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Originally Posted by Alecto
The focus on marriage is problematic in a number of ways, honestly. First of all, yes, unions for all (legally) and marriages for whoever your church wants to have 'em (religiously) WOULD qualify as "equality". It would also be such a major, major change (people are hung up on that word not just cause they don't want us to have it, but because they WANT their relationships to be special and superior) that I think it's regrettably unrealistic.
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However, I am cannot agree on one point here for the simple fact that any two people who fall in love behave as they they are special. Superior? That implies a great deal of ego. And not everyone who is in love thinks they are better than everyone else. My sense is that if human beings can be rather myopic and self-referential about their experiences. Does that mean that straight people believe that they must be 'better' than gay people? I don't see that. What I see is that straight folks can be freaked out by what they see as the 'ickiness' of gay sex. They judge everything according to their own desires.
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Originally Posted by Alecto
Aside from all that, there's a growing and dangerous mentality that once there's same sex marriage, everything is magically ok for queer people. Bam! We're equal! And this is incredibly untrue: there's the military issue to deal with, there's hate crimes, there's workplace and housing discrimination, not even getting into the criminal justice system and it's multitude of inadequacies (50% of transgender people will end up in jail for some amount of time: Something's wrong here). It's interesting to note that marriage only applies to a percentage of queer people (whereas we all need job and housing protection, we're all potential targets for hate crimes or the justice system itself), but it's the ones that have enough money that they don't need to worry about their job or housing (right now) that are directing the rights orgs.
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Now this is worthy of a great deal of attention. Of course you are right. Having gay marriage isn't going to stop gay people from being bashed, killed and thrown out of their house and fired from their jobs. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation will only change, I believe, when laws and education work together.
Too bad their isn't a Law of Love.
But oh...it's that tied up with marriage?