Marriage equality vs. gay equality

May 30 2008LawsuitsDavid Benkof Comments

My most recent column, Marriage equality for some postpones gay equality for all, is up at the Web site of the Boulder, Colorado Daily Camera. It’s also running in several Scripps newspapers on the east coast of Florida.

The conclusion:

I totally understand that for many lesbians and gay men, the ego boost of having the governments of California and Massachusetts declare their relationships completely equal feels terrific. I haven’t forgotten the loneliness and stigma of growing up gay. But it is selfish, unfair, and even cruel for LGBT people in very progressive states to insist on retaining a purely semantic change that endangers the rights and freedoms of gays and lesbians in places where homophobia is much stronger and where the protections Americans would readily support are desperately needed.

1 comment:

  1. John Howard, 31. May 2008, 18:24

    Hi David,

    What is needed is a distinction in rights for same-sex couples that is reflected in the difference between marriage and civil union. I think that as long as they explicitly do not give the couple the right to conceive together, then they cannot be said to be like marriage or giving the “rights of marriage” and so can be passed even in those 18 states you mention. (I’m not sure the exact language of those state’s bans, but usually they only prohibit legal recognition that offers “the rights of marriage”.

    So, what do you think of “conception rights” as a distinction? If we enacted a cloning law like the one in Missouri, then people would only have a right to conceive with someone of the other sex, and same-sex couples would be prohibited from using various technologies to attempt to conceive children together. That should be recognized as a major distinction in rights based on the sex of the person one chooses to be with.

    There’s lots of jurisprudence that establishes that marriages have a right to conceive children using their own gametes (Lawrence, most recently) but it wouldn’t hurt for Congress to establish that no married couple may be prohibited from conceiving using their own genes. And also, Congress needs to get around to banning cloning, and the best way is by banning all forms of creating people that do not join an egg of a woman and a sperm of a man, like Missouri did. Next, Congress should say that it will recognize state Civil Unions that are defined as being exactly like marriage except not granting the right to conceive using the couple’s own gametes for all federal purposes as if they were marriages.

    What do you think? It is the distinction you are looking for, and what the majority of the people want, even if they don’t realize that conception rights has anything to do with it. I think it gets at the underlying reason why people freak out about gay marriage - they know that marriage implies a right to have children.

    See my website for information about the research going on to do same-sex conception.

    Thanks

     

Write a comment: