Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

The Appellate Division (the second-highest court in New York) has reaffirmed that New York state recognizes marriages, including same-sex marriages, performed elsewhere. In the specific case, the question was about benefits for an employees wife: the two women got married in Ontario. This is in line with a century of previous rulings, some of them affirming that other marriages that New York would not itself solemnize, were valid here if performed elsewhere.

“The Legislature may decide to prohibit the recognition of same-sex marriages solemnized abroad,” a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court ruled unanimously in rejecting a 2006 lower court decision. “Until it does so, however, such marriages are entitled to recognition in New York.”

For more than a century, the court noted, New York State has recognized valid out-of-state marriages. Moreover, it said that the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest judicial body, has said the Legislature may enact laws recognizing same-sex marriages. “In our view, the Court of Appeals thereby indicated that the recognition of plaintiff’s marriage is not against the public policy of New York,” the court held.

This state is unlikely to prohibit such recognition, even though the majority leader of the state senate is, for now, blocking a vote on the same-sex marriage bill. The assembly passed it last year, and I expect would do so again, and Gov. Spitzer has said he will sign it if/when it reaches him.

State and New York City agencies had already been recognizing such marriages for the purposes of employee benefits--when Spitzer was attorney general, he made that policy, citing "full faith and credit"--but this goes further. A few New Yorker residents had marriages to same-sex partners recognized because they were legally married in Massachusetts, but that state is currently granting marriage licenses to same-sex pairs only if at least one is a Massachusetts resident. There's no such limitation on getting married in Canada, and Montreal and Ontario are right next door to us.

For All Who Feel That Marriage Has Been Destroyed By Gayfolk Getting Married: Put your money where your mouth is and dissolve yours forthwith.

If not, well, then shut up, as you're not walking the walk. —stealthpup

Where is my raging apocalypse? This is what I want to know. Where is the social meltdown? The moral depravity? I was promised an apocalypse, dammit. What am I supposed to do with all these tubs of margarine and confetti and kazoos?

There have been more than 3,500 same-sex-marriage ceremonies in San Francisco so far. Hundreds more are just now kicking up a storm in Oregon and in beautifully rebellious little burgs around New York state. And, yet, nothing. No chaos. No rain of terror. Not even a lousy heat wave. Sigh.—Mark Morford

These are a few things I've posted elsewhere recently, and want in my own journal. I'll probably make posts like this periodically, now that I've thought of this approach.

In suggestions:

If I wanted random people to know my gender, I could include it explicitly in my userinfo (as I could my age, where I went to high school, how many teeth I have, and any number of other facts that some people consider important).

Anyone to whom it matters is free to ask. I'll probably answer (on all of those points) if it seems that they have a reason to want to know. (If we have no relationship, online or otherwise, you almost certainly don't have a reason I'd recognize as valid.)

But one of the things I like about LiveJournal is that it doesn't treat gender as being the key variable. I don't go as far as the friend of mine whose userinfo includes the explicit request that those of us who know them in real life not out their biological gender. I just think of random users as "she" when I have no evidence (userpics, handles) otherwise--and I know that I sometimes guess wrong, even when I do have what seems like plausible evidence.

What I've discovered is that it usually doesn't matter: not when we're interacting online, through the written word.

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In yonmei's journal, in response to someone who was waving a dictionary around as an argument against the Massachusetts court ruling on same-sex marriage:

Fine, I walked into the next room and got the dictionary down. It defines marriage first as the institution, then as a union of that sort between a man and a woman, and then several other things, including "homosexual marriage", corporate mergers, and on to pinochle. The actual useful information is at "marry", which uses the terms "husband" and "wife", but nowhere specifies "husband and wife".

Besides, modern dictionaries are descriptive and draw almost entirely on published written English. That is, all your stack of books [assuming they all agree] proves is that, as of whenever they were published, that's how the word "marriage" was being used in print in whatever part of the English-speaking world they were trying to cover. (I'd guess the US, UK, or Canada, rather than New Zealand, Kenya, India, Jamaica....)

Further, I believe your argument forces the conclusion that the noun "marriage" means something different in Toronto--where authorities have declared such marriages to be as legal as those between people of different sexes--than it does in New York. Alas, I don't remember which box I put my copy of Chambers in.

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In yonmei's journal, where she's dissecting Orson Scott Card's anti-gay-marriage screed; this is tangential to anything Yonmei wrote, but a bit of the Card piece caught my eye there:

Ah, yes, Clintonesque. The right-wing's bogeyman, a heterosexual woman who has her own life, career, and opinions, and who stuck by her husband and child when they and their buddies told the world that he'd had an affair.

That's a rhetorical as well as logical hole in the argument: the Clintons are still together, both seem happy, and raised a child well. Furthermore, Senator Clinton answers constituent email (she wrote back yesterday to assure me that she "does not support" that homophobic constitutional amendment), which is one of those boring but necessary structural and communication things that help keep a civilization together.

Okay. New York has a Democratic presidential primary tomorrow.

I will vote: this is given. But I haven't decided who to vote for. Kerry and Edwards have both said they're against gay marriage, so it's going to be a bit of holding my nose regardless. I'm tempted to vote for Kerry, but that's partly because I'm sick of the whole "only a southerner can win" which seems to come down to the assumption that southerners are too prejudiced to vote for northerners, whereas the reverse isn't true, so we have to cater to their [perceived] prejudices.

Policy reasons--that is, the candidates' stated position or records--for voting for any of the remaining Democratic candidates are hereby solicited. Post early; we generally vote in the morning.

"Next year won't be the best time, and the year after won't be. There's midyear elections, mayoral elections and governor elections. There will never be the best time. It's the same script."—Gavin Newsom

The Netherlands, Ontario, San Francisco....and Cambodia? Sihanouk is a constitutional monarch, so it's not clear how much practical effect this announcement will have.

The text is here, if you're up to reading handwritten French.

My friends list is full of entries consisting of a rainbow-colored bar and the text "marriage is love". It's a link, and if you click on it, it's to someone's journal where we're urged to add it to our own journals to indicate our "support for gay marriage" (by which I assume zie means same-sex marriage).

I strongly believe that people should be allowed to marry whom they want, assuming the other person or people also want to marry them. (The entry linked to specifically says "two people who love each other".)

But marriage isn't love. Marriage is, depending on your viewpoint, one or more of the following: a legal contract; a legal status recognized by the government, which affects taxation and inheritance; an arrangement between the people who choose to marry; or a sacrament between people and their gods.

It's not love. It's not even romantic and/or sexual love. [I'll assume that the slogan is intended to mean "eros", and we'll skip the bits about parental love, love of friends, and love of music, chocolate, and sushi.] If marriage were love, there'd be no need to be agitating for the right to have same-sex marriages recognized, because either they'd be automatic—you love each other and "poof!" you're married, no need for license, clergy, or ceremony—or they wouldn't be needed, because people wouldn't love until they married, and nobody would feel deprived because they couldn't marry someone of the same gender.

It doesn't work that way. Not everyone marries for love, of course, even in the modern West. But those who do, fall in love before they stand up and say "I do." Some, but not all, of the people who marry for reasons other than love come to love the people they're married to.

Marriage is not a condition for love, nor is it a guarantee that love will last.

I do appreciate the support and the good wishes, especially from my heterosexual friends. But there are better slogans out there. I've tossed one into the box below, if you want to see what's behind the link.

Marriage is a human right.

lysana and a number of her friends are my co-spouses for the next week, as part of a subversive attempt to support marriage.