The Douglass Blvd. Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky has voted to stop signing marriage licenses until gay marriage is legalized by the state.
posted by reenum on Apr 25, 2011 - 87 comments

Not all queer or LGBT people are for legalizing gay marriage. The Against Equality collective argues that legalizing marriage values one type of relationship over another (.pdf), doesn't do enough for queer people of colour, and plays into the larger class struggle. Beyond Marriage calls for "access to a flexible set of economic benefits and options regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender/gender identity, class, or citizenship status". Queer activists in Maine consider the marriage issue a "distraction from improving the lives of gay people", and Questioning Transphobia argues that "marriage by its very nature is an exclusive practice, its purpose is to ennoble some relationships and by default render other relationships to be less meaningful and less worthy of legal and social recognition". Mainstream queer women's website Autostraddle ponders all this and asks: does gay marriage make gays straight?
posted by divabat on Aug 20, 2010 - 236 comments

Queer female webzine Autostraddle, who interviewed media celebrity Tila Tequila shortly before the death of her fiancée, socialite Casey Johnson, uses the aftermath to discuss the complications of not having legal rights as a gay couple when the relationship becomes dysfunctional:

We don’t look at those crazy-ass toxic relationships that were so intense they carved a hole in your heart and you knew, no matter how deep the emotional connection, that at any minute your loved one could get up, walk out the door, and never speak to you again, and that it wouldn’t matter if you’d paid their bills or built a life around their demands. There is nothing tying you together besides your feelings. And that’s really frightening.

posted by divabat on Jan 9, 2010 - 51 comments

Gay Marriage - Go Canada Canada is only the third country, after Netherlands and Belgium, to legalize gay marriages. This surprised me because I figured we were playing catch up to most 1st world countries. Not so surprisingly my home province of Alberta is promising to block same sex marriages and will refuse to issue licenses to same sex couples. Which must be putting smiles on faces at Tourism BC. Interestingly this may cause big waves in the USA as they have traditionally recognized Canadian marriages as valid under US law and Canada has no residency requirement for marriage licenses. How surprised would you be if your local authority followed Canada’s example?
posted by Mitheral on Jun 18, 2003 - 39 comments