[lbo-talk] Re: What's wrong with civil unions

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>[lbo-talk] Re: What's wrong with civil unions
>Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com, Fri Jul 2 20:58:59 PDT 2004
>
>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

I dare you Democrats to begin the culture war by challenging John 
Kerry to define civil union as an institution that grants *exactly* 
the same rights, benefits, and duties as marriage does, rather than 
as an institution that is 1049 federal rights short of equality to 
marriage that civil union is today.
-- 
Yoshie

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