There Are No Real Arguments Against Gay Marriage

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 2:47 am

bradsnet wrote:

Please list anything that a marriage provides that you can't get without it.

I can't think of a single thing. You can even have a contract that binds two people financially, gives them rights regarding each other, etc... without marriage.

There are an awful lot of things that marriage for same sex people would provide them cheaply, which they simply don't have right now and can't get for the same expenditure of time, energy, and money (or many times, at all!):

* Designating heirs for inheritance,

* visiting rights to a partner's child or a non-responsive partner in a hospital (which is regularly denied by family at this point, something which marriage rights would override),

* making medical or final resting place decisions for such a person, bereavement or sick leave, or wrongful death benefits because of a partner,

* access to joint insurance or rental agreements,

* joint child custody rights and visitation,

* adoption and foster care,

* education and home loans,

* immigration residency for foreign partners,

* social security.

Basically, a spouse has nearly unquestionable rights wrt their spouse's well-being, even over objections of the parents, siblings, and children of the spouse. This isn't something that is true when a contract or even power of attourney is involved.

The point of legal recognition of marriage is legal and financial. There is no other practical reason the state has for bothering with such a mess.

bradsnet wrote:

If a gay couple tries to get married in a state that hasn't banned it.... what happens?

That's precisely what happened about 15 years ago, when it came up in Hawaii. States started trying to figure out whether there should be laws or amendments added to actively prohibit same sex marriage.

Many states, like my own state of Iowa for instance, blocked laws or state constitution amendments that were brought up by religious bigots for a few years (1996 and 1997 in Iowa), but it just kept getting brought up, and in 1998 a law banning SSM in Iowa was passed.

This kind of thing happened before, where people didn't even imagine an interpretation of marriage besides what they were comfortable with, so didn't write restrictions into the law or definition of marriage until it became an issue. The law didn't originally explicitly define marriage as between two members of the same race, but for the majority of our country's history, marriage did not include white men and black women (or vice versa) ... the vestiges of that legally lasting until the late 1960's!


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