Sunday, April 18, 2010

This is outrageous

Greene v. County of Sonoma et al.

I'll just let the FARK headline sum it up:

You're a county dealing with an eldery gay couple who are hospitalized. Do you c.) refuse visitation, disregard their wills, call them "roomates", sell their belongings, and allow one to die alone in a hospital without his partner?


I don't give a happy shit if they were gay or straight, sexually involved or chaste -- this isn't a sexuality issue. This is a freedom of association issue and a property rights issue and a due process issue.

7 comments:

WKen said...

I agree completely.

This kind of thing actually fuels the pro-gay-marriage argument. Because if malarkey like this happens to people, then maybe they really do need marriage rights.

A similar thing happened with a lesbian couple in Florida, one woman was dying and the other was only allowed in during last rites. Yes, apparently the priest of all people acknowledged the relationship.

The survivor was told that they might have a civil union at home, but that she wouldn't find any friends of gay marriage in their hospital.

That's really missing the point ...

Christina Dunigan said...

Well there's nothing wrong with the love and the commitment. The only beef I have with same-sex couples is the insistence on using the term "marriage" to describe it. You can't go around changing the definition of words just because you want them to mean something else. (But then I think they should legalize polygamy, since it has a very long established base in many societies and has been recognized as marriage for as long as there has been recorded history.)

OperationCounterstrike said...

The concept of marriage should be removed from all government institutions. The meaning of each marriage should be defined by the participants, not their government.

Slaves need their masters to validate their marriages. I am not my government's slave, and I can decide what my marriage or non-marriage mean without any input from Uncle Sam.

Every reference to marriage should be removed from the legal code.

Then we wouldn't have to have these fights about what sort of marriages should be allowed and which sorts not. We wouldn't have to argue with mormons and muslims who wanted to practice polygamy.

Christina Dunigan said...

Marriage is also a CONTRACT. That's why the government has a hand in it. They're a form of legal partnership.

I'd be just as happy to see the government establish pure and simple civil unions, that have the contractual elements of marriage, and allow religious institutions to deal with marriage itself.

Foxfier said...

I'd like folks to be able to do a sort of not-quite-power-of-attorney, because I know a LOT of folks who aren't married, don't want to get married, aren't screwing...shoot, think along the lines of making it so the Golden Girls can be listed as "next of kin."

L. said...

"I'd be just as happy to see the government establish pure and simple civil unions, that have the contractual elements of marriage, and allow religious institutions to deal with marriage itself."

I have said this before myself.

I myself am in a secular marriage, not recognized by my particular church, and that's just fine, because we enjoy all the legal benefits.

Christina Dunigan said...

Exactly, fox.