Where Gay Marriage is Just Marriage

[kayell]

oops, sorry

http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1433_A_1140144_1_A,00.html

As the gay marriage debate continues in the U.S. and Canada, many European countries are looking on bemusedly. The continent has been pioneering the drive to grant gays the same rights as herterosexual couples.



When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome was under political attack for allowing same-sex marriages, he got a comforting note from Job Cohen.



The mayor of Amsterdam shared a part of history when he officiated over the world's first gay marriage in 2001. The Netherlands, together with Belgium, are the only countries in Europe which recognize gay marriage on the same level as heterosexual unions.



Other EU countries aren't far behind. Politicians in California and Massachusetts -- the two hotspots in America's gay marriage debate -- could learn a few lessons from Europe, which has been following a progressive road to granting homosexual partners equal rights.

more

Is the US going to catch up to Europe, or have we irrevocably turned down a road of limiting civil rights, rather than improving peoples level of equality in this country?

[Renew Deal]

1. Change your subject line

[theHandpuppet]

2. Could you please edit your thread title?

Its length is really screwing up the formatting of the DU page for me. Thanks in advance!

[kayell]

3. Bump because the thread dropped because of bad title

sorry about that. *Must always think while posting.*

[Ms. Toad]

4. 1,138 Reasons Marriage Is Cool

Hope the slight digression is OK - I don't have enough posts yet to start a thread, and have been looking for a related thread that wasn't stale or a mile long to share this article:

"1,138 Reasons Marriage Is Cool
The many legal benefits of being married"

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040308-596123,00.html


>>Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 879 makes it illegal to threaten certain individuals guarded by the Secret Service, including the President, the Vice President and their families. At first blush, you wouldn't think the statute has anything to do with the war over gay marriage. But consider this: that law makes it a federal crime to threaten the husband of Elizabeth Cheney, one of the Vice President's daughters. But it does not outlaw threats against the lesbian partner of Mary Cheney, his younger daughter.<<

At the end, the article discusses benefits of being single - but couches it as things gay activists don't want to folks to know and contrasts married straights with single gays. I'd change all the examples of unmarrieds to heterosexual - as I have the last example here:

>>At the other end of the economic spectrum, the law prohibits Senators' spouses from accepting gifts worth more than $250 a year. But if, say, a Senator left his wife for (another woman), the new (girlfriend) could take a Ferrari from a Saudi prince if (s)he wanted to.<<

Otherwise, I find it a helpful illustration of just how many and how varied the laws are that would have to be changed to make civil unions equal to marriage.

[gator_in_Ontario]

5. Canada is a little ahead of the US

in that it is legal (in Ontario and BC at least)....but at the border there was some debate as to whether they should let me in, and I saw that the woman interviewing me had written "same sex partner" instead of "wife". It will take a while for it to become what it is...just marriage, but Canada and the US both are getting there!