Props Yo

You know if you go to the CNN elections website and look at the results for president, Missouri is still uncalled. That’s 11 electoral votes…WHO’LL GET EM! McCain has the edge!

Heh heh heh…Anyhow, aside from president, Senators and House Representatives, other things were being voted on too. There were a bunch of ballot measures with endearing titles such as Prop 102, Prop 4, Amendment 48, question 2, and initiative 1,000. That’s a big initiative.

Since I have the floor of a blog more popular and credible than mine, I’ll take this opportunity to whine about a pet peeve of mine. The definition of marriage and the government’s involvement in it.

In California, the proposition of contention was a ban of gay marriage. In fact, a ban on gay marriage was on the ballots in three states and a ban on homosexual adoption in one. All passed including the one in super liberal land also known as California. What’s even more shocking to me than the fact that the bloody thing passed is that as the African Americans voted 90% in favour of electing a coloured president thus moving their civil rights movement and quest for equality further, they voted away the rights of an existing oppressed minority by a majority of 70% among their own race. While blacks favoured a black president overwhelmingly, they also supported abolishing the rights of married gay couples in the great majority.

Even more than simply defining marriage, prop-8 also determined whether or not gay couples would have access to the same rights and benefits that heterosexual married couples do.

There are so many things wrong with prop-8 that I can’t even really go on to list them. That would make this one heck of a boring entry and heck, I’m already sounding pretty dry. So far there has been no mention of fat people exploding at a distant fast food joint or rabid kittens intent on dominating Vancouver Island. I’m sorry but I’m not even going to mention those…again.

Prop-8 was well funded on both sides. Religious zealots and wing nuts urged their congregations to donate money to take away the marriage rights of gays lest we all catch their evil disease. Flower arrangers and truckers that normally keep to themselves for reasons best not mentioned at a truck stop diner rose to the defence of their brethren and hoped to defeat the measure that would rob them of the most basic rights enjoyed by married couples. Simple things such as inheritance rights or death benefits resulting from the loss of a partner.

History was written of course and prop-8 passed as a state constitutional amendment that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Of course this will see its day in the courts and the amendment will be declared unconstitutional federally and gays will get the right to marriage back but my own position is that prop-8 was a great idea…it was just completely misguided.

Here’s the straight dope on marriage. The word “marriage” is a religious term. It’s not a term that is only linked to civil law and in fact finds its origins in religious tradition and institutionalized acceptance of god and divinity. That was then…and for some reason, we dragged it into now. Now, marriage is an interchangeable term and that creates a lot of confusion and havoc. Marriage may as easily refer to a civil contract between two people as it may refer to a divine endorsement of the relationship that exists between two people. It is because of this interchangeable nature and solid connection to millennia old religious traditions that when two men are married, a god bag who can’t get over a badly interpreted part of some dusty old book will get upset. You can never make gay marriage acceptable to all because the state is handing out a license that strongly implies (if not outrights confers) a religious endorsement for a relationship.

The state needs to get out of the marriage business and prop-8 in California should have been asking whether or not the state should even be involved in giving out marriage licenses as opposed to domestic partnership licenses. You can never escape the religious connection to the term “marriage” and so you can never make this a dispassionate issue of civil law. People of all types are deserving of equal treatment as human beings, that much is simply true. To solve the inequity that exists regarding homosexual couples wanting the same rights and responsibilities that come with being married, the government should immediately stop conferring “marriage licenses” to people and give them something like civil union licenses or something.

If you read my blog, you’ll know that I hate the government and would like to see it one day disappear from this wonderful thing we call the planet earth. In the meantime though, I think it would at least be a step in the right direction if we could only have people stop demanding that the state define their relationships.

Ask yourself for just a second, do you really need the government to define the relationship you have with your significant other via a term with undeniable ties to religious tradition?