I can't help but feel like this is Wikipedia at the ballot box. The only thing at stake here is the meaning of the word marriage. All the rights associated with it are available to any two consenting adults in California. The level of vehemence and misinformation on both sides, is ridiculous. The only thing I agree with Bucku on is we should just call it something else. "Marriage" has to much historical baggage to function effectively as the States recognized basis for legel dependance and responsibility. If I remember right, there are a handful of Eurozone countries that already figured this out. We need to cut the tether between the religions and the government. No pastor or whatever should be presiding over a civic contract and no government body, wether judicial or legislative, should determine religious ceremony. Let's leave marriage to the religious and let the state only recognize a civic union for ALL.
Just my two cents.
although i am in favor of allowing everyone to make their own decisions with regards to things like abortion and gay marriage, i do not believe judges have the right to legislate from the bench. i think it's fair to say that a lot of people were upset about that, not necessarily discrimination.
a modest proposal: to nullify any state propositions or ballot initiatives to ban gay marriage, those gays who want to get married should start a new church. a new and recognized church, which would not need to be entirely gay bi the bi, this church would allow gay marriage in its doctrines and find some ambiguous religious passage to cite as a defense. then the church and its practices would be protected by the first amendment of the united states constitution ...
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…" and then all these propositions would be unconstitutional! no charge!
"The Pattersons, who have been married 14 years, say there were thinking about their children's future when they decided to tap into their savings to contribute. And they also said no one pressured them into giving."
So tapping into your kids college fund for $50,000 is thinking about their future? Totally bizarre.
gay marriage is totally cool with me. i don't think anyone here hates susan surface.
actually my gramma probably is convinced susan is going to hell, but she has also asserted that i am going there too (and is very worried for me), so it isn't personal. in fact she probably is praying for susan right now, cause she actually is otherwise rather buddha-like.
Her daughter, my mother, is almost sure we will be in hell too, but bless her she thinks it is still pretty much ok for gay folkses to marry other gay folkses. and now my gramma's grandson (that would be me) is so ok with the whole thing he doesn't even understand why it is an issue.
3 generations is all it took. it may take a few more, but eventually i imagine we will all be happy to just let people live their lives.
either that or there will be a religious backlash and all of us here on archinect will be executed for being educated and questioning the establishment (hey its happened before). keep your ip addresses close to your chests folks.
oh, and btw the john stewart reminded me a few days ago that traditionally "marriage" was kind of a complex three-way affair, which included the local lord taking first dibs on consummation. so like, whatever, you know. the past is no excuse for the present.
roughly $60 million was spent on this proposition; about $30 million from each side. what a waste of money on something that didn't need to be changed - the judges got it right a few months back. very sad.
Considering all of the misinformation that went on in the campaign for/against prop 8 (flyers in the Castro saying"vote FOR prop 8".) tells me that if california is going to keep public propositions it needs to state very clearly what they are for, for example:
PROP 8 - IN SUPPORT OF REMOVING THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS TO MARRY THE ADULT PARTNER OF THEIR CHOICE REGARDLESS OF GENDER.
SurfaceS you know I love you but I must disagree with your assertion that Prop 8 passing means that "millions and millions of people hate you".
Most people don't hate enough to obsess over eliminating us or come after gays with fists/shotguns or even to spend hours seething excessively over the fact that we might marry... just that millions of Californians hate enough to block some of our civil rights, often while condescendingly asserting that they don't *actually* hate gay people because they don't want to harm them or even prevent them from having relationships otherwise. it is just a more insidious form of violence that allows people to think that they actually aren't perpetuating hate, when in fact... they are.
The above is true of Obama/Biden - so I would disagree with you about "Knowing" that they don't hate gay people. As long as they refuse to actively stand for equality - whether that means supporting gay marriage so long as we have legal marriage, or abolishing marriage as legal institution for everyone - they do perpetuate a measure of hatred for us. I prefer their version of transitionally slightly-icked-out by the gays to the McCain/Palin version, but it's still problematic.
That said, yes, civil rights struggles do take time, and deeply entrenched cultural prejudices are not easily reversed in a few years (or even a few decades.) But change does happen. & That doesn't mean we should stop calling out problems - just because the civil rights struggle hasn't been won "yet." How else would that change occur? It's like racism, classism, etc. that people don't even realize they are participating in... and I can take myself as an example... I generally think of myself as a pretty aware person, who actively tries to be fair, but in the past year or two specific really common prejudices I held against certain groups of people have been pointed out to me (both through direct personal conversations & through well-reasoned written arguments), which I have since actively worked to overcome. If I hadn't been actively confronted with my own prejudices by the people who were negatively affected by them, I'd have been totally clueless that I was inadvertently helping perpetuate oppression. So I am actually GLAD when people point this stuff out... as they probably will in the future... even if my first initial reaction is to be defensive like, "WTF no I'm not!!!" and to cling to my prejudice for a little bit.
As long as 52% of voters in my state are happy to conflate biblical law with civil law, it seems that the God's take on Prop 8 is pretty straightforward.
Leviticus 20:13 - If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
Perhaps Prop 8 is just the first step toward what these jackasses really have in mind.
the implications of prop 8 passing are far-reaching...one could easily replace the 'gay/lesbian' description in this prop. with any other segment of society...
needless to say, no one has the right to dictate to another adult who they can and cannot marry...prop 8 passing is pure bullshit and filled with hate and fear...
people claiming they are doing this to preserve the 'sanctity of family' and the morals of a prudent society; ironic too since tolerance and acceptance is probably the foremost edict that comes along with any logical and prudent human being....ARRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
i apologize for the rant and seemingly disconnected string of thought...just thinking about prop 8 passing drives me nuts
"i do not believe judges have the right to legislate from the bench. i think it's fair to say that a lot of people were upset about that, not necessarily discrimination."
That's just a right wing talking point. That's what judges do and have always done-Roe v. Wade, Brown v.Board of Education, and so on. If people were upset about this, they should have done what people opposed to those rulings did-bring lawsuits and chip away at the laws.
marriage is just a contract......... my sister was married and divorced within 8 months.... go figure....
if your married and it's working out...then good.... but i have seen a good amount of people get divorced..... i think they should make it to where you can only get married after your 35.......
hopefully this will get to the supreme court quickly because these marriages need to be recognized nationally.
and it's the defense of marriage act passed by the republican house/senate and signed by clinton in 1996 that needs to fall. maybe obama and the overwhelming democratic house/senate can change this.
the 'defense of marriage act' was introduced by libertarian presidential candidate bob barr! can i change my vote to obama? too late? :'(
The Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, is the short title of a federal law of the United States passed on September 21, 1996 as Public Law No. 104-199, 110 Stat. 2419. Its provisions are codified at 1 U.S.C. § 7 and 28 U.S.C. § 1738C. The law has two effects:
1. No state (or other political subdivision within the United States) need treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state.
2. The Federal Government may not treat same-sex relationships as marriages for any purpose, even if concluded or recognized by one of the states.
bucku, you seriously think that homosexuality is a choice? where do you religious nut jobs get this from? does thinking that make you feel more secure that the bible is true?
Maybe you can come to my clinic, i will strap electrodes to your balls, and show you images of women. With each image we will give you a jolt and see if youre cured of the hetero disease.
This may have been mentioned already but the bigger concern of Prop 8 is that 52.3% of voters (only 62% of registered voters voted) were able to decide on a law for the state of California.
whether a secular space can act as a true neutralizer that separates yet also allows simultaneous existence ("seperate but equal") various spores of different, even antagonistic, valencies (i.e. religious, ideological, moral...) is an interesting prospect to examine. being middle eastern, gay and having islam as a religious background, i have always found it amusing that in a city like London, and specifically on tottenham court road, if i'm not mistaken, a gay pub frequented by flamboyant "boiz" could exist right across, "face à face" if not "tête-à-tête", an islamic bookshop. the urban space in between, in its hyper state of sensorially channeling movements and significations, in its role as a mitigating ether..a carrier of messages and not a message (at least in a general sense) in itself... seemed oblivious to the irony of fortuitous circumstance. Here was an abstract completely unironic system of urban real estate ,devoid of both humour and violence, mitigating a confrontation between identities that profess substance and nature . It did not matter that within the 'household' of each, in the pub and in the bookshop, hateful antagonistic words and gestures could be formulated as long as that space was able to zap them, right on the private-to-public threshold back to neutrality.
but of course, public space is an outcome of public policy and public policy is a consensus of a ruling belief/morality/valency. neutrality, the absence of valency (that is to say, opinion), can only be guaranteed by a ruling belief in the complete absence of all belief/valency within any shared space (and the discrimination of shared vs private space is, paradoxically any anyway, the outcome of a belief) . herein the denouement (and the interesting confornation elicited by bucku's opinions (and any one opinion always invites a contrary opinion since it removes the responsibility of all parties to have to justify the apriori basis of their deliberately unrooted reasoning): neutrality must become its own valency (must contain itself) as a devoiding mitigator...but in turning the (non-)nature of neutrality into an opinion (a defensive one at that) neutrality itself becomes an extension of the household. as some have pointed out, its a matter of "semantics" ...and in the coexistence of the neutralizing effect of secular space and the hyper-crazed urban embroidery of disembodied wisps of money-buying/selling significations, both of which add to a complete de-substantiation of semantic valency and content, the real victim here is the very content, rather than medium, of communication i.e. semantics. this is why, for instance, the word [/i]terrorism[/i] is so easily and readily used against resistance groups such as hizbollah and hamas whereas the word genocide was withheld in the rwandan case. why bush, a semantically challenged person, can front a macabre coalition of greed and self-interest. it is the inversion of the role of the Fool as a wise critic. Here is the Fool as a complicit agent, a harbinger of things to come.
anyway, let us also distinguish between gay and homosexual. there the lifestyle thing can be brought up.
or more to-the-point, the usage of the words gay and homosexual. gay is a sociopolitical formulation used to encompass social type identification, lifestyles, tastes, mannerisms...cultural aspects. the homosexual, however, is a purely sexual formulation. i realize, however, how many ambiguous kernels there are in drawing out this distinction.
nice essay. some good points there about urban space.
but what do you mean about the distinction between "gay" and "homosexual"? last time i checked, they were synonyms. are you saying they have different lifestyle connotations? i haven't heard of this before.
The term gay was originally used, until well into the mid-20th century, primarily to refer to feelings of being "carefree," "happy," or "bright and showy"; it had also come to acquire some sexual connotations as early as 1637
the person in connection to his sexual orientation is (or might very well be) the overlap of both terms, of course i agree with that. however, the carried connotations (rather than the denotations) differ. there is no formulation of a "homosexual community" there is however that of a "gay community", similarly a "gay lifestyle", "gay-related humour/etc". "Homosexual" is a starker word that stops within the bounds of its own denotation: a description of same-sex desire. "gay", however, signifies a cultural and sociopolitical identity (even economic, given the proliferation of the "pink pound/dollar/etc").
therefore, it would be more exacting, or at least careful, to describe a person in some part of the world that has scant contact with the global westernized consciousness which carries with it the gay prototype as a homosexual than it would be to call her/him gay.
of course, the starkness of the term "homosexual" is therefore also easier of an offense to those who despise safe-sex desire. therefore, when used derogatorily (as in "homo"), the insults can be equally starker. whereas breeders teasing each other with "you're so gay" show that "gay" is a more rounder, softer and fuzzier word (because of the cultural multi-layers noted above). naturally, this is all amusingly debatable.
Disgusted by Prop. 8
I can't help but feel like this is Wikipedia at the ballot box. The only thing at stake here is the meaning of the word marriage. All the rights associated with it are available to any two consenting adults in California. The level of vehemence and misinformation on both sides, is ridiculous. The only thing I agree with Bucku on is we should just call it something else. "Marriage" has to much historical baggage to function effectively as the States recognized basis for legel dependance and responsibility. If I remember right, there are a handful of Eurozone countries that already figured this out. We need to cut the tether between the religions and the government. No pastor or whatever should be presiding over a civic contract and no government body, wether judicial or legislative, should determine religious ceremony. Let's leave marriage to the religious and let the state only recognize a civic union for ALL.
Just my two cents.
although i am in favor of allowing everyone to make their own decisions with regards to things like abortion and gay marriage, i do not believe judges have the right to legislate from the bench. i think it's fair to say that a lot of people were upset about that, not necessarily discrimination.
a modest proposal: to nullify any state propositions or ballot initiatives to ban gay marriage, those gays who want to get married should start a new church. a new and recognized church, which would not need to be entirely gay bi the bi, this church would allow gay marriage in its doctrines and find some ambiguous religious passage to cite as a defense. then the church and its practices would be protected by the first amendment of the united states constitution ...
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…" and then all these propositions would be unconstitutional! no charge!
This is just gross: http://www.sacbee.com/391/story/1308945.html
"The Pattersons, who have been married 14 years, say there were thinking about their children's future when they decided to tap into their savings to contribute. And they also said no one pressured them into giving."
So tapping into your kids college fund for $50,000 is thinking about their future? Totally bizarre.
hah, now THAT would be funny.
gay marriage is totally cool with me. i don't think anyone here hates susan surface.
actually my gramma probably is convinced susan is going to hell, but she has also asserted that i am going there too (and is very worried for me), so it isn't personal. in fact she probably is praying for susan right now, cause she actually is otherwise rather buddha-like.
Her daughter, my mother, is almost sure we will be in hell too, but bless her she thinks it is still pretty much ok for gay folkses to marry other gay folkses. and now my gramma's grandson (that would be me) is so ok with the whole thing he doesn't even understand why it is an issue.
3 generations is all it took. it may take a few more, but eventually i imagine we will all be happy to just let people live their lives.
either that or there will be a religious backlash and all of us here on archinect will be executed for being educated and questioning the establishment (hey its happened before). keep your ip addresses close to your chests folks.
oh, and btw the john stewart reminded me a few days ago that traditionally "marriage" was kind of a complex three-way affair, which included the local lord taking first dibs on consummation. so like, whatever, you know. the past is no excuse for the present.
roughly $60 million was spent on this proposition; about $30 million from each side. what a waste of money on something that didn't need to be changed - the judges got it right a few months back. very sad.
Considering all of the misinformation that went on in the campaign for/against prop 8 (flyers in the Castro saying"vote FOR prop 8".) tells me that if california is going to keep public propositions it needs to state very clearly what they are for, for example:
PROP 8 - IN SUPPORT OF REMOVING THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS TO MARRY THE ADULT PARTNER OF THEIR CHOICE REGARDLESS OF GENDER.
Or something like that.
SurfaceS you know I love you but I must disagree with your assertion that Prop 8 passing means that "millions and millions of people hate you".
Most people don't hate enough to obsess over eliminating us or come after gays with fists/shotguns or even to spend hours seething excessively over the fact that we might marry... just that millions of Californians hate enough to block some of our civil rights, often while condescendingly asserting that they don't *actually* hate gay people because they don't want to harm them or even prevent them from having relationships otherwise. it is just a more insidious form of violence that allows people to think that they actually aren't perpetuating hate, when in fact... they are.
The above is true of Obama/Biden - so I would disagree with you about "Knowing" that they don't hate gay people. As long as they refuse to actively stand for equality - whether that means supporting gay marriage so long as we have legal marriage, or abolishing marriage as legal institution for everyone - they do perpetuate a measure of hatred for us. I prefer their version of transitionally slightly-icked-out by the gays to the McCain/Palin version, but it's still problematic.
That said, yes, civil rights struggles do take time, and deeply entrenched cultural prejudices are not easily reversed in a few years (or even a few decades.) But change does happen. & That doesn't mean we should stop calling out problems - just because the civil rights struggle hasn't been won "yet." How else would that change occur? It's like racism, classism, etc. that people don't even realize they are participating in... and I can take myself as an example... I generally think of myself as a pretty aware person, who actively tries to be fair, but in the past year or two specific really common prejudices I held against certain groups of people have been pointed out to me (both through direct personal conversations & through well-reasoned written arguments), which I have since actively worked to overcome. If I hadn't been actively confronted with my own prejudices by the people who were negatively affected by them, I'd have been totally clueless that I was inadvertently helping perpetuate oppression. So I am actually GLAD when people point this stuff out... as they probably will in the future... even if my first initial reaction is to be defensive like, "WTF no I'm not!!!" and to cling to my prejudice for a little bit.
As long as 52% of voters in my state are happy to conflate biblical law with civil law, it seems that the God's take on Prop 8 is pretty straightforward.
Leviticus 20:13 - If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
Perhaps Prop 8 is just the first step toward what these jackasses really have in mind.
i've used marriage before
it's only good for giving citizenship, heath care benefits, children rearing together, and a (false) hope for some monogamous sex
most homosexuals i know are poly
the implications of prop 8 passing are far-reaching...one could easily replace the 'gay/lesbian' description in this prop. with any other segment of society...
needless to say, no one has the right to dictate to another adult who they can and cannot marry...prop 8 passing is pure bullshit and filled with hate and fear...
people claiming they are doing this to preserve the 'sanctity of family' and the morals of a prudent society; ironic too since tolerance and acceptance is probably the foremost edict that comes along with any logical and prudent human being....ARRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
i apologize for the rant and seemingly disconnected string of thought...just thinking about prop 8 passing drives me nuts
"i do not believe judges have the right to legislate from the bench. i think it's fair to say that a lot of people were upset about that, not necessarily discrimination."
That's just a right wing talking point. That's what judges do and have always done-Roe v. Wade, Brown v.Board of Education, and so on. If people were upset about this, they should have done what people opposed to those rulings did-bring lawsuits and chip away at the laws.
marriage is just a contract......... my sister was married and divorced within 8 months.... go figure....
if your married and it's working out...then good.... but i have seen a good amount of people get divorced..... i think they should make it to where you can only get married after your 35.......
what ever floats your boat.......
First Connecticut Same-Sex Couple Marries
http://www.wfsb.com/news/17962737/detail.html#-
to me, prop 8 is racism 'legalized' at the cost of many citizens.
hopefully this will get to the supreme court quickly because these marriages need to be recognized nationally.
and it's the defense of marriage act passed by the republican house/senate and signed by clinton in 1996 that needs to fall. maybe obama and the overwhelming democratic house/senate can change this.
the 'defense of marriage act' was introduced by libertarian presidential candidate bob barr! can i change my vote to obama? too late? :'(
The Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, is the short title of a federal law of the United States passed on September 21, 1996 as Public Law No. 104-199, 110 Stat. 2419. Its provisions are codified at 1 U.S.C. § 7 and 28 U.S.C. § 1738C. The law has two effects:
1. No state (or other political subdivision within the United States) need treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state.
2. The Federal Government may not treat same-sex relationships as marriages for any purpose, even if concluded or recognized by one of the states.
imagine if the Mormons who funded this initiative got to write a new marriage law and what it would look like...
less freedoms for women
polyandry
lower age for women to get married to men of also older age
no interracial marriage (why mix 'good' with 'evil')
bucku, you seriously think that homosexuality is a choice? where do you religious nut jobs get this from? does thinking that make you feel more secure that the bible is true?
Maybe you can come to my clinic, i will strap electrodes to your balls, and show you images of women. With each image we will give you a jolt and see if youre cured of the hetero disease.
hahah
if anything it is a characteristic all species are able to exhibit as a natural reaction to over population, i think. evolution.
This may have been mentioned already but the bigger concern of Prop 8 is that 52.3% of voters (only 62% of registered voters voted) were able to decide on a law for the state of California.
53% of voters (about 61% of registered voters voted) were able to decide on our president for the united states of america.
whether a secular space can act as a true neutralizer that separates yet also allows simultaneous existence ("seperate but equal") various spores of different, even antagonistic, valencies (i.e. religious, ideological, moral...) is an interesting prospect to examine. being middle eastern, gay and having islam as a religious background, i have always found it amusing that in a city like London, and specifically on tottenham court road, if i'm not mistaken, a gay pub frequented by flamboyant "boiz" could exist right across, "face à face" if not "tête-à-tête", an islamic bookshop. the urban space in between, in its hyper state of sensorially channeling movements and significations, in its role as a mitigating ether..a carrier of messages and not a message (at least in a general sense) in itself... seemed oblivious to the irony of fortuitous circumstance. Here was an abstract completely unironic system of urban real estate ,devoid of both humour and violence, mitigating a confrontation between identities that profess substance and nature . It did not matter that within the 'household' of each, in the pub and in the bookshop, hateful antagonistic words and gestures could be formulated as long as that space was able to zap them, right on the private-to-public threshold back to neutrality.
but of course, public space is an outcome of public policy and public policy is a consensus of a ruling belief/morality/valency. neutrality, the absence of valency (that is to say, opinion), can only be guaranteed by a ruling belief in the complete absence of all belief/valency within any shared space (and the discrimination of shared vs private space is, paradoxically any anyway, the outcome of a belief) . herein the denouement (and the interesting confornation elicited by bucku's opinions (and any one opinion always invites a contrary opinion since it removes the responsibility of all parties to have to justify the apriori basis of their deliberately unrooted reasoning): neutrality must become its own valency (must contain itself) as a devoiding mitigator...but in turning the (non-)nature of neutrality into an opinion (a defensive one at that) neutrality itself becomes an extension of the household. as some have pointed out, its a matter of "semantics" ...and in the coexistence of the neutralizing effect of secular space and the hyper-crazed urban embroidery of disembodied wisps of money-buying/selling significations, both of which add to a complete de-substantiation of semantic valency and content, the real victim here is the very content, rather than medium, of communication i.e. semantics. this is why, for instance, the word [/i]terrorism[/i] is so easily and readily used against resistance groups such as hizbollah and hamas whereas the word genocide was withheld in the rwandan case. why bush, a semantically challenged person, can front a macabre coalition of greed and self-interest. it is the inversion of the role of the Fool as a wise critic. Here is the Fool as a complicit agent, a harbinger of things to come.
anyway, let us also distinguish between gay and homosexual. there the lifestyle thing can be brought up.
or more to-the-point, the usage of the words gay and homosexual. gay is a sociopolitical formulation used to encompass social type identification, lifestyles, tastes, mannerisms...cultural aspects. the homosexual, however, is a purely sexual formulation. i realize, however, how many ambiguous kernels there are in drawing out this distinction.
amazing how no one mentions how this was 'facilitated' by the Utah Mormons reaching out to California Suburbia...
ex-mormons are great people
noctilucent,
nice essay. some good points there about urban space.
but what do you mean about the distinction between "gay" and "homosexual"? last time i checked, they were synonyms. are you saying they have different lifestyle connotations? i haven't heard of this before.
a meme.
The term gay was originally used, until well into the mid-20th century, primarily to refer to feelings of being "carefree," "happy," or "bright and showy"; it had also come to acquire some sexual connotations as early as 1637yeah
like we'll have a "gay old time" or whatever bing crosby used to say...
but in everyday speech, "he's gay" is the same as "he's a homosexual", right? i'm not sure what difference noctilucent was referring to
the person in connection to his sexual orientation is (or might very well be) the overlap of both terms, of course i agree with that. however, the carried connotations (rather than the denotations) differ. there is no formulation of a "homosexual community" there is however that of a "gay community", similarly a "gay lifestyle", "gay-related humour/etc". "Homosexual" is a starker word that stops within the bounds of its own denotation: a description of same-sex desire. "gay", however, signifies a cultural and sociopolitical identity (even economic, given the proliferation of the "pink pound/dollar/etc").
therefore, it would be more exacting, or at least careful, to describe a person in some part of the world that has scant contact with the global westernized consciousness which carries with it the gay prototype as a homosexual than it would be to call her/him gay.
of course, the starkness of the term "homosexual" is therefore also easier of an offense to those who despise safe-sex desire. therefore, when used derogatorily (as in "homo"), the insults can be equally starker. whereas breeders teasing each other with "you're so gay" show that "gay" is a more rounder, softer and fuzzier word (because of the cultural multi-layers noted above). naturally, this is all amusingly debatable.
interesting...
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