Red Squares

AKA, the post in which I irritate everybody and possibly receive a few death threats. What can I say, it's been boring lately.

Anyone on Facebook recently has no doubt seen the rash of red squares with two pink lines cropping up as profile pictures. The rhetoric over the entire Gay Rights/Gay Marriage issue has flared up hugely on both sides, and I'm sitting crossly in the middle getting sick of my feed of interesting factoids, tumblr reposts, and spotify notifications being flooded with poorly thought out, vitriolic, simplistic, and sarcastic posts on the subject.

I feel like I'm in prime snark form today.

Getting down to the serious issue, I've posted once before about my stance on gay marriage. I feel like some of it bears returning to. For those who for whatever reason don't want to click through to my old link, I have a short set of basic questions. First off, what exactly is the 'right to marriage' so often talked about? What exactly is different between legal marriage and contractual stipulations of the various aspects of? How do you intend to to elicit societal change through law? And lastly, What business is it of the Fed what anyone's marital status is?

This last question I feel deserves a greater degree of investigation.

I have a number of friends who are of the LGBTLMNOPZetc. persuasion, both in the flesh and on the WWW. I think they are all good people, else they wouldn't be my friends. I am all for the government keeping its nose out of the private details of their lives. If they want to live together and love each other and call each other Frankie, I really do not care. If these people are of the same gender, I don't happen to agree with it for personal and religious reasons, but I am absolutely not going to try and stop them. Here's the thing. All of this applies to heterosexual couples as well.

Where do we as a society and those in government get off on trying to tell other people what they should do?

I am a Mormon planning on going on a mission. Clearly, I don't think everyone in the world is always doing the right things, or are on the right track with their lives. I want some people to change. I want it for their benefit though, and I will never force any of my beliefs on anyone else. Different people believe different things. I don't have to agree to respect that.

The problem I run into, personally, with the gay marriage issue is that it just doesn't make sense. It's a contradiction of terms, like saying bluish orange, or broiling cold. Marriage in my book and in the traditional sense is a union between a man and a woman, covenanted with God. It seems like everyone who  is not married in a religious sense is just pantomiming. Civil Union, Domestic Partnership, these are more accurate labels for a great many 'marriages' across the country than marriage. You can call your best friend your brother or sister all you want, and the emotional bond may be just as strong, but you will never be biologically and technically accurate.

In the end, I know that this comes down to an issue of semantics. It's a case of "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does." If the governmental institution of marriage, which admittedly has its usefulness in convenience of such things as power of attorney and visiting rights, wants to exist, I personally would change its name to something more accurately reflecting the nature of the arrangement and extend that arrangement to any pair of adults who wish it.

This seems to me to be a bridge that covers the gaps in what most people are talking about. It preserves the sanctity of marriage by recognizing that it doesn't really happen in many typical US marriages. It provides equal protection under the law to all couples. The people who think all gays are spawns of satan, and the people that try to convert everyone on earth to being gay free lovers, are both left out of this consideration, but both are fairly small minorities and both are unrealistic to accommodate.

The broadest points I can make are these. The .gov really doesn't have any business in this issue on either the straight or otherwise position. If a system has to be for stuff (I do see legitimacy to some government awareness of relationships) I think it needs to be extremely limited to emergency power of attorney and other similar things. Taxes should have nothing to do with marriage. Employment benefits should be a contractual matter between employer and employee.

You don't get to call your relationship something it isn't. If you want acceptance for your relationship, don't try to get it by pretending it's marriage. Words have meaning.

This brings me tangentially to the other thing I wanted to talk to on this issue. The red squares. Turning this into an "Us V Them" situation and heckling those who disagree as haters and bigots. Caring more about being seen doing something than actually doing anything. Simplifying a complex issue into "I want it and you're a meanie and a bigot for not wanting to give it to me".

Just... stop. I keep this blog for my political rantings and ravings because I know no one has to look at it who doesn't want to. Facebook is not your soapbox. Feel free to get one, just don't force it on anyone. (Yes, I am guilty of this at times. I try to avoid it)

In a way, that's the fundamental issue. I just ended a long and grueling conversation with a gay marriage activist, and the end result was that he wanted to force everyone to accept it by fiat. I have a problem with that. Just let it go. Drop the empty gestures and shrill cries. Learn to accept that not everyone is going to agree with you. Tolerate intolerance. And just give it a rest. The SC will decide what it will entirely independently of how many red boxes turn up on Facebook.