On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, DeborahSRogers wrote:
> Everything or nothing, depending on how you define "civil union."
Exactly. And there is no reason at all you can't define it as the legal equivalent of marriage. You could even amend the DOMA to do that, reserving marriage to hets, and defining civil unions as same-sex, and saying that the term "spouses" designated by either would be equivalent in all rights and duties in all federal laws and regulations. It would be hard to oppose. Bush himself said he was for it.
There are several advantages to such a strategy even if (perhaps especially if) you think the ultimate desired end state is gay marriage.
1) The majority of Americans are already for it.
2) The backlash it would generate would force that majority to define itself as progressive.
3) It would divide conservatives and unite progressives, weakening them and strengthening us, where gay marriage does the opposite.
4) It would make progressives the defenders of family, taking that arrow out of their quiver.
5) It would force conservatives to emphasize that they are for discrimination, against equality, for intolerance, and for letting religion dictate what goes on in our private lives -- all things that are unAmerican, and repulsive to the majority, and which would further push the political imaginaire to the left.
5) It would create facts on the ground in the form of families that could never be torn asunder. They would gradually grow until they entangled every institution in society.
6) It would be so be called marriage anyway. People would talk about long- term gay couples as married because they already do it now. It would simply increase the scope of their visibility. People would even have weddings to go with them. The unitarian church I went to was having them in the 1970s.
7) By specifically protecting homosexuals in law, it would basically make opposing homosexuality illegal
7) Eventually, for all those reasons, gay marriage would become such a normal part of life that get the words in the law changed would be like changing the sodomy law. It would seem like an anachronism.
It would take decades for all this to happen, but that's the whole point. A culture war is a campaign that goes on for decades. That's what happened with civil rights and abortion rights. That's what will happen gay marriage rights. It seems absurd to imagine a culture war in any other time frame. So the question is not how do win the battle, nor what do we want most. The question is, how do we win the war. You do that by planning for the counterattack you know will come. You do it by taking the the strategic moral heights. And you do that by defining the frame in a such a way that places a majority on your side, and which defines what you want as quintessentially American.
Michael