Marriage poll

[joshcryer]

134. It's a slippery slope. If you advocate for this (which is in theory more egalitarian)...

...you wind up overlooking or neglecting the very real impacts that marriage inequality has.

It's similar to the argument that "it's not racism / sexism / homophobia, it's class" argument. That argument basically says to jump over the practical intermediaries that reduce suffering and exploitation and go to the root cause, class. You're saying skip over the root cause of marriage and just bring about equality. I agree with both, of course, in principle, but the world simply doesn't work that way. We're not magically going to have a revolution whereby class is abolished any more than we're going to abolish marriage overnight.

Let's say we got rid of the designation of marriage, government is still conveying property rights. Now, let's say we have an All In One Contract that actually conveys all the rights that marriage conveys. Government could still prevent same sex couples (or even interracial couples) from being able to sign such a contract, if a referendum was passed by a bigoted swath of the country. You haven't really solved anything that way, either. In reality government is what conveys property rights, and all other rights that follow, so you're still going to have to deal with government.

Government must respect the equality of individuals itself, it can't just magically change, it takes decades of evolution for these things to happen. We'll likely have gay marriage legalized this year by the SCOTUS.