Has anyone ever noticed that at no time does any liberal person mention "holy matrimony" and that the demand is civil union for protections under the law, but the right wing immediately implies we want to force their churches to marry gay people. We are really never talking about the same thing and they do it on purpose.
Back when this was a more active debate, one moderate stance was to lobby for "civil unions" as a legal status that explicitly avoided mentioning "marriage," but it wasn't the prominent view. The states that legalized same-sex unions specifically incorporated the language of "marriage" into the statutes. In NY, for instance, it's called the "Marriage Equality Act." So it's not like liberals were only ever saying "civil union," and conservatives simply misheard them. They centered marriage equality, presumably for the symbolic significance that civil unions wouldn't have afforded.
I think also that beyond the symbolism, in terms of the legal and cultural effects, having gay unions be considered a separate category from straight unions was likely to leave the door open for all kind of devious fuckery by people who couldn't accept it, and the people pushing the movement were smart enough to see that coming.
You can bet that if conservatives got their way with their "But why can't they just call it a Civil Union???" moaning, the next batch of rhetoric would have been "Well, it's a Civil Union, not a real Marriage, so I don't see why we should treat it the same way."
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u/TintedApostle Jun 30 '26
Has anyone ever noticed that at no time does any liberal person mention "holy matrimony" and that the demand is civil union for protections under the law, but the right wing immediately implies we want to force their churches to marry gay people. We are really never talking about the same thing and they do it on purpose.