A while ago now, Erik and I were IMing about some of the court setbacks that gay marriage and civil unions have faced in the last few months.<\/p>\n
I once again suggested that we change the concept of marriage altogether in the future. A civil union, open to any two unrelated adults, should confer all legal and governmental benefits — Social Security, shared custody of children, inheritance rights, hospital visitation, etc. — that are currently offered to married people. Marriage proper could be a religious ceremony, offered to certain (or all) people depending on the tenets of the church.<\/p>\n
Erik, I believe, (Correct me if I’m misrepresenting your views here) agrees with this idea in theory. But he argues that “civil union” as a term seems very bland and businessy and second-class when compared with “marriage.” And what would one use as a verb? “Unionized” has a very different connotation. “Partnered” has platonic definitions that lends itself to confusion.<\/p>\n
So we thought we’d open the discussion up to you. Is there a better term that we could start to use to connote all the romantic feelings that ought to accompany such a union while simultaneously and unambiguously explaining what sort of relationship one is entering into?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A while ago now, Erik and I were IMing about some of the court setbacks that gay marriage and civil unions have faced in the last few months. I once again suggested that we change the concept of marriage altogether in the future. A civil union, open to any two unrelated adults, should confer all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gay-rights"],"yoast_head":"\n