marriage

Monday night, I covered a regular meeting of the Lovington City Commission. One of the major items of discussion was a proposed domestic partnership policy. If enacted, this policy would allow city employees and their significant others who are not married to declare their relationship and domestic partnership thereby making the significant other eligible for coverage under the employees insurance. It would also allow biological children of the significant other eligible for coverage.
The draft the commission looked at is derived from the state’s affidavit of domestic partnership but tailored for Lovington. According to the state affidavit, just to get the legalese in here, a domestic partnership is an exclusive, committed relationship that is the same as or is similar to marriage in New Mexico between two people who are 18 years of age, mentally competent to enter into legal agreements, not of blood relationships that are not allowed to marry. The couple must have lived together for at least 12 months and share financial obligations.

Now the term “domestic partnership” automatically conjures up images of same-sex couples in many people’s minds, and this was true of some on the Lovington City Commission. One commissioner asked, “This isn’t one of those Massachusetts things, is it?” The scary part of that is not that he is against gay marriage, but that as a representative in government he cannot make sense of basic documents that come before him. No where in the affidavit does it even imply that adopting the policy would legalize same-sex marriages in Lovington. But that is not really my point

And now that I have bored you with all this meeting crap, here is my point, the meeting just got me thinking about it.

More and more couples are choosing not to get married. That is a personal choice. Some couples would love to get married, but because religion is all to often injected into politics and government, they can’t. I do not believe that just because you do not go into a church or stand in front of a judge and attach some legal definition to your relationship or the law will not let you have that legal standing attached to your relationship lessens the level of love or committment in that relationship.

I also do not believe the government should have any part in marriage if it is not willing to afford the legal rights and standings afforded to married couples to all couples regardless of gender. It is easy, I think for people, to feel okay about saying gay people should be allowed to get married, but what if it were a different group instead. Would people be as okay to say black people shouldn’t be allowed to get married. Or Christians shouldn’t be allowed to get married. If that were the case, I think there would be more outcry about the denial of rights.
So, back to the government being involved in marriage. I am not saying that private entities should be forced to perform a marriage ceremony for any body. If a church doesn’t believe that certain couples should be married then they do not have to perform a ceremony for them, but that couple should be able to go down to the probate judge and get a government approved union that affords the same legal rights to everyone regardless of gender.
If this is not gonna happen, then people should be allowed to legally declare their relationship a domestic partnership and be allowed insurance and the legal rights to make certain decisions regarding their significant other where medical issues are concerned, have tax incentives and whatnot.
People can have their moral opinions about marriage and what not and that is great, but those opinions, beliefs, tenets whatever should not be used to make discriminatory laws.

Okay I have rambled enough and not sure I said anything.

2 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI