Civil Rights

[zandperl]

A nice "doctored" video about civil rights. California is facing a ballot question that would make gay marriage illegal, Question 8. The Yes on 8 people put out a video w/ people talking about what's wrong w/ gay marriage, yadda yadda. And then someone took that video and replaced every mention of "same-sex" with "interracial," and "gay" with "

Comments

[marquiswildbill]

I personally think that all of this ban gay marriage stuff is a step in the right direction but doesn't go far enough. I think marriage should be made illegal in all forms.
Marriage should be left up to religious groups if people want to have a big party declaring their undying love for each other fine, but it should not be a binding legal contract giving half of you to someone else. But I am a very very bitter man.

[seekingferret]

On How I Met Your Mother, Neil Patrick Harris's Barney is opposed to gay marriage for the same reason he's opposed to marriage: As an inveterate womanizer, he is philosophically opposed to monogamy. Gay marriage is awful to him because it strengthens the institution of marriage.

Barney:OK, here's my thing - if gay guys start getting married, then suddenly the whole world's gonna be doing it. That's how it works: they start something, then six months later, everyone follows.

Barney: Gay marriage is going to cause single life as we know it to die out. [beat] Think of how the American family will be strengthened!

[marquiswildbill]

The last quote made me laugh.
I just think that the legal ramifications of marriage are excessive. When you get divorced (the result of the majority of marriages these days) it is a horribly nasty affair. It makes ordinary contract law look downright friendly. Unmarried couples manage to break up without needing to go to court and fight over every little thing. If it is really nasty hire a damned mediator. Fortunately NJ has decided to use mediation as the primary means for doing property settlement as well as child custody. It has been amazingly successful for child custody. Who would have thought that ordering parents to sit down and talk to each other could be good for the kids? Shocking.

[zandperl]

the result of the majority of marriages these days

As I understand it, that oft-quoted statistic doesn't do the real situation justice. Specifically, it's skewed by serial divorcers, and it might be more appropriate to instead look at the percent of *people* who marry who subsequently get at least one divorce.

Mediation: Heh, whoda thunk. Too bad it doesn't work so well for unions.

[kelsin]

The video sounds awesome but the lj embeded version is not working for me, can you put up a link right to the you tube page?

[kelsin]

Found it :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H3kxDFgmu8

Pretty freaking scary. I can't believe these people can even appear in this video, I would be totally ashamed.

OMG you mean if we allows gays to marry a photograph might have to photograph a gay marriage!? THE HORROR.

[zandperl]

If the Boy Scouts - who are publically funded - are allowed to kick out gays, I'm pretty sure an entirely private for-profit phtographer can do what they want.

You like the part about "Massachusetts Catholic churches were forced to stop their adoption agencies"? Um, no, they DECIDED to stop them b/c they were bigots and weren't willing to give children to all loving families.

[seekingferret]

Nope. The Boy Scouts are a private organization. They can allow in whoever they want (A lot of time the strings you imagine to be attached to receiving federal grants aren't there). The photographer runs a business. She's forced by anti-discrimination laws to photograph gay weddings. I believe the analogy is to a restaurant not serving blacks.

What's troubling to me was the CHURCH that was required to allow civil union ceremonies on land it owned and used for religious weddings. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91486340 That story really bothers me.