacrament of marriage; it may be a woman and her aunt who are inter-twining their finances to cope with the increasing economic pressures of today’s world.
The relationship described in this partnership need not be sexual, but must be binding and exclusive. Give it a contracted period of perhaps 20 years so the government can still fulfill it’s mandate of promoting a stable family unit for the rearing of children, with options to renew. Dissolution of the contract should be difficult, not like today’s quickie divorces that are so easy you can almost do them online. My mother represents many people in a similar situation. She is a widow of a career military officer who is basically unable to remarry because the health benefits she receives from the government would all be lost and her current laundry list of medical conditions would make acquiring new insurance extremely difficult. The performance of a wedding ceremony in a church is currently meaningless unless you also have a piece of paper from the state saying it means something, and most churches won’t perform the ceremony without the marriage license.
So her current option is to remain single for the remainder of her life, get married and lose all of her benefits, or live in sin in the eyes of her church. I’m sure there are many other situations where it would be more constructive to separate the civil and religious recognitions, but that’s just one example.
If the state is going to recognize relationships between people, make them recognize them equally. Let us remove the current concept of marriage from the government, and keep it soley as a religious ceremony. Let the straight people who are afraid that a couple of gays getting a piece of paper from the government will cause their marriage to crumble, sleep a bit easier at night. Let the gays and lesbians not confuse the recognition of a relationship in the eyes of the state with the ceremony they had at their progressive church with their friends and family. Keep the civil partnership a hard to enter, hard to exit, binding, and exclusive contract between two legal adults. Let them be responsible (in the eyes of the state) for the care and support of their partner. Let the insurance companies be willing to recognize this new legal status since it would be more meaningful than marriage is today.
We’ll discuss particulars on the type of contract we could devise in comments or in another post.