I have interacted with people online who seemed to genuinely think that the ability of a same-sex couple, that they have never met and never will, to get married would deeply affect the value of the ongoing relationship they had with their opposite-sex spouse.
I never did get to the bottom of how that was supposed to work.
Marriage is a possibility for a relationship if you're straight. To deny that for gay people is to deny them the full legal potential of their relationship.
Here's how you explain it to your kids: "Mummy and Daddy love one another very much, and so do lots of other people. Men love women, some men love other men, some women love other women. And when they love each other enough, they commit to being with that person for the rest of their lives and get married."
I'm not totally sure how a conversation like that means - as some same-sex marriage opponents seem to think - that one has to start describing the intricacies of sex, anal or otherwise.
I do think it's utterly disappointing that the primary reason people seem to think that denying same-sex partners from getting married is because they are too much of a pussy to explain to their kids that gay people exist and can love one another.
Saying "a same-sex couple should be allowed all the privileges of a married couple, but please don't call it 'marriage'" is like saying "a woman should be allowed to attend medical school and receive a degree and be licensed to see patients and prescribe medicine and collect insurance reimbursements, but please don't call her a 'doctor'".
Because, as he wrote just after that: "Marriage is something a lot of people have strong and (from my point of view) old-fashioned opinions on. The fact that he feel marriage is a bond between two members of a different gender does not necessarily mean he's going to actively discriminate members of the LGBT community in a professional environment."
"Second, for the purpose of marriage, gays are not equal: it is impossible for them to procreate, which is the purpose (but not a requirement) of marriage."
This an extremely biased statement. Just because a person is gay doesn't mean that they have different biology than a person who is not.
This conversation always ends up with a slippery slope argument with polygamy, children, animals, something else equally offensive. Comparing my rights to be be married to these things is precisely why I refuse to work with people “on this side”. I frankly couldn’t care less about how he or anyone else rationalizes their bigotry.
I'll reiterate what I've said twice already: I'm talking about people using this argument to oppose (or at least refuse to support) allowing gay people to marry members of the same sex.
You're welcome to point it out, but I sure don't see any such argument made by Graff in this interview.
That reminds me of the old argument that laws prohibiting same sex marriage or prohibiting engaging in homosexual sex do not discriminate against gay people since they prohibit both gay and straight people from marrying someone of the same sex or engaging in homosexual sex.
Same-sex marriage is about LGB. I really don't understand (or actually I do, I just think it's devious) why we keep mixing sexual preferences in partners (i.e. Lesbian Gay Bisexual), and sexual identity (Transsexual, Queer). These two things are not in the same category at all.
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