Agile Tortoise

Greg Pierce’s blog

« The Passion of the Christ      Not my kind of doctor »

Civil marriage

Why is the government even in the business of defining, banning, encouraging marriage in any form? If people get married for a tax break, it’s the wrong reason. I’m not for giving special benefits to married people, regardless of sexual preference. Why is that not discrimination against single people?

I’m not sure I think civil marriage is a good idea…why don’t we all just have civil unions? and, if so desired, religious or other forms of marriage in which the government need not have any association.

Tuesday, February 24th, 2004 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Civil marriage”

  1. Sean McMains Says:
    February 24th, 2004 at 4:31 pm

    A gay friend of mine who lives in San Francisco and I were discussing this very issue today, and reached the same conclusion: let government define its form of partnership, and whoever wants participate in it. Let the church define its form of partnership, and let whoever wants participate in it.

    Of course, if one doesn’t get tax benefits, or some other different legal status, then why have civil unions at all? On the other hand, if one doesn’t put any restrictions on civil unions, then could whole groups of people be wed — 6 person civil unions? 700 person civil unions? And what cans of worms would that open up?

    Interesting food for thought.

    Sean

  2. Greg Pierce Says:
    February 24th, 2004 at 5:03 pm

    On Feb 24, 2004, at 4:37 PM, Sean McMains wrote:

    > Of course, if one doesn’t get tax benefits, or some other different
    > legal status, then why have civil unions at all?

    purely for legal reasons, such as medical decision-making, inheritance,
    guardianship of minors, etc.

    and, yes, i don’t think you could limit that to pairs exclusively.

    g.

  3. thom Says:
    February 25th, 2004 at 7:44 am

    Tons of blogging out there about this, naturally… but at core, it’s a "seperate, but equal" argument, and the state should not be seperating.
    Found one guy questioning "what are we going to do about software?" in relationship to same-sex marriage, and then he goes on to wonder aloud, if we say "two men, two women," then why not "three men, or two and a woman?" and of course, we’d need some software in this world updated to facilitate *that* heheh
    http://www.free-conversant.com/thom/

Leave a Reply