Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney on gay marriage
CommentsAm I the only one who is confused by Bill Clinton’s and Dick Cheney’s language when they each came out in favor of gay marriage, Clinton just this last week? Here are the quotes:
Cheney: “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish.”
Clinton: “I personally support people doing what they want to do. I think it’s wrong for someone to stop someone else from doing that.”
It’s as if the traditional-marriage crowd was trying to pass laws stopping gay weddings, not to keep the government from recognizing same-sex marriages. The latter is the issue we’re debating.
Yes DB. . .there is a difference in ‘trying to pass laws stopping gay weddings’ and defeating legislation that would acknowledge the partnerships of SSM.
Action taken to pass laws to discriminate is no different than action to defeat legislation that would promote equity, inclusion, and liberty.
as for quotes: I like this from the NAACP celebration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2epf5G3v3o
sorry, meant to say there is no difference. . .
From their choices of language, I can only conclude that Cheney and Clinton also think polygamous and incestous (not to mention forced, and underage) marriages are A-OK.
Oh Marty, you forgot my favorite, beastiality. . . what is interesting to me is the particular use of your Gorilla image as your avatar/icon. Let’s see Iowa, Mass, Conn yuppers I see those clauses for polygamy and incest (even forced and underage maariages are listed in those state laws.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. Never would have seen the light without your profound powers of illumination.
DB: “Am I the only one who is confused by Bill Clinton’s and Dick Cheney’s language when they each came out in favor of gay marriage, Clinton just this last week?”
I think you’re the only one who’s confused. “Marriage” and most of its synonyms or near-synonyms, including “union”, are used interchangeably for the ceremony and the state that prevails after the ceremony, because most of the time there’s no interesting difference - you have to pass through one to get to the other. If Clinton and Cheney had meant to single out ceremonies they would have said “marriage ceremonies”, or, as you did, “weddings”.
That said, it’s not as anti-SSM campaigners don’t, among other issues, have a big problem with gay weddings specifically, precisely because they’re what you have to pass through to get to the state of being in a same-sex marriage. You’re the one who was insisting on the right of wedding caterers and photographers to refuse to serve gay weddings. And one of the very few ways that California civil unions differ from marriage is that there’s no ceremony, precisely to appease potential celebrants, caterers, photographers etc, who would accept on sufferance a gay quasi-marriage that they had to treat like an official one, but drew the line at a gay quasi-wedding.
Cheney did not say he favored the merger of gay union and marriage. Indeed, I think he meant that he would not favor passing legislation to change the DOMA.
When he said union and arrangement, he referred to pesonal choice and did not refer to issuing licenses for gay union.
Gay union and marriage are not the same thing, except in the minds of SSMers who have failed to distinguish SSM from marriage. Indeed, they have great difficulty distinguishing marriage from nonmarriage. They point to licensing but not to the essentials that merit the special status of the social institution of marriage. So for them the license is the thing that distinguishes, rather than recognizes the distinctiveness of marriage. This circular thinking of SSMers makes it very difficult to communicate clearly on this issue.
Trying to use the terms of SSMers lands one in quicksand. They don’t mean much of anything. Instead of referring to unions or to “gay marriage”, we should insist that SSMers distinguish the relationship type they have in mind from the rest of the nonmarriage category. When they can do that, then, we can compare with marriage.
Marriage has a core meaning; SSMers reject that core meaning and disparage it as bigoted. So we already know that SSM is not marriage. It is something else. Something that appears to have very little societal meaning. And so it is probably really just some vague notion — something that is private and without the weight that a special status (on par with marital status) would require. Marriage has heftiness that SSM lacks. Actually, it becomes more and more clear that SSMers strategically deny that marriage has a core meaning because SSM lacks a core meaning. So the idea is to make marriage as meaningless as SSM.
Yet when it comes to SSM, which they distinguish only through gay identity politics, they offer no good reason to treat SSM differently from the rest of the nonmarriage category — a very broad category that is not defined by sexual orientation, much less by identiy politics.
Sometimes when a public person attempts to use the confused terminology of SSMers the result is a muddle. I’ve read and listened to Cheney’s recent remarks on this and his position has not changed. He opposes the merger of SSM with marriage but he also leaves it open to the people of each state to decide through the political means available. People, he said, should have a shot at that.
The SSM campaign has tried to spin McCain as favoring “gay marriage” just because he disfavored a federal marriage amendment. But his position is predicated on DOMA and his view of marriage prompted him to publicly endorse the Arizona state marriage amendment.
The SSM campaign tried to do similair spin on Rudy Giuliani’s view on “domestic partnership” versus marriage. Expect more of that to arise out of this fudging of the terminology of both marriage and … whatever it is that SSMers mean by “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” or “gay union”.
Cheerio,
Chairm Ohn
The lack of a ceremony for domestic partnership status in CA is due more to the concern about the state government promoting a nonmarital alternative (or competition). Man-woman twosomes can be eligible for domestic partnership.
This was designed to accomodate older people who chose not to marry because of financial penalities produced by government.
But the SSM campaign expropriated domestic partnership. They pressed to rapidly expand a limited domestic partnership status. They pushed for a merger in all but name. And then they pushed for the name as well — as MB acknowledged in his previous comment. It is a political strategic rather than an argument in favor of whatever SSM is supposed to mean.
So, as originally understood, domestic partnership was not a merger with marriage and a marriage-like ceremony was not appropriate to the license.
I suppose that the low rate of participation in domestic partnership is some sort of a boycott of an anti-gay strategy, as per the usual pro-SSM spinmeisters. Predictably, the so-called stepping stone of domestic partnership has been picked up by SSMers everywhere as a weapon with which to attack the supposedly pro-gay compromise that produced domestic partnership in the first place. That’s how the rapid expansion of domestic partnership was sold, politically, within the legislative forum.
The CA judiciary managed to remove the mask from this stepping stone strategy. SSMers seek to replace marriage with a specious substitute. SSM = Specious Substitute of Marriage. The merger in that state finds a very low common denominator such that the term “gay marriage” means whatever the individual chooses it to mean. And that destroys the common language needed to allow for clear communication.
That’s the problem that you see, David, in the recent remarks of Cheney and Clinton. Obama is playing the pro-SSM game in this regard as he says one thing but means another. What he actually means, when it comes down to taking action, is anyone’s guess. The vaguness of the pro-SSM terminology has set the stage for Obama’s intellectual dishonesty on the subject of marriage.
“I think that freedom means freedom for everyone,” replied the former V.P. “As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don’t support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis. … But I don’t have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that.” Dick Cheney Speaking at the National Press Club for the Gerald R. Ford Foundation journalism awards.
Any kind of arrangement does not translate into treating marriage as the equivalent of SSM.
A federal statute to change DOMA was at question. He said he did not support that.
DOMA protects the state-by-state basis of regulating marriage.
People ought to get a shot at trying to merge nonmarriage with marriage at the state level. He had no problem with that approach.
If he wanted to say he was in favor of merging SSM with marriage, he would have plainly stgated it that way. I fhe wanted to say that he supported the repeal of DOMA, he would have said that plainly. He did neither. He is a federalist who supports the state-by-state approach via the democratic process.
That he acknowledged his daughter is to be expected of a father. He grimaced but he was prepared for the question and he answered it diplomatically given that he disagrees with the position of his daughter on that particular issue.
CO: “People ought to get a shot at trying to merge nonmarriage with marriage at the state level. He had no problem with that approach.”
Exactly. But then he’s a states’-rightist. As far as he’s concerned, there is nothing but the state level. So he’s certainly not supporting your point that there’s some core meaning to marriage that would be violated if it were expanded to include SSM. Mind you he’s probably not a states’-rightist for any better reason that he’s a member of a political party that has embraced the Southern Strategy and has been using states’ rights as a dog-whistle to racist southern whites. And he’s a psychopath and a war criminal. So it’s not as if I particularly value his support. But for what little it’s worth, he’s supporting me and Rusty to the extent his cramped little world view allows.