https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/07/157-republicans-voted-marriage-equality/

This is despite marriage equality reaching a high assent of 71% among Americans. https://news.gallup.com/poll/393197/same-sex-marriage-support-inches-new-high.aspx

Impressions and reflections:

My brother says he can live without the right to “marry” as long as they let him have a “civil union.” He doesn’t get it. It’s not just optics and labels the theocrats want as they impose minoritarian values on the country. They want to criminalize all of his lifestyle beginning in “God’s country” and they’re going to work outwards from there as far as they can get away with it in these crazy postmodern (I.E. anti-enlightenment) days.

The bill of rights enumerates a right to religious choice, speech, press, assembly, and protest for redress of grievances (activism). There is to be no establishment of religion by law. The constitution forbids the imminent domain of your house for the quartering of troops. It enumerates your privacy from unwarranted searches and seizures. It says you cannot be compelled to testify against yourself and that your silence cannot be held against you in and of itself. Hell, you could argue that all these implied rights to privacy and autonomy were intended to be enforced by the right to bear arms; in other words, you have the right to point a gun in the faces of the people who try to infringe all these other rights in your self-defense. Furthermore, the bill of rights says the enumeration of certain rights doesn’t mean that other implied rights don’t exist as shall be discovered by the ongoing development of American jurisprudence. It does say that powers not spelled out by the constitution explicitly are reserved to the states or to the people, but the fourteenth amendment passed by the GOP after the civil war makes everyone born on US soil a citizen and makes it federal government’s business to protect the civil rights of the individual from encroachment by the local government. You need to know all this to understand why the Supreme Court did anything it did in the last fifty years.

Once the “separate but equal” of interpretation of the constitution fell apart, it was obvious what needed to happen: racial integration. The Civil Rights Act of 1967 was a profound leap forward in the march of equality. Most Americans acknowledged this consensus, even if they were sad about it. The Voting Rights Act expanded the electorate and the number of interests politicians had to juggle to get elected — which is good. A pluralist secular mindset, a cosmopolitan mindset, is the correct mindset we ought to bring to politics. It’s a sober mindset. It’s a humanist mindset. On the heels of racial rights came progress for women too. While the equal rights amendment went to limbo, women did have their rights expanded significantly. Americans got a right to contraception, a right to abortion, and a right to racially intermarry acknowledged by the Supreme Court by the seventies. By the turn of the new millennium, Americans got a right to have sex in any way they wanted in the privacy of their bedrooms with any consenting adult they wanted, and once that door was open a wave of awareness for the rights for sexual minorities came flooding in. America changed her immigration laws over fifty years ago to be more diverse, and more diverse and freer she is fast becoming. This is a land of freedom, being interpreted as individual liberty, and many Americans instead of going to church to get lectured to by an old guard of ideologues preaching versions of the Word descended from generations of white supremacy and patriarchy turn evermore to new exciting inventions like the internet and social media to express themselves, branch out, and find a more perfect union with each other by meditating on all these new burgeoning awarenesses of liberty almost as it were a new religion.

Racial minorities have always existed. Women have always existed. Homosexuals, bisexuals, trans people and all the rest have always existed. What changed is our awareness, and with our dawning consciousness of many social challenges peculiar to each of these groups many American imaginations are churning with new ideas to improve the quality of human life in this country, which is their right. This is a big country of a third of a billion people in it. You’re going to get many takes when everyone has a platform and not all of them are going to be winners. People are going to piss each other off. There will be drama and even fights. Welcome to human nature, just enabled by technological interconnectedness never before seen on earth. We have new problems to tackle on top of all the old problems, and the need for solutions yesterday is mounting. It’s gonna be messy as we argue about what the best course forward for the the most amount of people is on each issue severally. But there is one approach to the anxiety of our times gaining power that is unAmerican: the mythology that America is “founded on JudeoChristian values,” which means its ok to roll back all the progress I just laid out as far back as the people can be bullied into accepting because God wills it supposedly. We are — if not a democracy per se — at least a republic that has always been proud of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This new movement of minoritarians and theocrats and white nationalists dressing up in the red white and blue and talking about how much they love this country are posers and hypocrites. Uncle Sam doesn’t know them, and the actual Jesus probably wouldn’t either.

I toured the open house of the Mesa temple some years ago, the one where I took out my endowments. It struck me how much more diverse and representative the new art was after the renovation. Even if the people that rule the church are old regressive white guys with every secret opinion you would expect them to have, and even if their organization and their edicts can assemble armies of socially regressive protesters and corporate-rights lobbyists that gain them actual political power, their PR department knows what’s up. The evidence from their own polling of control groups shows in order to grow or at least preserve the young membership they got, especially the white nonhispanic youth under fire by all their friends for being members of such a backwards, racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic church, they have to show a more inclusive and representative face on a global church. They must or they will die or at least shrivel into irrelevance. The church as an institution interested in its own survival and the maintenance of its own power knows this and feels this even if the old Caucasian codger they call the Prophet is blindly slitting its throat in terms of multicultural appeal while claiming to love it with every fiber of his being.

Marriage equality can be far more significant than most Americans realize for those involved in the marriage.

In the United States, our separate states each choose (actually: HAVE CHOSEN) whether they are "community property" states or are "common law" states. ("Community property" states usually have a historical background of Spanish law; "common law" states usually have a historical background of English/British law.)

The legal reasoning behind each of these two choices is completely, entirely, different.

In "community property" states, AFTER the marriage, each person owns 50% of what comes into the marital "community" (with some very important exceptions, such as gifts, or inheritances which one or the other may inherit--these belong exclusively to the person who inherited, or legal awards for serious accidents and damages, etc.).

In "common law" states generally: (I am not well educated in the different laws of the common law states) what a person owns is what they have earned, or what has their name on it.

The nine community property states are: Arizona; California; Idaho; Louisiana; Nevada; New Mexico; Texas; Washington state; Wisconsin.

Community property law comes from Spanish law and was incorporated in the various state laws because to NOT incorporate community property law would have been to, in effect, "steal" from one of the two marital partners the moment that state became a legal state of the United States.

Whether two people who live as a couple/a family, are recognized as legally married and are legal residents of a community property state, OR a common law state, can make an enormous difference, especially decades down the line, when accidents, illnesses, and death occur.

Marriage is very, very important--but it is most especially important to couples (and families) in community property states.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/25/2022 09:03PM by Tevai.

The problem is people define marriage differently. You are never going to get a large group of people to agree on it.

The only solution is to make every marriage a civil union as far as the state and law is concerned and then let everyone define the emotional or religious aspects of marriage themselves.

Rubicon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The only solution is to make every marriage a
> civil union as far as the state and law is
> concerned and then let everyone define the
> emotional or religious aspects of marriage
> themselves.

I couldn't agree more.

Rubicon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The problem is people define marriage differently.
> You are never going to get a large group of people
> to agree on it.

"People" do not legally define marriage.

Each state has that authority, not individual people.


> The only solution is to make every marriage a
> civil union as far as the state and law is
> concerned and then let everyone define the
> emotional or religious aspects of marriage
> themselves.

Although I know nothing about "civil unions" as defined by law, this sounds fine by me.

That's how it works in France. Only civil marriages are considered valid, so religiously-inclined people often go to the Town Hall to marry and then have the Church (or other ;-) ceremony in the afternoon, or the next day. But without the "passage à la Mairie", you're not married.

(I'm not married - and neither is my "wife" for the last 4O years ;-)

'Racial minorities have always existed...what changed is our awareness' I think it's fascinating how our world has responded to it. As the Me two, Blm, defund the police, lgbtq, and now climate justice, and the esg crowd has demonstrated in the last few years for more rights, for ways to dismantle the system, corporations (all run by straight old white guys) have taken the initiative to virtue signal that they care so much about poor people,

At my employment we have an embarrassingly low esg rating, and are almost a by-word for everything supposedly wrong in America, we pollute, we have trucks all over the freeway, we have piles of plastic all over everything, we have no woman, minorities, or trans, in leadership, sexist to the core, yet we have new propaganda on the website all about esg and how much we care, I look at the mayor of DC and how she hijacked the blm message for political reasons and painted it all over the street, how did that help black people? It helped herself. Or Romney joining the protests and marching with the protestors, We have all this show but no action, it's just another way for corporations to make a buck.

And mormonism is right along with it, diversity in the art now, deseret news will print more stories about minorities I guess? Maybe even find a way to profit over lgbtq politics.

What is more interesting is why someone cares about what others they don't even know do.

More "I am special, I am favored, I am included because I can do what you can't" type stuff.

I am carrying a lot of anger about the rights that women are collectively losing, or have lost. I first entered the workforce full time in the late 70s and early 80s, and watched first hand as women struggled to gain equality in terms of pay and promotions. I watched as women gained control over their bodies and their destinies. And now, after 50 years of progress, we are suddenly back to being 3/5ths of a person.

It is giving me a deep contempt for the Christian faith. I am tired of the patriarchy, tired of women being held down. It has had the positive effect of giving me more empathy for other groups that have also been marginalized.

157 voting against marriage equality means 278 voted for it. That’s a win for marriage equality. That’s a landslide win.

It’s a win, but there shouldn’t be so many still against it when the issue is 71% support in the public’s view. I thought eventually we’d accept the consensus and use our finite time on the floor of congress to talk about, I don’t know, our crumbling infrastructure or something. But instead we have to spend all of our energy keeping our rights away from theocrats who have way more power than they should have.