Gay rights advocates push to recast marriage on morals

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2005-11-12T225851Z_01_SPI281689_RTRUKOC_0_US-RIGHTS-GAYMARRIAGE.xml

OAKLAND, California (Reuters) - As U.S. gays and lesbians prepare to battle a raft of state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage that will likely be on the ballot next fall, activists are recasting the issue as one that needs to be fought on moral rather than political grounds.

That is the message Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the oldest and leading U.S. grass-roots gay and lesbian coalition, has taken to more than 2,500 gay rights organizers at its annual conference held in Oakland this week.

"What I really want people to understand is rather than seeing these as political contests, these are really profound, unfair, bordering on immoral elections," Foreman told Reuters on Saturday. "Imagine if this was being done to a minority in Kosovo -- people would be outraged."

"We're going to have another 10 to 12 anti-marriage, anti-family recognition constitutional amendments on the ballots next fall," Foreman said. "That's going to be an enormous challenge.'

Two key elements in the strategy to defeat more votes banning same-sex marriage will be reaching out to people of faith and demanding that Democrats, who have long counted on gays and lesbian as core supporters, stand up for the gay community, Foreman said.

"The Democrats' response to gay issues over the last few years has been incoherent and spineless, and that has only worked to their disadvantage," Foreman said. "There is a sense among large gay donors to the Democratic party that they need to have the party take a stand for us."

To simply unhinge marriage from the church. If you wish to obtain all the rights and privileges of a legal union, you must hae a license and a ceremony in a registry office. That is the end result of church and state and sidesteps the definitions that the fundies want to put on the business. A civil union is, then, whatever the state wishes to categorize it as. New Zealand has civil unions for same sex couples as well, by the way, rather like Spain. Canada and the Netherlands have defined these unions as marriage, although Canada will not force any clergy to perform those unions.......it's a typically Canadian compromise.

Legal unions are accompanied by a license from the STATE, can be performed by a judge, and even ministers who perform marriages end the ceremony with, "By the power vested in me by the STATE of..."

States also recognize "common law" marriages where no ceremony has been performed or license issued. Churches do not, but they don't have a say in the legality of THIS agreement.

The church needs to stop acting like they own the institution.

...The happy couple registers at the Town Hall or equivalent, and then does or does not seal it with a religious ceremony elsewhere. It's not a *legal* marriage without that registry, but how your religious group deals with it is not the state's business.

One argument in favor of gay marriage that I find appealing is social stability -- and one would think the moralists would, too, as one of their knocks on gay men has been promiscuity. But logic is seldom the strong suit of moralizers.

Hekate

to decide who you can and cannot marry? Republicans are all about getting government out of your lives, aren't they?

:sarcasm:

They just say they are. This is yet another issue where their actions don't match their rhetoric. They say they want to save families and preserve marriage.
They also say they want to liberate Iraq?