Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights.
Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.
It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America back on that front. At this point it's clear that the people who stoked that anger and fear over decades no longer have control of how to direct it (if they ever did).
It's mind boggling how some people see eye watering profits and political donations and think that the whole thing is driven by stupidity.
>Now I will say that some of the individual stories—I mean, one story that jumps out at me was I was doing interviews about the Affordable Care Act, and I was interviewing very, very medically ill white men who really would have benefited—this is in Tennessee, and in other places in the South where they didn’t expand the Medicaid, they didn’t create the competitive insurance marketplaces—and I said like, “Hey, you guys are dying because you don’t have healthcare. Why don’t you get down with the Affordable Care Act? What’s your reason?”
>And I would say a number of people told me things like, one man told me, “There’s no way I’m supporting a system that would benefit,” as he said, “Mexicans and welfare queens,”—like total racist stereotypes. And so, even though he would have benefited—and his guy, ultimately over the three years of interviews, he passed away because he didn’t have medical care—so he was literally willing to die rather than sign up for a program that he thought was gonna benefit immigrants.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness [1] https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/jonathan-metzl/
It’s not him being a racist if he genuinely thought that the program would benefit immigrants and not benefit him.
How does your racism cause you to equate welfare Queen with black woman? I’d have thought that was more connected to the media using it that way.
1. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistak...
What is not so clear is why the person I was responding to thinks it’s their racism that causes them to think of those images, and not just that they have been exposed to Reagan’s imagery through the media.
So indeed I think your personal racism is not a simple function of exposure.
I’m sorry you personally have been a victim of racism exposure, and have become a passive racist as a consequence. It is a shame that society has done this to you.
We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincentives?
Maybe its the armchair libertarian in me, but it seems like we should just remove any formal definition of marriage from the government and instead normalize more power of attorney style actions.
First it’s a default mechanism for saying things like “if I get hurt this person can come see me in / ask questions about me in the hospital”. Also “we have joint economic activity so friction should be removed”.
Second, kids can’t necessarily articulate for themselves so it’s a default way of saying “here’s a couple of people who are helping me and others can be disregarded by default”
And it acts as a dash pot for both entering into and especially leaving these set of default rights and obligations.
* Marriage should be universally available. I’ve never liked saying that I “supported gay marriage” — the correct phrase is that “I want us to stop discriminating against people in the case of marriage”
This is essentially the power of attorney portion of my post. Perhaps it would be more inclusive if we just had a way to grant certain checkboxes and options to certain individuals. eg I could grant financial decisions to my mother, friend, cousin, and could even give a time limited grant to a girlfriend like "For the next year you can make life and death medical decisions for me" or whatever.
Sadly i dont see it happening because our government is so archaic
We haven't really codified the religious practice so much as codified the civil law assumptions around it.
It is weird in many ways, and it is the most complicated (and misunderstood) contract that many/most people will execute in their lives and it's done very implicitly.
On the other hand, if you didn't have the contractual side of marriage standardized, a whole other can of worms gets opened. If we didn't have a "standard contract" there are a crapton of things you would have to deal with individually.
Before gay marriage, some same-sex couples worked pretty hard to try and get as close to the marriage contracts as they could through contracts, which as I understand it was pretty expensive (5 figures typically) and ultimately not entirely successful especially as there are other implicit aspects that run counter to it.
The religious part of marriage is entirely optional.
Just because we used to regulate these ideas with religion in the past doesn't mean that our current institutions are religious. Some people who are legally married also subscribe to religious meanings of marriage. Some people who have food handlers cards also follow religious food customs. They're related but independent concepts in the modern day. The modern legal construct of marriage in the US is secular.
Now, would anyone ever check? Nah. Unless litigation (divorce, inheritance, whatever) came up and someone thought invalidating the original marriage might somehow help their case, though even then, dunno if it'd really matter.
The really interesting thing is that marriage is a contract that changes over time (as the government modifies law), without either party re-consenting to the new agreement. It's part of why I will probably never get married, it technically represents infinite risk.
a) Prenuptial agreements help some.
b) I hope your partner doesn't have a different view of what it represents.
c) this is actually a real interesting perspective I haven't heard. You're absolutely right and (like many things) the government could pass a law changing what it means, and who knows the affect. Actually, basically everything ever can change with government law changes (eg. taxes?) so maybe this isn't profound.
This can also happen time with non-marriage contracts, which is why prudent drafters include severability clauses
yes, but we dont get to draft the law/contract that is marriage -- that's done by law makers. IIRC even a pre/postnup cannot contradict law.
How much do you think it should cost a couple to form the contract for their marriage? Even a proper review of a contract with that complexity will likely cost a thousand or two, let alone making modifications. Times two, of course, as you would need independent representation.
I imagine that if we actually did this, fairly standard versions would start floating around and drop the costs - but the worst case of this is essentially the status quo with a few hundred in legal fees for review & education. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be terrible as it would reduce the amount of surprise in divorce.
On the other hand, it only really works in one jurisdiction so still problematic.
The government is not involved at the time of contract formation, there's not some government representative reviewing the contract. Nor do they enforce contracts (and related regulations) until there's a dispute.
Sure it does, depending on what the contract is about, even between individuals -- at least in most countries: A sale of real estate isn't really done until the deed is properly registered with the appropriate authorities. (I'm guessing this goes even for [at least most of] the otherwise so often wildly different USA.)
Marriage works the exact same way (again, at least in most of the world), and for the exact same reason(s): It only comes into force once properly registered, because it affects not only the parties and the relationship between them, but their relationship to government and the rest of society. For married people, taxation may change if the authorities know they're married; for property owners, they're the ones that can have others arrested for trespassing instead of themselves being arrested for it if the authorities know they're the owner.
That's pretty much how it has to work, otherwise it can't work at all. Isn't that rather obvious?
Given that 'marriage' nowadays has nothing to do with family formation, it makes sense for the State to get out of that business.
Or just look at it the other (and IMO more correct) way around: It's actually family formation that is "marriage".
This truth used to be recognised by governments too, as witnessed by the ancient legal term "common law marriage".
If it's time for anyone to "get out of that business", it's everyone but the state.
Some countries handle marriage as a religious thing. Israel works that way, and it's really complicated.
I, of course, agree with you in principle. However much of the controversy is around the religious aspect -- ie some religions have a narrow definition of marriage which we've codified into law.
part of me wonders if it would be smarter for us to cede the terminology to the religious and just remove "marriage" as a term from the government and instead normalize another term, perhaps but not necessarily "civic partnership". Once we recognize the part that government should be involved with we can start to remove all religious connotations because it's not the <term> that we're "attacking".
Christians want to say marriage is exactly a man and woman w/ a clergyman ? Fine they can do that inside their building because that's not a legal thing. But if a Christian wants to say "civic partnership" is a specific thing, well that's too bad because they dont get to define law (at least not directly).
(That's actually how it works, AFAIK, in traditionally deeply Catholic but legally wholly secular France: People "get married" twice. Once [usually first, AIUI] legally at the magistrate, and [then] optionally also in church, by a priest. But the latter is only "for show" -- for any deeply religious mothers and aunts who think that's "the real deal"; and, at a guess, in no small part to give the bride the grand show she's always been dreaming about.)
This is exactly the junior developer mindset described in the thread parent: restoring equal rights to gay people is a problem but first let's spin our wheels inventing a different terminology and taxonomy for marriage and upending legal precedent and existing case law about marriage.
it is both equal rights if "everyone/anyone can get married" or "no one can because it's not defined" (in the eyes of the government).
If people aren't willing to accept the 2nd case then I'm guessing they dont actually want equal rights so much as public(governmental) recognition of their status.
This is cutting the proverbial baby in half and redefining the legal institution so no one gets what they want, that will go well in a democracy /s
I should be able to extend the same set of privileges (like can make decisions for me if I am unable to) to my grandmother, or roommate, neighbor, priest, or whomever I choose. It makes little sense how we've constrained the solution w/o adding any value by those constraints. This maybe just the software engineer in me, but we've codified the concrete instead of the abstraction.
This is actually something of high importance to single people too -- something like 30-40% of households are single person and do not have a simple way to elect a person who can make legal decisions for them besides a relatively expensive and difficult power of attorney... So I see it as win:win:win to distill todays "marriage" into a legal common ground and give that right to _all_ people. Then anyone, gay or otherwise, can claim "marriage" because there will not be a legal definition (kind of like "natural" in food labelling). Christians wont be able to claim a monopoly on an undefined term.
But your idea of a win-win compromise is "let's expand it even further so I can include not just same-sex couples, but my grandmother or random roommate too"?
Of course it's about monogamy. Of course it's about who you have sex with. Why do you think we have laws around adultery and divorce? Our democracy wanted to govern adultery and divorce so much that it enshrined it into law, but also lol it should be easy to get support for repealing the whole thing because I don't think it makes sense /s
Fight for it if you wish, I think this can of worms is just about the furthest thing from a politically & legally pragmatic solution that you could possibly come up with in a Western democracy like majority Christian USA.
I'm reading your "software engineer" description of concrete vs abstraction as if that's remotely relevant to the law & politics of helping gays rightfully access a beneficial institution and I'm just thinking "holy shit if this is kind of attitude that crypto folks promise to bring into the political institution of finance, PLEASE KEEP THEM AWAY FROM IT".
The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person for their contextual meaning -- which is the only globally true usage of "marriage" -- marriage hasn't meant exactly one woman and one man in a literal monogamous pairing in basically any culture. Even in America it's at best serial monogamy. This would nullify the christian argument that we have to stop X group from "marriage" because it wouldn't be about _that_ anymore, by removing the terminology and insinuations they're concerned about it would become no different than a license to drive and afaik there aren't any christians arguing to remove drivers' licenses from X groups.
Anyways I cant help but feel like there is a lot of bad faith or miscommunication happening here, time will tell how it all get's solved, I do think we'll land on something that gives all groups of people a governmentally recognized status which gives basically powers of attorney and maybe financial responsibility (alimony)
I don't think you misrepresented yourself, nor that I misunderstood what you meant.
> The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person...
But I do think that's a bad idea. Language belongs to everyone, not any religion. If they want their own separate word for a societal concept that has no basis in any religion, let them come up with their own new word for it. Marriage existed long before Christianity or Islam, and I'd guess before Judaism too. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs were married, weren't they? And I doubt even they came up with the idea. But society, and probably even "government" of some kind, existed even then. In fact, AFAICS at least "society" must have -- the whole idea of marriage makes no sense except in relation to the rest of society: "We're in a long-term exclusive relationship; please treat us, in many respects, as a single unit." If a couple are the only two people in existence, it makes no difference if they're "married" or not; it only starts to matter if there are other people around.
To extend the message I usually advocate giving to religionists: Just as you keep your pecker in your pants and out of my wife, you should keep your sexual mores in your bedroom and out of mine; your faith in your church and out of society as a whole; and [new addition] your ideas about marriage among yourselves and out of everyone else's language.
Who the fuck do those nutjobs think they "are,* to decide what everyone else understands as "marriage"? And why do you advocate ceding this power over what separates Man from the rest of the animals, namely language, to them?
Then you haven't understood anything -- at least not about marriage -- at all.
> we have have codified that one religious practice into our government
It's the exact other way around: Marriage is a social / societal thing, i.e. exactly what government is all about. Religion -- perhaps particularly Christianity -- has co-opted it, but certainly didn't invent it.
> libertarian
Yeah, that explains it.