“My partner [Mark Andrew] and I look forward to taking full advantage of the new law,” Robinson told the Associated Press….[Civil Unions] “moves us one step closer to the American promise to all its citizens of equality under the law,” Robinson said.
Dawn Touzin, NHFTM Board Member
“Sometimes you’ve just got to live long enough. I never thought I’d see the day. It’s just been such a struggle. It shouldn’t be this hard just to want to be in a relationship. This is a huge step and I’m just so proud of New Hampshire today.”
“Governor Lynch and the state of New Hampshire have shown true leadership in the ongoing battle against discrimination that so many Americans face every day in this country. By recognizing that committed same-sex couples should have the same rights and responsibilities as other citizens, New Hampshire has taken an important step in the name of two of the most fundamental American ideals — fairness and equal rights.”
I applaud Governor Lynch and the New Hampshire Legislature for passing the Civil Unions legislation, ensuring that all couples enjoy the same rights and freedoms regardless of their sexual orientation,” said Dodd. “With two young daughters of my own, I want to ensure that they grow up in a world that is free of discrimination. That is why I supported Civil Unions in my home state of Connecticut and it is why I am proud to see John Lynch and the State Legislature doing the right thing here in New Hampshire.”
…not opening the civil unions to heterosexuals is the fatal flaw in the plan to create separate but equal unions. As long as there is an A track and a B track there is discrimination and our system will eventually do away with said discrimination. So, thank you NH for throwing us a bone that we can use to pick the lock when the time is right!
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There aren’t different tracks, there are different options. The different names aren’t about sexual preferences but what the sexual make-up of that particular couple is. The same guy can marry a female, divorce, enter a CU with a male, end that, marry a female again, etc. Gene Robinson’s a formerly married New Hampshirite, isn’t he? Everyone is eligble for both marriage and CU, and should be. The flaw in these civil unions is that they give “all the rights” of marriage, making it legally questionable why there are two names.
Mixed-sex couples (1 man + 1 woman) may not obtain a civil union anywhere in the nation.
….eluding you again I see.
All people must have full and equal rights. We shouldn’t let anyone believe that they don’t have a right to marry and conceive with a person of the other sex, just as Laurel shouldn’t spread the idea that some people don’t have a right to enter into a civil union. Gene Robinson is not the only person who has had both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. We all have the right to have relationships with people of both sexes.
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As to both-sex relationships being denied the option of civil union, I wouldn’t have made that restriction. The civil unions I’ve been proposing would be an option for every couple, but they wouldn’t give conception rights to any couple, so a brother and sister could get them, or a platonic couple that wasn’t sleeping together.
…I who am trying to create separate right Mr. I Want to Pretend Gay People Are the Genetic Criminals of the Future So I Can Demand Separate and Certainly Not Equal Status for Them Howard. That is all you.
Why cannot I and two other consenting adults, one male and one female unite in a CU or a marriage? What is applicable to you is now denied to me. Why? Are you on a higher echelon of legal standing than I? I demand my right as a citizen under the state and US Constitution. To whom and how many that I wish to marry is no one’s business but mine.
…the slippery slope polygamy argument. Same sex marriage is not synonymous with polygamy. It, like opposite sex marriage is monogamy which is what the law allows and supports. Polygamy is too complicated for the state to administer even if it were so inclined. If three people are married are they all married to eachother or are two of them married to the third but not eachother? What responsibility does an additional spouse have to the children of others in the relationship? Can one person unilaterally bring others into the marriage, can all agree to bring others in, is the marriage class closed when the union is originally created? So on and so an…too many questions and possible permutations to consider. Once one spends more that 2 seconds thinking about the reality of legaliing polygamy and why it is impracticable for it to ever be recognized by the state the scary slippery slope argumnet dissolves completely. Nice try, but as I stated above, same sex marriage is still monogomy so if one frames marriage as a legally recongnized monogomous union between consenting adults the polygamy argument falls away completely.
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The “here come the scary perverts” argument is so intelectually weak it makes perfect sence that it was you who introduced it in this thread.
Polygamy is the most traditional form of marriage, the Old Testament form, one man marries as many women as he can afford. Polygamy is pretty much always patriarchal, all the rights belong to the man and the women are his property. As practiced by the illicit breakaway mormon-fundamentalist-separatists it is associated with forcing underaged girls into nonconsensual sex. Polygamy is not about sexual freedom, it’s about sexual slavery. Equality of the sexes (and sexual orientation) are the antithesis of polygamy. For those who want to have multiple sex partners, there’s a simple solution–don’t marry anybody, stay single, find other singles to screw around with (at your own risk, of course).
The US Supreme Court has already ruled that government can forbid polygamy, in REYNOLDS v. U.S., 98 U.S. 145 (1878) . Scroll down to section 5 As to the defence of religious belief or duty. The case involved a federal statute that forbade polygamy in regions of the country in which the federal government was empowered to exercise plenary power, in this case the Utah Territory.
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In the opinion in the case, the US SupCt addressed two issues, namely, the issue that it infringed the Mormon right to free exercise of religion under the 1st amendment, and the second issue being inferentially an equal protection claim. The US SupCt essentially dismissed the free exercise claim on the basis that one can believe what he wants to believe, but he doesn’t necessarily have the right to act on those beliefs.
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The US SupCt also dismissed the equal protection claim on basically the same argument described above by Alice. Read the fifth to last paragraph of the cited section 5.
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Outlawing of same sex marriage has never been upheld by the US SupCt, so polygamy advocates have a much longer row to hoe to get prohibitions on polygamy held unconstitutional under the 14th amendment.
Since then, we’ve learned about the right to privacy, the right to be free from unwarranted government intrusion into marriage, the sweet mystery of life, etc. Polygamous families exist and are conceiving children.
I said above “The different names aren’t about sexual preferences but what the sexual make-up of that particular couple is.”
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I should have said the different names are whether the couple has conception rights together or not. As I said in a later comment, a brother and sister ought to be able to enter into a civil union, without conception rights. And they should have the security and protections of their union being recognized as binding and prohibiting them from marrying someone else, even in another state, if they should meet someone they want to marry. There’s a Zablocki issue here, in that nothing can temporarily prohibit a person from marrying except being already married (unpaid child-support cannot prohibit marriage), but as long as the Civil Unions can be exited from with full marriage-equivilent protections for the jilted spouse reasonably quickly, just like a marriage can, then it should be fine.
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If they do dissolve their union, just as if it were a marriage, they would have the right to enter another exclusive relationship. And if they want conception rights, they have to be a man and a woman. They don’t have to ask for conception rights. If their conception would be unethical, they can’t marry, they can only civil-unionize. If a man and a woman civil unionize, they are not allowed to have sex together, because they didn’t get conception rights.
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But they can all still say they are marrying, no one is going to arrest anyone for just calling it a marriage, as long as they don’t do anything that might result in their conceiving a child together.
If you get a civil union in VT or CT, the other one will recognize it. Presumably, full faith and credit on civil unions carries over to NH too, in the absence of any specific language in the legislation against it. But now, if a male-female couple gets a union in VT or CT, NH won’t recognize it? Or will they? I could see the interpretation going either way. I could see it landing in court. Weird choice on NH’s part.
so it’s not just a NH thing, it’s “universal”. it is proof that CUs are a ghetto institution. don’t want any heteros slumming it with the queers, dontchaknow.
But that’s a few more sandwiches than you’d get with no loaf at all. Good for NH and Governor Lynch.
When they repeal DOMA, they should enact a new law to somehow help ensure that state civil unions are recognized throughout the country as if they were marriages, provided the civil unions are defined as marriage without conception rights. I think if the federal government recognized them as marriage, it would bring the states around together. Then they could say “all states will recognize another state’s civil union as if it were marriage, but without conception rights.”
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In what ways do states “recognize” marriages, anyhow? They treat them like their own marriages. They allow activities, and hold spouses to the obligations of spouses, even if the marriage was entered in another state. They don’t allow couples married in another state to get out of their marriage.
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If I remember correctly: Virginia charged the Lovings for going out of state to enter an illegal marriage, not for fornicating, even though the arresting officers said they “didn’t recognize that here” when Richard Loving pointed to their marriage certificate on the bedroom wall when cops came in at 2:30 in the morning. The cops were wrong, states DID recognize each other’s marriages, and the charge was changed to the “going out of state” charge. The actually didn’t need to catch them in bed together to charge them with fornicating, because they were actually allowed to conceive. They were married and Virginia recognized it. They could have arrested them on the “going out of state” charge just by seeing the D.C. marriage certificate.
…now rewriting history to suit our demented political ends are we? I’m sure the Lovings would have been happy to know at the time that Virginia actually recognized their marriage. Imagine the trouble it would have saved them.
So it looks like they were convicted for “being married” and the marriage shall be governered as if had been solemnized in Virgnia. But there is also a law that voided their marriage automatically, so Virginia’s really covering all the bases, i guess. That last law 20-57 that declares a marriage void does look like it would “not recognize” a marriage of a couple from out of state though, so I guess I’m wrong that states recognize marriages from out of state, even if they wouldn’t have allowed them to take place.
Anthony hit the nail on the head. By only allowing civil unions between same sex couples, the NH legislature created a poison pill so to speak, that will allow them to open up marriage through the courts. Because inevitably a heterosexual couple will petition for a civil union, most probably a heterosexual couple allied with the LGBT movement and will start a court case, which will establish precedent …..
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Very sneaky Gov Lynch, very sneaky
….mans’s poison pill is another man’s right to equal treatment under the law I suppose.
Sorry LGBT allies, but this is a homo-only drinking fountain. You may not get a civil union.
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…I suspect that the NH law says nothing about sexual orientation. If anything (I haven’t read the law) it refers to the sex of those entering into a Civil Union. I doubt very seriously that the city and town clerks would require a test to determine whether or not those applying for a CU license are homos. It’s true that it is likely that only homos would want to enter into a CU, but that’s a separate issue.
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The post led me to wonder. Would, for example, a male who was married to a female, also enter into a CU without being considered a bigamist? Bigamy is usually considered being married to two people at the same time, and CUs aren’t marriage, as anti-SSM people continue to remind us. If that scenario would not be considered bigamy, it seems like a perfect route to allowing for the equivalent of polygamy.
…law in NH specifically states that you cannot be married or in a CU from another state and qualify to be registered in NH.
the purpose of creating CUs in the first place is to, in part, be sure that the relationships of gays aren’t on the same level with those of straights. why else go to all this trouble in creating newfangled institutions?
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[read http://www.gencourt…. the bill.
It’s true that civil unions are still discriminatory, no doubt about that — but overall this new law can’t been seen as anything but good news. After all, this is New Hampshire, home of the Union Leader and the state that once (not that long ago) had Meldrim Thomson as Governor. Who would have thought this was possible even a few years ago.
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Also, civil unions help create a new status quo, one where people get used to the fact of gay and lesbian couples having some sort of protection for their relationship from the state. It’s much easier to go from civil unions to marriage than nothing to marriage. I wouldn’t get too disappointed about the 24-0 Senate vote, because my guess is that were just greasing the wheels for easier passage of the civil union bill. I doubt all 24 would be against equal marriage if it comes up in the next 2-3 years (and it will).
If you can’t get a mile, take an inch.
4,000 feet…not the whole thing, but more than half. And, most definitely, a whole hell of a lot better than nothing, which is what you have in most states…in some states, even less than nothing (the 18 that already have constitutional bans on any rights for same-sex couples, even CUs).
Just getting some form of governmental recognition of rights for gay couples is important. After some jitters nationally the direction is now almost always to an increase of rights.
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Approval of gay marriage runs about 12% (well, 10-15%) behind the Democratic Presidential vote percentage nationally. New Hampshire is probably at 53-54% Democratic-voting now. (There’s still a 1% per year Democratic trend in the Purple states and as a national average.) The NH state legislature is simply doing the intelligent thing by not even entertaining full gay marriage legalization at the moment. I wish that were 2-3 years away, and it may be, but I’d guess 5 years is more realistic for passage.
…had the equivalent of Civil Unions for about a decade before they decided (legislatively) to just have marriage. I read about the decision to do so in the Netherlands (it came first), and they essentially decided that it was silly to have two separate regimes that were different in name only. Maybe the same thing will happen in the US states that now have CUs that differ from marriage in name only.
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I don’t know what if anything is being discussed in France or the Scandinavian countries that have CUs.
It’s not so simple in tUSA with Federal vs Regional (state) rights. Then again, the state can call the CU whatever the heck it wants if the Feds aren’t going to recognize it anyway…
“People in committed relationships should not have to worry about visiting a loved one in a hospital, or whether their loved ones will inherit their estate, or the many other legal protections so many of us take for granted,” Lynch said.
The only difference between a civil union and a civil marriage is the name marriage. My parents were married by a judge and have all the same rights that homosexual couples have under a civil union, so the rights are exactly the same which is a crucial victory since in a lot of states even civil unions which is true legal equality are not considered valid or are banned by law. That said the ‘marriage’ part is an important symbolic lightning rod for both sides. Gays obviously still feel that a civil union is separate and unequal, even though the rights are equal, the state is still refusing to symbolically recognize their unions as something worth calling a marriage, obviously if I were gay I would want to call my partner my husband and not merely my civil union partner or whatever the case may be. For those that oppose same sex marriage but support civil unions (or even those that oppose those) its because they feel that ‘marriage’ is a religious institution only, and that the federal government should not defile a religious sacrament by opening it up to ‘sinners’ like gays.
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That argument is wrong on a lot of levels, theologically, legally, constitutionally, etc. but its the prevailing argument on the right or even the muddled middle. Theologically when Christ said “render unto Caeser”, coupled with the fact that a lot of Churches treat marriage differently than the state, its clear that there should be a separation for the sanctity of religious marriage to remain intact. Personally I feel that the Christian church should only grant marriages to people that are in love, that are both Christian or at least pledged to become Christian, preferably have not been divorced previously or ever unfaithful, and I say this knowing full well that the state does and honestly should marry people that are just doing it for financial reasons, or that have been previously married, etc. and I see no difference when adding homosexuality to the mix. Churches should know that if they truly feel homosexuality is a sin then they don’t have to marry gays, just like the Catholic church refused to marry my parents because they got divorced it and other churches can refuse to marry all sorts of people that are legally granted married rights in the civil sphere.
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I think either right wingers don’t understand this (which is sadly a lot of them) or they just really want to enforce their view of marriage onto the civil sphere which could lead to a regression of marital rights for all sorts of people if we really want to use a slippery slope argument.
it is true that on paper, at the state level, there is no difference between CUs and CMarriages. However, the experience is that CUs are not respected at crunch time moments (emergency room, etc) at an upsettingly frequent rate. Garden State Equality has been doing a great job of documenting the rate of refusal CU’d couples are experiencing in NJ. It is currently at about 10%. I would think that this percentage should decrease with time, as the general population gets more educated on the existence of the new system. But any percentage of refusal is criminal, especially when I cannot think of one single instance of a hetero marriage being questioned and treated as invalid. AT least, not since Loving v. Virginia (1967).
…between CU’s and marriage beyond the words used to describe either. Each state can convey different rights, benefits and responsibilities for CU’s than for marriage and each state does not have to be the same whereas at this point marriage is fairly standard across the board. Then there is the whole issue of federal recongnition. They are not the same, at all.
and I agree wholeheartedly.
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It took me quite a while to get to the bottom of the issue about gay marriage for the opposition.
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The short version is that legalized civil unions are an affirmative statement that gay people are full and acceptable citizens. Yes, it’s an emphatically secular statement.
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Marriage, in contrast, is an affirmative statement of full and acceptable adult humanity. After you cut through the inarticulacy, confused thinking, secularist guesses, and religious groups’ lengthy verbiage, the bottom line is that the fundamental elegibility requirement is for the partners to have, well, souls.
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A minority of straight adults are committed to denial (that’s the dogmatic “religious” view) of soulful quality to gay couples’ lives and commitments. Enough more to form a majority with the first group aren’t committed that way. But at present they default to denial, knowing no evidence and seeing no demonstration to the contrary.
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It is imho probably proper and necessary for some gay couples to supply that public demonstration of (if I had to come up with the qualities of perhaps most importance) dignity and covenant. Public affirmations do deserve a form of proof being rendered for them, after all. But it is also terribly difficult to do so; all the residues of the past and present, internalized stigmas and traumas and external stresses, conspire against it.
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What the right wing reactionaries know- from experience- is about closeted homosexuality and its degradations. They know about the terrible pain and the patterns of (often mutual) victimization of gay people, pedophiles, other sexual predators, and straight people mostly of the past. From their actions and beliefs they suppose homosexuality to be a particular kind of demonic possession, even though they cannot rationally admit that to themselves or in public.
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Find me a religion that allows marriage of children/youth, or any kind of forced marriage. You’ve got to enter a marriage of your own free will, and implicitly be old enough to establish that you’re making the decision of your own free will. That doesn’t necessarily mean you must be of age 18, but you must be old enough.
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Souls just plain ain’t enough. Find me a religion that allows non-consenting marriage, and I’ll find you a cult.