Wow, even on HN, there are people that oppose gay marriage? That surprises me.
The people who donate primarily for the gay marriage fight don't get to earmark their money either.
I don't see why they don't make it possible to earmark money - I think they would end up getting a LOT more funding:
People that don't want to fund gay marriage advocacy would donate to the issues that they find more important, and people that feel strongly about gay marriage would donate more because they know it would all go towards their pet issue.
Or are you straight and hence it doesn't affect you? Kinda defeats the point of donating to charities...
I would like to not pay more because of whom I choose to marry.
I know a lot of smart people, myself included, who read HN regularly and oppose gay marriage.
I'm not strongly against gay marriage. I simply don't support it. Sorry if my explanation is a little disjointed. There isn't one particular issue that explains it all.
I see the whole issue as completely artificial. It was almost entirely created and started by Gavin Newsom (former mayor of SF). It was a demogogic move on his part to try to get support for his run for governor several years later.
Aside: Ironic it backfired and ended up pigeon holeing him as a far left politician.
No one talked about or wanted gay marriage before he brought it up.
A more nebulous reason is that society is moving away from marriage. People are more and more living in civil unions. Marriage has become a religious/traditional thing. So revising/redefining antiquated traditions to appease a group of people seems unnecessary.
I think the idea of redefining a term like marriage is also rather problematic for me. It's always described a union between a man and a woman, since like the times of Hammurabi - and now we're just redefining it? It seems a little absurd.
The address the issue, we created a new term. "Civil Unions". But for some reason this isn't good enough - and I don't know why. Seems like the real goal is to redefine a several thousand year old term - which kinda seems revisionist to me.
Another argument I've seen and that I've never seen addressed is: why do gay couples get to marry and not polyamorous people? Seems like there is a double standard here.I personally feel like if they're going to go through all of this, they might as well allow all marriage.
At the end of the day I wouldn't really care if gay marriage passed. What bothers me the most is that so much time, effort and money is spent on something that is a rather insignificant issue.
The right to visit loved ones at a hospital and the tax benefits are more symptomatic of broken hospital/tax laws than a huge national issue on par with the civil rights movement. I think calling gay marriage a civil rights issue is hyperbolic and disingenuous (and is polyamorous marriage a civil rights issue too?). I think there are way way way more important issues currently to deal. Thousands of people are rotting in jails for non violent crimes, thousands of people have their lives ruined by medical bills, thousands of people are forced into plea bargains for crimes they never committed. There is so much suffering happening around us, and we spend out time arguing about redefining marriage. It's just really frustrating for me to see this artificial debate occupy so much of the collective unconscious of the country (and now the world).
I would prefer if we just make it illegal for anyone (IRS, immigration, employers, etc) to discriminate based on marital status. Problem solved.
The same reason "separate but equal" wasn't good enough for black people in the mid 20th century: It isn't equal at all.
It's not about redefining a term or forcing people to think a certain way. It's about being recognized on a legal level as being equal.
> why do gay couples get to marry and not polyamorous people? Seems like there is a double standard here.
There's a stigma against polygamy due to it being used almost entirely as a way to abuse and imprison women and children. That's also ignoring the legal hurdles; for example, power of attorney gets tricky when there is more than one spouse. Same with inheritance.
> What bothers me the most is that so much time, effort and money is spent on something that is a rather insignificant issue.
You think it's insignificant because it doesn't affect you. However, for a lot of gay and lesbian couples, it's a huge issue in their lives for many reasons. The fact that you can't even imagine this being a serious issue for someone else is quite telling, and it's something all too common amongst people who argue against gay marriage.
You should take some time and look into yourself to see why you have such trouble empathizing with others.
"Separate but equal" when it comes to schools is very different than equality under the law; the latter being much easier to achieve and can be rectified by law when it falls short. Separate but equal in schools is intrinsically unequal, this is not true for civil unions. I know that the attempts to hitch gay marriage to the civil rights wagon is a stumbling block for some people.
Restricting marriage to pairs of opposite sex plainly discriminates on sex in the same way that restricting marriage to pairs of the same race discriminated on race. Who you are permitted to marry is determined by your race/sex.
Limiting marriage to pairs does not discriminate in the same way. It may or may not be an inappropriate restriction, but its not the same type of discrimination that is at issue with either the opposite-sex or the same-race restrictions, so there is no "double-standard" in eliminating either or both of those restrictions and not eliminating the restriction to pairs.