Mal ,'Out Of Gas'
[NAFDA] Spike-centric discussion. Lusty, lewd (only occasionally crude), risqué (and frisqué), bawdy (Oh, lawdy!), flirty ('cuz we're purty), raunchy talk inside. Caveat lector.
everyone else has domestic partnership
Depends on what state you live in. Most states don't have anything at all for the rest of us.
And for the record, I certainly wouldn't mind the churches handling something called "marriage" and the government handling something called "civil union" or "domestic partnership" or the like.
that seems like an even harder change to make than expanding who has the right to marry.
that's the crux of the biscuit for me.
Marriage provides more rights than domestic partnership's, which are very fuzzy, particularly if you've moved to a place that doesn't have domestic partnership. Marriage gives you uncontested right to things like your spouse's pension and specific inheritance rights.
Marriage provides more rights than domestic partnership's, which are very fuzzy, particularly if you've moved to a place that doesn't have domestic partnership. Marriage gives you uncontested right to things like your spouse's pension and specific inheritance rights.
And this is precisely the reason I'd like to see all marriages turned into domestic partnerships. If the two are truly equal then there should be no complaints. Somehow I think there would be a LOT of complaining if this were actually be proposed.
Yeah, I think the best solution would be basically what everyone else is saying -- civil marriage, between any two consenting adults, as something the state handles, and religious marriage, between whoever that particular religion thinks ought to be allowed to get married, as something that religions handle.
Which leads me to ponder -- if this were the system, should churches be allowed to marry people that the state says cannot marry? Like kids or polygamy. (I've actually got no problem with polygamy if everyone is consenting adults, but it would be a royal pain to try to amend all the laws that would need to be amended for that to work out, legally.) Right now, if a minister performs a marriage ceremony between two kids, or between a kid and an adult, he can be charged with performing a marriage without a license, right? So, if we made state marriage and religious marriage totally separate, could he still be charged with that? He'd still be charged with a bunch of other things, like abetting statutory rape or something like that, but would performing the ceremony itself be illegal?
(Honestly, I'm not sure what I want the answer to that question to be. I'm just trying to work out the logic.)
civil marriage, between any two consenting adults, as something the state handles, and religious marriage, between whoever that particular religion thinks ought to be allowed to get married, as something that religions handle.
Isn't this how it is handled in Europe? Or at least England? A civil ceremony and then the church one?
Right now, if a minister performs a marriage ceremony between two kids, or between a kid and an adult, he can be charged with performing a marriage without a license, right? So, if we made state marriage and religious marriage totally separate, could he still be charged with that?
My thinking is that the religious marriage would be symbolic and it's the state marriage that affords legal rights. In this case a marriage in a church outside of what is a state accepted union would be simply symbolic with no legal standing, so I'm not sure there would be any charge to mount. As things currently stand the minister is acting as an agent of the state when signing the marriage certificate.
The trouble with the domestic partnership thing, over here at least, is that it's asymmetrical. Straight people get to do something called 'marriage' which confers a lot of rights, immediately. They get the choice of doing this either in a religious establishment or a civil one. We get to do something called 'civil partnerships', we're not allowed to do those in a church or similar, and we have fewer rights than (straight) married people (for example, many of our rights don't kick in until six months after we sign the civil register). Meanwhile, straight people who want to register a partership but don't believe in marriage are not allowed to have civil partnerships. It's all a piecemeal mess arranged in such a way that the established church* didn't have to deal with gay weddings, as far as I can see.
What I'd really like to see is full equality - both straight and gay people getting to choose between either civil partnership-style contracts that confer legal rights, or marriages that they can do in churches. I'm a Christian. I'd at least like the choice of getting married in the church that I attend. The best we're going to have to settle for is a blessing there. Equally, I know lots of non-religious people who would like a fully civil union, with no religious overtones or associations. They should have that right too.
Shir, the reason I want a wedding - I think, and eventually, after we sort out the legal rights thing first - is mainly because I want my friends and family to be able to recognise my relationship with me. It's sort of a 'look, I plan to stay with this lass forever, so be nice to her' thing. With a party.
Oh, and we're going to be paying for it ourselves. When there are two 'brides', and one has a family who really doesn't approve, and you're in your thirties, you can't really be arsed with the "Dad, buy me a big wedding" thing.
*Don't get me started on that one...
Straight people get to do something called 'marriage' which confers a lot of rights, immediately. They get the choice of doing this either in a religious establishment or a civil one. We get to do something called 'civil partnerships', we're not allowed to do those in a church or similar, and we have fewer rights than (straight) married people (for example, many of our rights don't kick in until six months after we sign the civil register).
There's also the issue that, for straights, there is near-universal understanding and acceptance of what those rights are. You don't have to explain or argue your case while you're a)standing outside the ER, b)signing up for cell phone service, or c)dealing with 90,000 other things that come up from time to time. Whether the impact is an annoyance or a tragedy, it's still something straight people generally won't have to think twice about. A domestic partnership, even if you could ensure that the actual rights were identical, won't solve for that.