re: #650 SixDegrees

There’s no difference at all between civil unions and marriage except the name. Insisting on a different label simply because of gender is as offensive as apartheid or “separate but equal” laws.

No, really, it’s not. Calling it “marriage” for male/female couples but “civil unions” for male/male and female/female couples is somewhat different from the South African government forbidding certain people to live in certain areas based on skin color.

And “separate but equal” became a dirty phrase in the case of segregated schools because there were finite quantities of tangible assets at stake — every piece of the school-funding pie that was taken by white schools became unavailable for black schools. It was a zero-sum game.

But this isn’t the case when it comes to the benefits of legal marriage. John and Mary McHetero don’t automatically lose their right to inherit each other’s money just because Adam and Steve Homovich have gained that right. Conversely, if the full weight of the law declares that Adam and Steve are entitled to call themselves spouses and become each other’s next-of-kin, then the practical legal value of their spousal contract is not diminished by calling it a “civil union” instead of “marriage.”

There is, of course, one intangible difference between “marriage” and “civil union” — the former is a concept that has existed since the dawn of human civilization and is the bedrock and central pillar on which society is built, and blah blah de blah, while the latter was invented piecemeal within the past 20 or 30 years by jurists in Connecticut and California, and thus it is badly lacking in gravitas and dignity. That’s why so many in the GBLTQXYЩЙ Community made a fuss about Prop 8, which theoretically converted California’s same-sex “marriages” back into same-sex “domestic partnerships” — “domestic partnership” doesn’t command the same respect as “marriage.”

And commanding respect — or rather, the vague notion that the government can and should command everyone to respect same-sex couples — is what this is all about. But as Iron Fist has pointed out above, there are no shortcuts to respect and social acceptability. If the majority of people don’t accept in their hearts that same-sex couplehood is “more or less like traditional marriage,” then it’s entirely pointless to make laws calling it “marriage”; people will grudgingly call Adam and Steve “married” if they have to, but they won’t believe the two men are “united in the eyes of God.” And bringing people to accept that God approves of same-sex couples is something that only Adam and Steve themselves can do, by the example that they present to their friends and neighbors — it won’t happen through legislation.