90 thoughts on “Equal justice?”

    2. Reminds me of another New Yorker cartoon, showing two Fat Cats talking in a law office. The caption read: “They say there’s no justice in the world. Not that that’s a bad thing.”

      1. (Can’t remember where I read it but – )
        Y’all have the best legal system money can buy.

      2. SMS lawyer -> client: “Justice has won!”
        SMS client -> lawyer: “Appeal immediately!”

  5. With some of the comments I heard the SCOTUS justices make yesterday, I’m not sure equal justice will have a lot to do with the decisions. However, at least all states should in future be required to recognize marriages made legally outside their own state – I don’t see how they can avoid that one.

    1. It’s precisely that issue that caused Massachusetts to limit its gay marriage law to residents of that state. They apparently wanted to avoid possible legal hassles as a result of nonresidents getting a vacation marriage which wouldn’t be recognized in the newlyweds’ home states.

      This raises another question – why is gay marriage so evil when there’s nothing to prevent a drunk hetero couple who’s only known each other for half an evening from being married in a Las Vegas drive-through chapel by an Elvis impersonator?

      1. The latter preserves the dignity of the sacred institution of marriage, of course. (The Elvis impersonator told me over cocktails through the drive-through speaker.)

      2. The thing that is most unpaletable to me about this, and all other issues in the same category, is that additional laws are needed so that same sex couples can not be legally prevented from getting married.

        Perhaps there does need to be changes to deal with the technical aspects, but on the issue of are same sex couples allowed to marry?

        In other words we have existing laws that provide for certain rights for people. Then we have some bigots that want to deny those rights to some subgroup of people. So, instead of just being able to ignore those bigots, or tell them to piss off, additional new laws have to be enacted to protect the subgroup from the bigots trying to deny them rights afforded by already existing laws.

        Maybe it is subtle, though I don’t think it is. The proper perspective isn’t that same sex couples are trying to gain new unique rights for themselves, but that bigots are trying to deny same sex couples rights that a reasonable and ethical interpretation of existing law already affords them and everyone else.

        1. Exactly. As I saw it expressed recently, if it’s okay for Sue to marry Bill but not okay for George to marry Bill, then Sue has rights that George does not and that’s discrimination and already covered under the 14th Amendment.

        2. All a part of the lawyers’ (and remember that all judges and many politicians in the US are a part of this group) attempt to interpret laws as narrowly as possible. This makes more work for the lawyers.

          Unless, of course, a wider interpretation is of value mainly to corporations.

  6. Clay Bennett is one of the best political cartoonists in the country, if not the world, and I’ve admired his work for years. He’s usually comfortably liberal, but he’s not afraid to express a right-of-center opinion if that’s what he thinks is the best way to make his point. He won an award a couple years ago almost solely on the basis of a single cartoon that so elegantly portrayed the impasse in the Israeli/Palestinian situation that it belongs in the National Art Gallery with copies in the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Tate (and maybe one in the Knesset chamber as well).

    Unfortunately, I don’t have a link so I can share it with you. Ceiling Cat willing, I could upload my saved copy to the Professor so He could post it.

    1. Maybe they can turn it into a flyer to post facing from both sides of the Gaza wall.

  8. I understand that most people frequenting this *website* are liberally minded and will provide (hopefully) sensible explanation to me, but I don’t understand why homosexuals want to re-define the word “marriage”. Surely, if the equal justice under law is the core of the matter, then civil partnerships (or civil unions) should solve the issue. I don’t see how civil unions endowed with all recognized legal rights provided to married people can infringe on gay people’s right to “marry”. If equal protection under law is the rub, make civil unions watertight with respect to legal recognition (also on the federal level) and that’s it. If some gay people in a civil union want to call it a “marriage”, they can, but I really don’t see the reason why they would want to force everybody else to call it that way. All these arguments about “human rights of gay people” seem really overblown once civil unions have complete and equal recognition as marriage and *I do understand that currently they aren’t*. In the end, it seems to come down to re-defining some terminology (“marriage”, “husband”, “wife”).

    I approach this question with open mind and would like to hear reasonable counterarguments.

      1. “Separate but equal” refers to segregation in education and transportation purposefully instituted to keep white and black people apart. I don’t think it’s the same as arguing about linguistic choices.

        1. civil unions have been tried in several of our states and other countries. they have been usually found to not afford the same level of protections and benefits to gays and their families, not to mention the dignity which the name marriage is supposed to confer to a relationship.

          if all the essential elements of marriage are conferred, then why not call it marriage?

          did you object to the redefinition of marriage, when women were no longer regarded essentially as their husband’s property with no rights of their own and marriage became a more egalitarian institution?

          the institution of marriage has been “redefined” many, many times in the course of human history.

          1. do you object to re-definition of “free speech” to prohibit expressions of hate? after all, the idea of “free speech” has been redefined many times and includes prohibition of incitement to violence. If an oppressed and disenfranchised minority claims that your mocking their religion is hate speech and “incites” violence against their deeply held religious beliefs, surely we should concede and re-define “free speech” to proscribe blasphemy. Clearly making fun of religion infringes on “dignity” of religious people.

    3. Why is it important to you to restrict the word marriage to heterosexual couples? If “civil union” would confer the exact same rights and privileges to homosexual couples, what is the point in having different labels?

      I haven’t yet heard a cogent argument as to why marriage should only be available to heterosexuals. The objections invariably are due to religious beliefs, whose justification rests solely on a couple of OT passages.

      1. I am not restricting anything, I am for maintaining the status quo. Why is it so important for you to re-define the word “marriage”? The onus is on the proponents of change to defend it. Frankly, I find this obsession with words misguided. It reeks of the leftist “policing the language” and political correctness. We have enough of that on university campuses already as has been many times pointed out on this website.

        1. If an obsession with words is misguided, why are you so dead set against “redefining” the word “marriage”? How is that not an instance of “policing the language”?

          1. As I said, the onus is on the proponents of change to defend it. If the argument is some gay people being “offended” by other people not using the politically correct word to describe their relationship, I don’t see why that’s a good argument. Nobody has the right not to be offended.

          2. Your argument is fallacious. This is not a linguistic issue, this is a legal issue. It is, rightly, a legal issue because it involves a subgroup of the population that is being denied rights that are supposed to be afforded to everyone.

            The offense that gay people may feel stems from people like you either directly, or obliquely, denying them certain rights that you enjoy and that our legal systems are supposed to afford to all.

            Do the right thing. Get out of the way. If you don’t like gay, LGBT, or whatever, then ignore them. They aren’t affecting you in any way, except helping the society you live in move one more step towards being better for everyone.

      2. Okay, I can play the devils advocate here.
        (apologies for copy/pasting part of my earlier comment)
        1. Marriage is not a compact between two people. (if it were, two people could always say the marital vows to each other without getting a marriage certificate and call it a marriage.) No, marriage is actually a compact between two people and the government that confers dozens, if not hundreds of various benefits directly and indirectly when the government recognizes the marriage as legal (tax filing, gift laws, inheritance laws, Social security survivor benefits, immigration benefits, healthcare proxies, pension benefits, health insurance availability, and so on, and so on..
        2. Government has an interest in maintaining the population and having children born and brought up in stable self-sufficient family units.
        3. The benefits above cost money, and therefore the government that wants to keep its population stable should subsidize just the couples that can help sustain the population (hetero couples), and not the couples that can’t (gay couple). An objection could be made that the government shouldn’t then subsidize heterosexual couples that are too old, infertile, or voluntarily child-free – but then these hetero couples can still potentially procreate with some higher or lower probability, while no gay couple can do that without outside help.

        So here is your faith-less argument against gay marriage.
        While I still think it’s a valid argument, I think that the government also has an interest in having more committed family units that provide emotional and financial support to each other, and therefore there is a reason for the government to subsidize both hetero and same-sex couples. Also,some of these marriage benefits actually save money instead of providing subsidies (like Social Security benefits or any means-tested benefits that are based on family income), so these subsidies aren’t necessarily as big.

        1. I think a stronger case can be made that the government’s proper interest is not in fertility as such, but rather in sustainability (China famously found a compelling interest in reducing its population), and in and in ensuring that such children as are born find loving homes. Gay families are just as suitable for the latter purpose as straight families.

          1. Actually, I’ll go further. I reject the implication that citizens should have children in order to provide government with future citizens to govern. Government exists to serve the citizens, not the other way round. If citizens voluntarily choose to limit their own fertility for whatever reasons, government has no legitimate interest in trying to counteract that trend as a means of institutional self-preservation.

          2. Unfortunately, having a stable population count is a problem when life expectancy rises, because the average age of the population will rise very quickly leading to sharp increases in social and health care spending. Having a small and consistent population growth helps make this change more gradual and adjust easier. China is somewhat an extreme example and is now reaping the results of its messed-up demographic policy with much higher number of males than females and too many expected senior with little social support net and one child expected to support both parents.
            Speaking of loving families, that’s a different argument, and that one (among others) eventually convinced me to support marriage equality. But I was trying to disprove the assertion that there is no secular argument against gay marriage, and I still see no sufficient explanation how that is not a valid argument.

          3. But doesn’t that amount to a kind of demographic Ponzi scheme that’s ultimately unsustainable?

          4. It does. However, with a small sustained population growth you could count on scientific development providing a way to use the existing resources and grow food more efficiently to at least keep the pace with the population growth. It’s not sustainable with a high population growth, or a population that ages way too fast. Think of it as a Ponzi scheme that adds new people at the rate of the population growth (so it would never run out of participants), and pays out what the fund earns increased by the percentage equal to increase in the number of participants. In theory, this Ponzi scheme should never run out of money.

        2. Government wants to encourage child adoption.
          Childless married couples do much of that. Marriage gives their children dignity and stability. Married gay couples adopt at a higher rate than the general population.

          1. “Government wants to encourage adoption” – true, but only as a second choice to birth. After all, adoption doesn’t create any new children.
            “Married gay couples adopt at a higher rate” – probably, but mainly because they can’t produce children in the “natural way”.
            “Marriage gives children dignity and stability” – that has little to do with my original argument, but I would imagine children care more about having two loving parents than a existence or absense of a marriage certificate.

          2. After all, adoption doesn’t create any new children.

            That’s a feature, not a bug. You can be a parent without contributing to overpopulation, and that’s what government ought to be encouraging.

          3. Again, a valid argument, but I don’t see how it disproves the argument “the government subsidizes marriage, has an interest in maintaining a stable population, and therefore can choose to subsidize the family type that is best suited to maintain the stable population.”

          4. On what basis does the government decide that heterosexual marriage is “best suited to maintain the stable population”? This seems like an instance of the naturalistic fallacy: straight sex is better because it’s “natural”. In fact many of the parenting options practiced by straight couples — adoption, IVF, surrogacy, and so on — are also available to gay couples. So it’s not at all obvious that straight marriage should be singled out as the government-approved “best” way to do it.

            Plus you’re ignoring immigration, which currently more than compensates for any decline in fertility in the US. There’s no shortage of potential citizens; we don’t need to encourage parents to manufacture more.

          5. It doesn’t matter what kind of sexual relations are considered “natural” or not. I don’t care who and how has sex with whom, as long as it between two (or however many 🙂 consenting adults. The fact is, most heterosexual married couples can and will manage to produce an offspring without having to involve an additional person to perform a role of biological parent (whether via IVF, surrogacy, or adoption), and not one gay couple possibly could do that.
            I have ignored immigration, true. But it only supplements the new births, and no government seems to be eager to make immigration the primary source of new citizens.

          6. Last reply for me.

            If you don’t care who, or how, or how many, then it shouldn’t matter if gays need three people to do what straights can do with two. That’s simply not a good enough reason to grant a subsidy to straights but not gays.

    4. The easiest way of granting gay couples all the legal protections and rights of marriage is to simply let them get married.

      What’s the compelling state interest for creating an entirely separate system of “civil unions” just for gay couples? Think of all the state laws, federal laws, industry guidelines and company handbooks which would need to be updated and rewritten to accommodate this new institution. Why would they bother? What’s the point if civil unions are completely the same as marriages? The only reason to keep them separate is if they are not the same.

      1. Well, it’s not the easiest way judging by the opposition to same-sex marriage across the country. Most of the states that legalized SSM have done it by court decisions, not through popular approval. That indicates that although legally gay couples should certainly be afforded the exact same rights and protections as married couples, the re-definition of the word “marriage” is not so popular. What many advocates of this change have done is conflated these two issues – legal protections and linguistic choice. I don’t think that forcing the re-definition of the word “marriage” down everyone’s throats is the best way of achieving equal legal rights for gay couples.

        1. So, you think it would be better to leave issues of civil rights to a popular vote? If you want to live in a decent society that is not a good idea. Especially these days when very wealthy religious institutions, like the Mormons and the RCC, can poor such large amounts of money and resources into such campaigns, like prop 8 in California.

          Besides, support for denying same sex couples marriage rights is waning, even among conservatives. According to Gallup polls support for same sex marriage has been just over 50% for years, and the most current poll indicates it is 55%.
          That is over all. Among young adults it is 80%. Please step aside as our society progresses.

        2. “although legally gay couples should certainly be afforded the exact same rights and protections as married couples, the re-definition of the word “marriage” is not so popular”

          The word is worth redefining precisely because there are still people against the redefinition. To give up this (otherwise pointless) linguistic battle is to cave in to bigotry.

    5. I understand that most people frequenting this *website* are liberally minded and will provide (hopefully) sensible explanation to me, but I don’t understand why blacks want to re-define the word “citizen”. Surely, if equal justice under law is the core of the matter, then separate enfranchisement should solve the issue. I don’t see how separate enfranchisement endowed with all recognized legal rights provided to actual citizens can infringe on black people’s right to “participate in our democratic society”. If equal protection under law is the rub, make separate enfranchisement watertight with respect to legal recognition (also on the federal level) and that’s it. If some black people with separate enfranchisement want to call it a “citizenship”, they can, but I really don’t see the reason why they would want to force everybody else to call it that way. All these arguments about “human rights of black people” seem really overblown once separate enfranchisement has complete and equal recognition as actual citizenship and *I do understand that currently they aren’t*. In the end, it seems to come down to re-defining some terminology (“citizen”, “human being”, “neighbour”).

      I approach this question with open mind and would like to hear reasonable counterarguments.

      2. I am going to ignore the passive-aggressive attempt to twist my words into expression of racism. What is this “separate enfranchisement”?

        If you’re talking about Jim Crow era laws then your argument actually buttresses my point. By law (14th amendment) all black people were granted citizenship and equal rights. Instead some states chose to redefine the word “citizen” to introduce discriminatory laws and barriers to impede black voters from exercising their right.

        This conflation of same-sex marriage and civil rights movement is grating.

        1. He’s not conflating, he’s drawing an analogy. He’s also not twisting your words into an expression of racism.

          In fact, his tactics only work on the assumption that you are not a racist i.e. you are supposed to think “oh yes, this exactly analogous argument is totally horrible and therefore my argument must be also”.

          1. Thanks. At this point, it is no longer possible for Eli to maintain that homosexuals are a lesser grade of human and should not be allowed to consider themselves deserving of equality. One hopes.

    6. I for one am getting quite tired of this whole “re-define the word” nonsense. Has no one ever looked in a dictionary? Words are redefined all the time without causing major misunderstandings, much less the moral collapse of society.

    7. If airtight civil unions are good enough for gay people, they ought to be good enough for straight people. So let’s have civil unions for everybody. If you want to call yours a “marriage”, knock yourself out, but why should the government be obliged to recognize it as such, if it’s legally indistinguishable from a civil union?

      1. I even wonder about the necessity for civil unions, except for when there are children involved. Why should couples of any stripe get special dispensation. Sort of playing devil’s advocate here, but it is a question I ponder…(Having been married + children then single again)

      2. I really don’t get this desperate desire for change just for the sake of change. Marriage exists. After many years of discrimination (not to say that it has disappeared) gay people finally are on the way to achieving exact same legal rights. Why the need to re-define “marriage”? Or even get rid of “marriage” altogether as you’re proposing? What is it all about? Is it just because some gay people are so offended that others won’t use the “right” word to describe their relationship, that they have to force everyone to call it “marriage”?

        1. Marriage will still exist if gay people are allowed to do it too, and call it by that name. The real question is why are you so offended by that possibility that you want to force them to call it something else?

          If you want to infringe on other people’s freedom to use the word “marriage”, the onus is on you to demonstrate some credible harm that would result from such usage.

          1. Gay people have the right to call it “marriage” under the First Amendment. I am not infringing on that freedom at all, I don’t know where you got this idea from.

          2. You’re saying they don’t have a right to use the word “marriage” on their marriage certificate, or to refer to each other as “husband” or “wife” in legal documents. Those words, according to you, are reserved for straight people in the eyes of the law.

          3. Okay. You offically make no sense. You are either a very poor communicator or you are in denial. Go back and reread all of your comments here and then see if you can still stand by this comment.

    8. I will try to explain, because I used to think the same way a few years ago.
      I’ll start by pointing out what should be obvious but somehow never seems to be stated out loud: marriage is not a compact between two people. It is a compact between two people and the government that confers dozens, if not hundreds of various benefits directly and indirectly when the government recognizes the marriage as legal (tax filing, gift laws, inheritance laws, Social security survivor benefits, immigration benefits, healthcare proxies, pension benefits, health insurance availability, and so on, and so on.)
      So, assuming you agree that a gay couple should have the same protections and benefits as a straight married couple, you have two options:
      1) Allow a gay couple to enter a legally recognized marriage which automatically extends the same legal protections and benefits to the gay couple and immediately solves the legal equality issue, or
      2) Define “civil union” as legally equal to “marriage” for every possible purpose (except they would apply to gay and one to straight couple), which creates two distinct legal names for the same exact contract which is, for all intents and purposes, a marriage. And the only reason this even becomes necessary is because some people are not comfortable with calling a marriage a “marriage”. Since the government isn’t actually forcing you to use the word “marriage” or “civil union”, and because they both represent the same thing, you can expect the colloquial blurring of the lines between the two terms, which will probably tend towards the more common term “marriage” – and as eventually it becomes acceptable and expected to refer to the “civil union” as marriage, the distinction will become obsolete.

      1. In fact Washington State underwent exactly the evolution you describe in option 2 in the last decade or so. In the ’90s, civil unions were established conferring many (but not all) of the benefits of marriage. Additional benefits were added piecemeal over the subsequent years until finally the legislature, tired of nickel-and-diming it, proposed a sweeping measure that explicitly defined civil unions as exactly equivalent to marriage in everything but name. This was overwhelmingly approved by the voters. And a few years later, the voters made it all moot with a citizen’s initiative legalizing same-sex marriage.

        1. If you can believe it, I was actually thinking of adding the option 3 which would describe this very nickel-and-dime approach to matching civil union benefits to marriage benefits wherever they came up, and how big of a legislative nightmare it would have been. 🙂

    9. Force everybody else to call that way?

      That is, frankly, bullshit. Anybody can think of marriage any way they want. You don’t like the idea of gay people being married? Then don’t think about it. You don’t have to go to their weddings. Or, do you think that gay people getting married will somehow magically affect all the hetero marriages that exist? Like, I’ll wake up one morning and my marriage will be different because now bigots can’t deny gay people legal marriage?

      Why should you, or anyone, care what sex the members of a marriage are? It does not affect you in any way that is relevant.

    10. Eli. You say here you are approaching this with an open mind. Many people have given you reason why civil unions aren’t practical. And rather than acknowledging those reasons – regardless of whether you agree – you seem to be digging your heels in.

      So I will ask you, if two people have been in a relationship for decades that is in every way identical to a marriage except for the genders of the human beings in the relationship, what valid reason do you have for not using the word marriage? Since this is a question of secular law, please note that religious texts do not carry any weight in secular legal decisions in the US. Also note that if “we’ve always done it that way” were a legally valid argument, slavery would still be legal and female suffrage would not. So what is your modern secular rationale against the word marriage?

  9. I sometimes wonder why the gov’t needs to be involved with marriages of any kind…

    2. As long as government confers (as it does) special benefits upon married couples and their families, it has to be involved in marriage. The better question is why is religion involved at all in the secular institution of marriage — rather than merely to solemnize whatever relationship between its congregants it chooses to solemnize by whatever means they all choose to do so. The key is to separate the two.

      1. Spot on comment. In fact in New Zealand, and I would assume elsewhere, ministers and the like act in a dual capacity one of which is to act as an agent for the state to solemnise the marriage. The only requirement (apart from having a state-issued license) is that “before a marriage celebrant, and before at least two witnesses, each party must say the words ‘I AB, take you CD, to be my legal wife/husband’ or words to similar effect.” There is a vast range of celebrants other than religious ones. The legal bit of marriage is purely secular and anything else is flim-flam.
        Across the Tasman the celebrant does have to say (usually after apologising for doing so) that marriage is “between a man and a woman”.

      2. Exactly. As anyone who has tried to get out of a marriage knows, it is primarily a legal agreement designed to protect both parties, is quite binding, and thus requires the government to regulate those legalities.

      3. For me, the question is why legal marriage should have anything at all to do with sex. If the government wants to grant benefits to cohabiting couples, fine, but whether they’re in love and what kind of sex they have, if any, is none of the government’s damn business.

        To me the most sensible approach is to make marriage, or civil unions, or whatever you want to call it, available to any group of people who for whatever reason want to live under the same roof, pool their income, and share property. Anything more than that is unwarranted intrusion into people’s private lives.

          1. Mostly property rights. It is shorthand for you have to split your shit evenly if you part. Without it, your spouse could die and his or her relatives could make a claim on your stuff and your house.

            A way around this would be to somehow alter the stupid law but I’m no legal expert so don’t know how to go about this.

          2. Broadly and subject to rules around ‘short relationships’ New Zealand now applies “the split your shit” bit not only to married couples but also to all de facto relationships that have lasted for 3 years or more. It also covers deaths including deaths in short-term relationships. For de factos with kids it kicks in immediately. Property (Relationships) Act 1976 if interested (the current situation results from amendments in the early part of this century).

            Such acts apply to non-kidded couples because you need to deal with commingled property, unequal power balances, in-relationship con-jobs and because both sides try to rort the other when they split.

        2. Greg = Why limit it to people who “live under the same roof, pool their income, and share property”? There are plenty of currently married couples who don’t meet one or more of these criteria.

          Under your proposal, would all three be non-negotiable requirements? (Or, as the waitress put it to Jack Nicholson in the famous diner scene from Five Easy Pieces: “No substitutions, no side orders”?) Would there be additional governmental benefits that accrue to married people that didn’t relate to these three factors?

          1. That “hold the chicken” clip is “not available in my country” but I do remember the original with glee. A classic:-)

          3. I’m not wedded to any particular set of requirements; those would depend on the purpose the law is meant to serve.

            My main point is that if, say, a group of grad students want to pool their resources to rent a house, it’s not obvious to me that they’re any less entitled to tax breaks for doing so than, say, a young yuppie couple with no children.

          4. Then the rational remedy is simply to open the benefits to everyone who requests them — not to force groups of people into the Procrustean bed of “marriage.”

            Could your group of grad students maintain straight faces while paying lip-service (which, granted, is all most couples getting married these days do) to the pledges about “in sickness and in health” and “until death do us part”?

          5. If the government’s only legitimate interest in “marriage” is verifying qualifications for cohabitation benefits, then it has no business asking for such pledges. Applying for such benefits should be like filing a tax return.

            What loving couples pledge to each other in front of their friends and families is their own business, and should not be a condition of receiving government benefits.

          6. Your issue appears to be solely with the distribution of government benefits, Greg, something that is traditionally within the purview of determination by the political processes, rather than anything to do with the institution of marriage per se — other than that you feel that married couples shouldn’t receive a disproportionate share of government benefits compared to (at least certain) other, unmarried people.

            To approach the distribution0-of-benefits issue by trying to expand “marriage,” therefore, seems to be attacking the problem (assuming there is a problem) from the wrong end. It would also raise all kinds of unanticipated issues (would all the members of a New York coop, for example, qualify for a group marriage, since they technically live “under the same roof”?) and would end up playing social havoc, since many of the traditional marital benefits have no rational application to the types of arrangements you’ve posed (inheritance and death benefits, hospital visitation, spousal testimonial privileges, and, of course, child custody and divorce; the list could go on).

            In addition, if the types of groups you’ve mentioned legitimately want the benefits you’ve stated, there seems to be no obstacle to their seeking to secure them through the usual method such matters are determined in a representative democracy, the political processes (primarily through passage of statutes in state legislatures). Inasmuch as those people do not constitute a homogenous group based on an immutable characteristic — such as race, gender, sexual orientation — they have no history of being the victims of invidious discrimination, with its concomitant reduced political power and access. Accordingly, having the political processes available to them, they would seem to have no need for recourse to the court system to redress their distribution-of-government-benefits grievances.

  11. Thanks for reasonable critiques of my post above. That is why I appreciate the community on this website: less name-calling, more logical arguments than elsewhere on the internet, thanks Professor Ceiling Cat.

    I don’t have time to answer everyone but on further reflection I find that the practicality argument won me over. Thanks to H.H. and List of X who advanced it. It does seem that the most practical way to ensure that everyone has equal legal rights is to extend the definition of “marriage” rather than to erect a whole parallel legal structure of civil unions. This convinces me that indeed legalizing SSM is the best way to achieving equal protection for both gay and straight couples.

    I am still somewhat confused as to why people in Washington state (as Gregory Kusnick mentioned above) felt the need to legalize SSM when this parallel legal structure of civil unions already existed and was completely equivalent to marriage. Tthe only practical reason I can think of is simplification of family and tax law in that state.

    1. I can’t speak for all Washington voters, but my sense of it is that having lived with all-inclusive civil unions for a number of years, people just didn’t see any good reason to retain a purely terminological distinction-without-a-difference. It became easy to get signatures for an initiative to unify the legal terminology, and hard to get votes against it.

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