Sunday, February 14, 2010

Your Parts Seem To Check Out. Marry Me?

After being turned down in her effort to marry her long-time partner, Kitty Lambert turned to the crowd and asked any willing man to step forward and marry her. A gay man agreed, they presented the proper documentation, and voila! Marriage.

I'm pretty sure this was staged, but it's still a pretty vivid demonstration of the sex discrimination element latent in anti-gay marriage laws.

4 comments:

PG said...

Latent?

David Schraub said...

"Existing or present but concealed or inactive" (here, concealed -- most people, yourself excluded, don't see it as sex discrimination).

PG said...

I don't see how it can be concealed on the part of those who are anti-gay marriage, given that pretty much all of their arguments as to why gay marriage is inherently bad turn on the necessity of having two people of the opposite sex in a marriage.

Or do you mean that they don't perceive this drawing of distinctions on the basis of sex to constitute "sex discrimination," and thus it is latent?

David Schraub said...

My feeling is that the broader populace doesn't instinctively view this issue as a sex discrimination issue. That is, if I said "we should reverse the ban on gay marriage, because it discriminates against gays and lesbians", people might argue on the merits about why it's still okay, but they wouldn't find the framing perplexing. If I said "we should reverse it because its sex discrimination", they'd be a bit startled. I remember my reaction when I first read an argument of that form (in the Texas SupCt Lawrence decision) I viewed it as a very clever argument, but not an intuitive one.