State lawyers answer that the basis for the exclusion is not gender but sexual orientation, a category not covered by existing antidiscrimination provisions. That is true, but forbidding marriages when one partner is the wrong gender still adds up to sex discrimination. The state also asserts that the civil union law grants all the rights of marriage to same-sex couples, and any difference amounts to “a difference in name alone.” A trial court judge bought that argument and dismissed the case last year, saying the plaintiffs suffered no legal harm.
Saying a civil union is the same as marriage does not make it so. Civil unions are a newly invented category, neither universally recognized nor understood. Connecticut’s claim that the two terms are alike merely underscores the bottom-line question: Why relegate a minority group to a separate category?
The court case has helped stall this issue in Connecticut’s Legislature. But if the ruling goes against the couples involved, the Legislature will have a duty to revisit the matter. A law that allows civil unions but not marriage is preferable to denying benefits and recognition to same-sex couples. But no one should confuse it with equality.
This is a logical progression because for the Left, it is never enough for people to be allowed to “do their own thing.” Rather, all the traditional institutions must be deconstructed so there can be no safe harbor from their atheistic agenda. The Left exists as the permanent leveller of organic society.
So . . . giving them the Sudetenland won’t be enough?
#2,
Nope. And they’re going to need Alsace and Danzig as well.
I also find this fascinating for the way in which the Left, increasingly aware of the tension between ethnic nationhood and the secular welfare state, has cautiously tiptoed away from championing ethnic pride in order to promote this new, conveniently non-sectarian Aggrieved Minority: the noble homosexual.
What. Ever.
The very fact that, as a male member of the human species, I can not physically bear a child means that I automatically have a case of sex discrimination against the maker of humanity. I wonder what that will be worth in a New York court of law.
Saying a civil union is the same as marriage does not make it so.
So does saying the union of two men or two women is a marraige make it so? This reveals, perhaps, the source of a serious social dissonance. The NYT, I suspect, would say yes: marraige is a legally defined construct which means what we says it means. The vast bulk of human experience and thought on the subject suggests that marraige is a psychological and physical union as well as a social union. For the bulk of religious people, the relationship of a man and a woman derives its authority from a transcendant source- i.e., it is a marraige because an authority higher than humanity has established it as such.
#6,
To follow up on that excellent post, marriage is an ancient institution that pre-dates the State, and even the Church. And as you note, it is a complicated arrangement with many social, biological, and economic implications that are simply not present in a union of two men or two women. The response to this reality is more judicial and legislative wand-waving. For its next act, the Connecticut Supreme Court shall decree the law of gravity unconstitutional.
#7,
Some years ago, Missouri’s legislature decreed by law that pi would equal 3 to make math easier for the school children. Legislatures are not known for deep thinking. (Or, sometimes, even for shallow thinking.) But, then again, neither is the HOB. ;>)
Actually, the “pi decreed to be 3” story is an urban legend; see http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.htm.
But according to the story, it wasn’t to “make math easier for the school children,” it was because 1 Kings 7:23 says, “Then he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.” So clearly the Bible says that pi is 3.0 exactly!
Urban legends aside, I don’t think I’ve ever run into a Biblical literalist who was quite that literal… but I’ve heard a few of ’em who come close.
let t=thickness of sea of cast metal in cubits, the 1Kings 7:23 just says that
30=pi*(10-2t), not that pi=3.
Or that whoever wrote that passage was using approximate figures, as anyone naturally would aside from the craftsmen actually building the thing.
I wonder if anyone will celebrate the upcoming centenary of the “fundamentalist” movement … or if it’s impolite in those circles to admit that biblical literalism is a very new idea?
#9,
Ross, you are right. I had not researched the urban myth that I heard years ago. But, how about the 1897 Indiana General Assembly Bill No. 246, which was apparently passed to the same end? http://www.dumblaws.com/law/439 , claims it was passed by the house, but postponed by the senate.
tdunbar’s explanation for the “sea” seems to be a good one as the wall thickness for the container would need to be taken into consideration. You have both partially restored my faith in legislative bodies. (Only partially, and I am not yet willing to revise my thinking on the current HOB.) :>)
‘Civil unions are a newly invented category’.
Exactly so. & so is same-sex ‘marriage’ – an invention of the imagination, not a right of any constitution. But if a state finds for this innovation, it must also abolish any legal distinction between males and females.
And numbers in the marrage/civil union. The number two is as arbitrary as you can get.
#14 writes:
How so? It would seem that there has to be an intact legal distinction between male and female identities in spite of the changes in partner status when states grant marriage equality to male or female couples, or enact civil union arrangements. If your scenario follows as you claim, should we not look at those states that have granted such measures to see if distinctions are still made btween male and female status. For instance, are females in Connecticut or New Jersey now expected to register with the selective service as they approach their eighteenth birthday because those states have enacted a civil union measure? Over the last several years of marriage equality in Massachusetts, do birth certificates of newborns no longer record the sex of the baby?
#14, #16 – here in Canada the legal basis for the lawsuits that created same-sex marriage was indeed that our equality legislation permits only necessary distinctions between male and female. So we put women in combat roles (i.e. allow them to shoot first/back, not merely get shot) and if we had “selective service” both genders would need to register. It surprises me to hear the implication that “selective service” only registers males.
#13 – read the Snopes account. The bill is far, far more complex than pi = 3 “and it was referred to the Committee on Swamps, amid much hilarity”.
#17 observes:
I can follow your argument, but that is a different claim than the one made by Gordian in #14 to which I was responding. The predicate for modifying gender discinctions is your charter of rights that specifies gender equality.
# 18: The creation of ‘same sex marriage’ effectively overthrows the nature of marriage as it has been understood since time immemorial, viz. that you have to be male to marry a female and vice versa. In other words, your sex (wrongly called ‘gender’) is irrelevant and cannot serve as basis for discrimination (e.g., in education, public rest rooms etc). You think I’m joking? Look at the recent brouhaha in NY over proposals that people could be what ‘gender’ they asserted. Moreover, acceptance of ‘same sex marriage’ logically entails acceptance of consensual polygamy as well.
#19 “Moreover, acceptance of ‘same sex marriage’ logically entails acceptance of consensual polygamy as well. ” There’s an argument that polygamy is never adequately equal, and therefore cannot be recognized. (There’s actually a UN convention against polygamy, which is a good thing.)