Getting back on my usual rails…
Social-political subject matter, yay! In the wake of Proposition 8 being knocked back down in the courts, let’s dive into the issue of ‘gay marriage.’ As I see it, the whole civil union law needs a rewrite, but we won’t see that happen. Additionally, this is a reversed-stream Civil Rights issue, where social acceptance has come before legislation, rendering the legislation in a belittled light: where people underestimate the attention it deserves.
Doing away with the fantasy situation in which we’re rewriting the entire legal code surrounding all civil “marriages” and up-ending both tax-codes and other benefits encapsulated and surrounding them… and just dealing with practical aspects of now including the question of same-sex couples:
I submit that from a foundational perspective, it behooves us to not only allow, but also to enforce (through the same codes of recognition, which are used to protect the de facto partners in Common Law) such unions. The rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should be protected; these are not rights which the citizens should have to fight for. These rights are recognized and protected for the spouses of those who are betrayed or abandoned, whose families are left without providers by disaster and disease – but, only if the couple was of heterosexual status in the eyes of government (not in fact, mind you – honesty, does have a role to play, but we’ll leave that alone for a moment); but, for those in same-sex relationships, these rights have been denied and these protections have been lacking – the reason underlying their gross lack of protection is clear: they are, because of their sexual orientation, not recognized as full citizens.
This is why so much of what they can do is thrown into question, when they are honest about their private lives and want to share that life as part of the polity. As a citizen, they would have the right to a civil union, a common law marriage, adoption, insurance and retirement benefits for their spouses. But, as a partial-ized citizen, those rights have been, (and realistically, even still are in some places) held aloft, in the hands of the real citizens to decide, whether or not they should be allowed and how much should be allowed, based on whether it benefits the heterosexual majority. Nobody has brought up, with the same seriousness and gravity, a bill to require reproductive licenses for heterosexual couples, with which same-sex couples must fight for adoption and marriage, or even procreative rights. Why? Pervasiveness of the status quo? Or am I missing something here? The point of these things is economic… I’ll deal with that next time, I digress, sorry.
Which brings us to where the less obvious and most important point lies. The right to life. There are a hell of a lot of reasons out there for gay marriage rights, but I think adoption and the economics which caused us to create marriage incentives at a government level ties into a more important issue. There is a surplus of humanity. Not to be a callous monster about it, there just is: we have children we cannot support and we have shuffled them through a system that has been broken for decades. A child who is adopted and loved and brought up as part of a home has a better chance of being a well adjusted and productive member of society, than one who is abandoned or loosely drifting through the channels of the foster system. There are exceptions to both – but, they are rare. The worst of it is, there are already parents and families who want to take care and raise these children as their own, but they do not have the same rights as full citizens. As a result, these children, who have nothing to do with whose arms their parents take greatest comfort in during the hardships of life, must suffer to be without a family they can call their own. And what is life without a home? family? or, someone who gave you their name, because they believed in you to make them proud?
I don’t think the gays, or bis, or transexuals have fought well enough, or hard enough, to earn the rights in question. I don’t think anyone should pity them for how they have been treated. I just think anyone who would deny them their rights should be publicly castrated and lashed in the nude, while Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions!’ is blasted into their ears, until they are driven deaf. And that we should treat all people, or at least citizens, born and unborn, straight and gay and everywhere in-between and parallel, as citizens with equal rights and cut this shit out. But, this is what happens when it takes 200 years to get rid of the official partial-personhood concept in a constitution, you get to stamp-out the ripples for the next 100+ years in places you didn’t think you’d find it lurking.
Besides, would you say no to her? :
No nudity this time, but don’t worry: I think I ran out of clean stuff ;)
