--- Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote: [re civil unions]
> And lastly, to remove all stigma and plant it firmly in the law,
we
> should
> encourage heterosexuals to get them.
The perfect case to encourage them might be Littleton v. Prange, in which the San Antonio district court, and the Fourth Court of Appeals upheld, said that what constituted a legal "man" and legal "woman" with the right to marry should be determined by the construct of one's DNA.
Heh, that'll confuse 'em, won't it.
When you consider that a fair portion of the population -between 5 and 7 percent, at least - do NOT have typical XX or XY markers, you've opened a whole bag'o worms in which it would be possible, technically, for a man who is presenting as a physical and emotional male and to have male gender characteristics to have XX markers, or a woman, who is presenting as a physical and emotional female and with female gender characteristics but with XXY, XXXX, XXYX or even XY... or a host of other combinations... to totally devastate conventional wisdom about using DNA as the bottom line of defining who is allowed to marry whom.
Go the purely physical presentation route of deciding who is and isn't allowed to marry, and you transgress upon a host of issues regarding transgenderism, which would include everyone from transsexuals to males who appear feminine to females who appear masculine.
The average Joe hetero just doesn't want to go there. But I doubt that Joe and Jane Hetero even know that these issues could be thrown on the table.
- Deborah R.
===== “If anybody can come back from the dead and write about it, it’s George Plimpton.” -Kurt Vonnegut, toasting the late literary legend at the Paris Review’s 50th-anniversary bash