on Love, Semantics and the Law

Washington state voters recently voted to approve Referendum 71.   That is, the legislature decided to grant full and equal rights to Domestic Partners (a legal term), a group petitioned to block it pending a vote, and the rest of the state backed the legislature.

Despite the law passing being important, what the law actually did was even more important in the long run.

Let's step back for one second.

I believe there are two key points in this whole thing.

1. Denying same sex rights IS discrimination.   It may be discrimination you believe in, but it is discrimination.  (I'd even argue it's illegal for the simple reason you are discriminating based on sex which is illegal)

2. The word marriage means a lot to a lot of people.   There is almost certainly more people who really care about the word than those who don't.


What Washington State did differently is it did not touch the word Marriage.   It simply said that those who register as Domestic Partners have all the same legal requirements.  The actual affect of the law was to effectively take every instance of the word "Marriage" and add "and Domestic Partnership".   Given how many attempts to actually legalize gay Marriage have failed or been overturned, Washington has shown that this is a much more tenable approach.  In fact, a gay marriage provision has never passed a public vote before.  Read that again.  Never.   All the existing ones have come from legislatures which have not been challenged.

I have long said the only route for gay "marriage" is to focus on the law and not the word.   The word simple means too much to too many people that it will never work as a step toward the concept.  In fact Referendum 71 only barely passed with 52% acceptance.   With that little of a margin, in a state with a large liberal bias, I think it's clear that "Marriage" is simply a non starter in our nation.   Ideally, governments should only recognize 'civil unions' and churches and society can do what they like with the word Marriage, but I think Washington has done a good job with this step.