Honestly, now that Obama is the nominee........

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

. . . Also, as far as property rights and inheritance rights go, you can own anything as "tenants in common" or any other form of title you choose where the other party gets the property upon your death. Also, writing a good will would take care of most of the issues you mention. Inheritance is another thing the government should stay the hell out of too. What right does the government have to say who I can give my stuff to when I die? If I want to create my own dynasty, why shouldn't I be allowed to?

Well, the govt. says it all the time. On the order of 1,400 legal rights are conferred upon married couples in the U.S. Typically these are composed of about 400 state benefits and over 1,000 federal benefits. Among them are the rights to:

joint parenting;

joint adoption;

joint foster care, custody, and visitation (including non-biological parents); status as next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions where one partner is too ill to be competent;

joint insurance policies for home, auto and health;

dissolution and divorce protections such as community property and child support;

immigration and residency for partners from other countries;

inheritance automatically in the absence of a will;

joint leases with automatic renewal rights in the event one partner dies or leaves the house or apartment;

inheritance of jointly-owned real and personal property through the right of survivorship (which avoids the time and expense and taxes in probate); benefits such as annuities, pension plans, Social Security, and Medicare; spousal exemptions to property tax increases upon the death of one partner who is a co-owner of the home;

veterans' discounts on medical care, education, and home loans; joint filing of tax returns;

joint filing of customs claims when traveling;

wrongful death benefits for a surviving partner and children;

bereavement or sick leave to care for a partner or child;

decision-making power with respect to whether a deceased partner will be cremated or not and where to bury him or her;

crime victims' recovery benefits;

loss of consortium tort benefits;

domestic violence protection orders;

judicial protections and evidentiary immunity;

Federal and state benefits like Social Security survivir benefits

and more

Most of these legal and economic benefits cannot be privately arranged or contracted for. For example, absent a legal (or civil) marriage, there is no guaranteed joint responsibility to the partner and to third parties (including children) in such areas as child support, debts to creditors, taxes, etc. In addition, private employers and institutions often give other economic privileges and other benefits (special rates or memberships) only to married couples. And, of course, when people cannot marry, they are denied all the emotional and social benefits and responsibilities of marriage as well.

Moreover, here is an interesting article:

Why This Is A Serious Civil Rights Issue

When gay people say that this is a civil rights issue, we are referring to matters of civil justice, which often can be quite serious - and can have life-damaging, even life-threatening consequences.

One of these is the fact that in most states, we cannot make medical decisions for our partners in an emergency. Instead, the hospitals are usually forced by state laws to go to the families who may have been estranged from us for decades, who are often hostile to us, and can and frequently do, totally ignore our wishes regarding the treatment of our partners. If a hostile family wishes to exclude us from the hospital room, they may legally do so in most states. It is even not uncommon for hostile families to make decisions based on their hostility -- with results consciously intended to be as inimical to the interests of the patient as possible! Is this fair?

Upon death, in many cases, even very carefully drawn wills and durable powers of attorney have proven to not be enough if a family wishes to challenge a will, overturn a custody decision, or exclude us from a funeral or deny us the right to visit a partner's hospital bed or grave. As survivors, estranged families can, in nearly all states, even sieze a real estate property that a gay couple may have been buying together for many years, quickly sell it at the largest possible loss, and stick the surviving partner with all the remaining mortgage obligations on a property that partner no longer owns, leaving him out on the street, penniless. There are hundreds of examples of this, even in many cases where the gay couple had been extremely careful to do everything right under current law, in a determined effort to protect their rights. Is this fair?

If our partners are arrested, we can be compelled to testify against them or provide evidence against them, which legally married couples are not forced to do. In court cases, a partner's testimony can be simply ruled irrelevant as heresay by a hostile judge, having no more weight in law than the testimony of a complete stranger. If a partner is jailed or imprisoned, visitation rights by the partner can, in most cases, can be denied on the whim of a hostile family and the cooperation of a homophobic judge, unrestrained by any law or precedent. Conjugal visits, a well-established right of heterosexual married couples in some settings, are simply not available to gay couples. Is this fair?

These are far from being just theoretical issues; they happen with surprising frequency. Almost any older gay couple can tell you numerous horror stories of friends and acquaintences who have been victimized in such ways. One couple I know uses the following line in the "sig" lines on their email: "...partners and lovers for 40 years, yet still strangers before the law." Why, as a supposedly advanced society, should we continue to tolerate this kind of injustice?

These are all civil rights issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with the ecclesiastical origins of marriage; they are matters that have become enshrined in state laws by legislation or court precedent over the years in many ways that exclude us from the rights that legally married couples enjoy and even consider their constitutional right. This is why we say it is very much a serious civil rights issue; it has nothing to do with who performs the ceremony, whether it is performed in a church or courthouse or the local country club, or whether an announcement about it is accepted for publication in the local newspaper.

____________________________________________

So, to say (general speaker not really you though you implied it) that all rights can be done by contract is untrue. Moreover, why should gay and unmarried straight people have to pay thousands of dollars to obtain some, but not all, of what married people get for free based solely on a religious argument?

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

Maryland's law concerning interacial marriage also has nothing to do with Republicans. You forget that it was a republican congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the help of a Democratic President. While the Republicans in Congress were working on this act, Bobby Kennedy was busy wiretapping Martin Luther King because he thought he was a threat to national security!

To answer your last question, I don't think the government should have any say in marriage, except for age of consent laws, but that's a criminal matter anyway.

My point had nothing to do the R's. I was refuting (successfully) your statement about marriage liscenses and the prohibition of marriages in general.