> > As I see it, there are two problems. One is that equality rights should not be a matter of popular opinion, and the other is that the US Supreme Court, who is supposed to be minorities' last line of defense for their Constitutional rights, isn't all that fond of gay rights. I agree that solving one wouldn't solve the other.
>
> The Court has never given gays any sort of protected status. You're saying they should be considered so. Perhaps. But the fact is there's no basis for it in US law, be it federal statutes, the Constitution or Supreme Court case law. If you wish to harm the cause of gay rights, there's no better way than to get nine unelected people to begin forcing unpopular and totally new precedents upon the American public.

I don't see that gays are asking for any rights that straight people don't already have - the right to entwine their finances with their life partner and to file taxes jointly; the right to be named as next of kin for the person they love; the right to sit at the front of the bus.

> Why not end this? Why have any kind of civil recognition of marriage?

More sensible might be to separate out the religious and civil aspects of marriage - have a civil marriage that is open to anyone with a licence, and brings with it the financial and legal benefits of marriage, and allow churches to join people together in religious ceremonies as they see fit, but without any legal meaning. This way, everyone can have the wedding of their choice.

> > First of all, gay people feel like they're being treated separate but equal, so the creation of a separate type of union for them directly impacts their dignity as human beings, in exactly the same way as a black person who has to drink from a separate but perfectly operational water fountain.
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> I don't find the two comparable at all. One requires that you actually use separate facilities, in public, while the other gives you a different name for the same legal fiction. In the case of marriage we're also dealing with adults, and I assume that they're a little better able to cope with it than the children who were the primary focus of the two Brown decisions ending "separate but equal." And none of this deals with the fact that, in almost all cases, "separate but equal" facilities really meant "separate and completely unequal" facilities.

If they are the same, why not give them the same name? Labelling them as being different will not encourage them to be treated the same. Names and labels have great emotive power, and insisting on the term "civil union" for something you freely admit to being identical to "marriage" can only make people think of those so labelled as of less value.

> > Second, if it's possible (and relatively simple, if someone wanted to) to give them the same rights as married people while calling it the same thing (i.e. make them equal without being separate), what's the point of giving them a separate label?
>
> I don't know. Hell, if it were popular, I'd say let them get married (but I'd still prefer the government stop regulating marriages). But it's incredibly unpopular to allow gays to be married, while the idea of civil unions (same thing, new name) is pretty popular. It doesn't have to make sense. Sometimes in democracies people are allowed to hold opinions that we don't understand. In such cases, rather than trying to force our own personal rationality upon them against their will, doesn't it seem better for all involved to just take the easier compromise?

I thought the American system was set up so that government could (to an extent) do the right thing without worrying about what was popular. I believe the term used is "tyranny of the majority". 40 years ago, several states forbade interracial marriages. Had popular opinion favoured the compromise of allowing such marriages but calling them "civil unions", would this have been the correct course of action? I think not, and I fail to see the difference in this case.

wintermute