Joining the fray on gay marriage...
I have no idea why I'm compelled to post this, given that I'm very likely to get flamed to little tiny bits. But given that my social circles, my Friends' list, and the Interwebz at large, are all a'twitter with the Maine gay marriage vote, I feel some compulsion to chime in.
Here's the thing, kids... I am PRO gay-marriage in theory, and ANTI gay-marriage in implementation. How is this possible?
Well, because I'm actually anti straight-marriage in its current implementation as well. As zoethe and others have correctly pointed out, marriage is a social compact. It's not some right given by [G/g]od, nor some inalienable birthright granted by nature. You can believe what you want, hang out with whom you want, and yes, sleep with whomever you want -- even if you have to do so discretely in some parts of the world if you wish to remain upright. But when you take advantage of certain social compacts, you have to play by the rules of the society who created them, and who are ultimately responsible for bearing the costs and imposing the responsibilities that they entail.
So what does this have to do with heterosexual marriage? Well, our system is broken -- especially at those times when things go wrong. In response to the progress made with womens' rights in the last few decades, we have now massively unfair and inequitably-applied alimony and child welfare standards. Abusive heroin-addicted fathers would never see their children again, while abusive heroin-addicted mothers get joint custody (NOT a theoretical situation here, given that a colleague is living through this right now.) We have ridiculous tax structures that benefit some couples while penalizing others. Our society as a whole has all sorts of operational problems that result from name changes by marriage -- or occasionally even worse, NOT changing names as a result of marriage.
Even when things are going very well in a marriage, the social systems that it's built upon are inefficient, inconsistent, and occasionally downright broken. As we progress with new Homeland Security initiatives (read: Secure ID and Secure Flight programs), impose new restrictions on medical care (read: HIPAA laws), and turn our schools into hardened bunkers, even the "traditional" trappings of marriage become a burden for anyone who isn't in a One-Man-One-Woman-Same-Last-Name-and-Address relationship.
So now we expand to gay marriage. When things are going well, married gay couples will probably have about the same level of hassle as your average straight couple with different names. But when things go badly? (Bearing in mind that the US divorce rate is currently around 50%...)
How will US courts -- bearing in mind that the laws are all set up with an assumption of the traditional marriage structure in mind -- deal with child custody issues? How about alimony, and who gets it, and why, and for how long? How about even tax issues, given that millions of dollars in IT that run the machinery of this nation don't have the ability to have two 'M' or 'F' check-boxes on the same form? Percolate that down to customs forms if you travel abroad, or FAFSA forms for a kid's college aid? What about disputes with family when one spouse dies?
I am not in any way saying that this is fair, or just, or that the problems cannot be overcome. What I am saying, however, is that gay marriage in the USA will be a fantastically expensive, convoluted, and technical process to implement. Then you complicate all of those tractable problems with the intractable problems of a significant portion of the population (and government functionaries) believing that gay couples are an affront to capital-G God, and re-igniting decades of the same kind of social discord we saw in the racially-based civil rights movement.
As a married straight guy, I suppose it's easy for me to say this. But I think that the gay marriage movement is reaching a little high right now. Atomic one-step change would be great, but it's not realistic. Instead, the gay-rights organizations should be focusing on fixing the problems with marriage in general. Fix the tax system, fix the HIPAA laws, fix child welfare processes, fix estate law, and fix ID standards and practices. It's a big, big job.
But if you do that, then there wouldn't be any reasons not to let ANYBODY who wants to get married, get married. Then it's a social contract with a tractable meaning. Right now, the meaning and implication of marriage is widely open to interpretation -- city to city, state to state, and even department-to-department at the federal level. We spend zillions of man-hours on entitlement programs, making sure that anything breathing American air has a valid Social Security number, but somehow nobody can get a grip on a social entitlement like marriage?? It's just not a priority yet, and someday hopefully it will be.
At the end of that day, the only barrier to gay marriage will be the religious one. And ultimately, despite the wailings and demagoguery that goes on about religious nut-jobs, America is fundamentally a secular nation. But presently, it's the religious nut-jobs leading the charge against gay marriage, and most of the rest of the nation honestly just doesn't care enough to sign up for the turmoil it would likely bring.
I would love to attend the weddings of some of my gay friends. (And I'm pretty sure that I'd also bear witness to the divorces of a few other gay friends, should their own weddings ever occur...) But when that happens, I don't want their happy event to be responsible for making a fairly-dysfunctional legal and administrative system fall entirely into disarray.
(Not to go off-topic, but it's the same reason why it isn't going to work to fix Health Care in this nation by just opening the flood gates to another 47 million people, without fixing the harder problems that created this situation in the first place. Throwing more bodies into a broken system doesn't make the system better. Fairness alone cannot be the ultimate goal of any functioning society.)
It just doesn't seem like a good idea to make things slightly happier for some, at the expense of everybody being a lot less happy in the end. So we have to do this correctly the first time, and not just hope that by calling something a "right", that an entire society will make a million overnight adjustments to fall into line. Especially when that "right" really isn't anything other than a mutually agreed-upon set of rules and responsibilities by society as a whole.
Our society as a whole has rights too. And it has the responsibility to fix things that are broken so that those rights can be justly exercised. Gay marriage is not an issue of rights for gay people. It's an issue of our society as a whole failing in its responsibility to effectively implement and maintain social contracts.
Here's the thing, kids... I am PRO gay-marriage in theory, and ANTI gay-marriage in implementation. How is this possible?
Well, because I'm actually anti straight-marriage in its current implementation as well. As zoethe and others have correctly pointed out, marriage is a social compact. It's not some right given by [G/g]od, nor some inalienable birthright granted by nature. You can believe what you want, hang out with whom you want, and yes, sleep with whomever you want -- even if you have to do so discretely in some parts of the world if you wish to remain upright. But when you take advantage of certain social compacts, you have to play by the rules of the society who created them, and who are ultimately responsible for bearing the costs and imposing the responsibilities that they entail.
So what does this have to do with heterosexual marriage? Well, our system is broken -- especially at those times when things go wrong. In response to the progress made with womens' rights in the last few decades, we have now massively unfair and inequitably-applied alimony and child welfare standards. Abusive heroin-addicted fathers would never see their children again, while abusive heroin-addicted mothers get joint custody (NOT a theoretical situation here, given that a colleague is living through this right now.) We have ridiculous tax structures that benefit some couples while penalizing others. Our society as a whole has all sorts of operational problems that result from name changes by marriage -- or occasionally even worse, NOT changing names as a result of marriage.
Even when things are going very well in a marriage, the social systems that it's built upon are inefficient, inconsistent, and occasionally downright broken. As we progress with new Homeland Security initiatives (read: Secure ID and Secure Flight programs), impose new restrictions on medical care (read: HIPAA laws), and turn our schools into hardened bunkers, even the "traditional" trappings of marriage become a burden for anyone who isn't in a One-Man-One-Woman-Same-Last-Name-and-Address relationship.
So now we expand to gay marriage. When things are going well, married gay couples will probably have about the same level of hassle as your average straight couple with different names. But when things go badly? (Bearing in mind that the US divorce rate is currently around 50%...)
How will US courts -- bearing in mind that the laws are all set up with an assumption of the traditional marriage structure in mind -- deal with child custody issues? How about alimony, and who gets it, and why, and for how long? How about even tax issues, given that millions of dollars in IT that run the machinery of this nation don't have the ability to have two 'M' or 'F' check-boxes on the same form? Percolate that down to customs forms if you travel abroad, or FAFSA forms for a kid's college aid? What about disputes with family when one spouse dies?
I am not in any way saying that this is fair, or just, or that the problems cannot be overcome. What I am saying, however, is that gay marriage in the USA will be a fantastically expensive, convoluted, and technical process to implement. Then you complicate all of those tractable problems with the intractable problems of a significant portion of the population (and government functionaries) believing that gay couples are an affront to capital-G God, and re-igniting decades of the same kind of social discord we saw in the racially-based civil rights movement.
As a married straight guy, I suppose it's easy for me to say this. But I think that the gay marriage movement is reaching a little high right now. Atomic one-step change would be great, but it's not realistic. Instead, the gay-rights organizations should be focusing on fixing the problems with marriage in general. Fix the tax system, fix the HIPAA laws, fix child welfare processes, fix estate law, and fix ID standards and practices. It's a big, big job.
But if you do that, then there wouldn't be any reasons not to let ANYBODY who wants to get married, get married. Then it's a social contract with a tractable meaning. Right now, the meaning and implication of marriage is widely open to interpretation -- city to city, state to state, and even department-to-department at the federal level. We spend zillions of man-hours on entitlement programs, making sure that anything breathing American air has a valid Social Security number, but somehow nobody can get a grip on a social entitlement like marriage?? It's just not a priority yet, and someday hopefully it will be.
At the end of that day, the only barrier to gay marriage will be the religious one. And ultimately, despite the wailings and demagoguery that goes on about religious nut-jobs, America is fundamentally a secular nation. But presently, it's the religious nut-jobs leading the charge against gay marriage, and most of the rest of the nation honestly just doesn't care enough to sign up for the turmoil it would likely bring.
I would love to attend the weddings of some of my gay friends. (And I'm pretty sure that I'd also bear witness to the divorces of a few other gay friends, should their own weddings ever occur...) But when that happens, I don't want their happy event to be responsible for making a fairly-dysfunctional legal and administrative system fall entirely into disarray.
(Not to go off-topic, but it's the same reason why it isn't going to work to fix Health Care in this nation by just opening the flood gates to another 47 million people, without fixing the harder problems that created this situation in the first place. Throwing more bodies into a broken system doesn't make the system better. Fairness alone cannot be the ultimate goal of any functioning society.)
It just doesn't seem like a good idea to make things slightly happier for some, at the expense of everybody being a lot less happy in the end. So we have to do this correctly the first time, and not just hope that by calling something a "right", that an entire society will make a million overnight adjustments to fall into line. Especially when that "right" really isn't anything other than a mutually agreed-upon set of rules and responsibilities by society as a whole.
Our society as a whole has rights too. And it has the responsibility to fix things that are broken so that those rights can be justly exercised. Gay marriage is not an issue of rights for gay people. It's an issue of our society as a whole failing in its responsibility to effectively implement and maintain social contracts.