WHAT WOULD STATE AMENDMENTS ACTUALLY DO?: Barry Deutsch replies to Joshua Baker

...Joshua clearly hasn't been reading many proponents of anti-SSM amendments if he thinks they've even come close to discussing "marriage (and little else)".

Joshua goes on to suggest that pro-SSM arguments about private employer's health insurance, hospital visitation, and parental rights are nonsense:

Repeatedly raising the specter of gay partners being thrown out of hospital rooms, or children being deprived of parental support, or businesses being told they can no longer offer partnership benefits to their employees serves simply to obscure, rather than illuminate, the real issues at stake.

But it's Joshua who is oversimplifying matters. Even on his strongest point--what would happen to private business partnership coverage--it's not clear that the broader anti-SSM amendments would have no effect. Some cities have laws requiring all businesses contracting with the city to offer domestic partnership benefits if they offer marriage partner benefits. Will such laws still be legal if the amendments pass? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know, and I suspect Joshua doesn't either.

(There's also the matter of insurance coverage, pension inheritance and other benefits for same-sex partners of public employees, which could easily be outlawed under reasonable interpretations of some of the amendments.)

Joshua's apparent belief that hospitals never reserve visitation rights--and, just as importantly, decision-making authority--to closest kin is shockingly ignorant. When a heterosexual is in such a situation, she or he is assured that the decision-maker will be their spouse; for homosexuals, a third cousin who you haven't seen in person for 12 years ranks above a life partner, in a hospital's eyes. ...

Joshua is doubtless correct that some claims about hospitals, insurance and parenting rights by opponents of anti-SSM amendments are technically incorrect in some way. (Just as many of the claims made by proponents of the amendments are often flat-out wrong, not to mention ridiculous). But even when technically mistaken in their particulars, the thrust of pro-SSM arguments are correct: There are essential legal and financial protections for families and children that marriage, and marriage alone, can secure. And those protections are denied to same-sex couples and their children.

If Joshua wants to discuss "the real issues at stake," that's one issue (one of several) which he should be ready to seriously discuss. And nit-picking at particular examples to imply that the overall problem isn't real, does not qualify as serious discussion.

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posted by Eve at 4:51 PM VOTE

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