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by eulenteufel
1984 days ago
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Not allowing homosexual people the right to marry is very much not "live and let live". There is a whole lot of married heterosexual people who do not and will not have kids, for all kinds of reason. If the US would like to encourage/support people getting kids they could legislate support for that. What remains is not allowing homosexual couples the same treatment as heterosexual couples, because heterosexual couples are "special" for religious and traditionalist reasons. This is very strong identity politics, but from conservative side and very much contrary to the spirit of "live and let live". It strikes me how many conservatives do not realize that they very much support identity politics and then go raging against it the next moment. Treating people equally should be the default and is the result of not caring about identity in the first place. There are some good arguments that can be made for identity politics after that, but the case against equal treatment should have to be a really strong one. Traditions and religious feelings do not suffice for that in my opinions. Even when the absolute numbers of homosexual marriages is very small that doesn't justify not caring about unequal treatment. Imagine if we would tax all identical twins 5% more than everybody else. This nonsensical unequal treatment would clearly be unacceptable injustice while the percentage of people that are affected is still very small. On top of that there are social explanations why homosexual people would be less likely to marry. Marriage has long been a religious and traditionalist institution and has been used to discriminate against them. It can be hard to identify with such an institution and I know queer people who would not like get married because of that. If marriage had been available to everybody since as long as they can remember considering marriage would perhaps come more natural. |
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I think there were conservatives who realized this, and this was the reason why "the state should get out of marriage entirely" was pushed as a solution. That too was shot down harshly. At that point I personally gave up I think. It's like abortion...the issue is not "should a woman have a right to it," the issue is that now we live in a society where premarital sex is the norm and abortion is just restoring equity to the new norm.
The real numbers..look, it was literally hilarious to me that the same people who were arguing "marriage was only a piece of paper" in their own lives suddenly turned around and became strict advocates of it in the lives of a small minority of people. If religious people had said "okay, we accept gay people, but they need to follow the same teachings we do-be the husband of one husband, no premarital sex, and no sex outside marriage" everyone here would have railed against marriage as a tool of straight fascism or something.
I'm not meaning the low numbers means its should be revoked though. If anything it's the reverse. We did all that trouble, all that hate and strife...can you all please use it at least? When you fight desperately for the right for something, and in reality barely anyone seems to use it, what was the fighting done for?