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August 8, 2005February 7, 2009 by Brendon J. Wilson

Canadians Get “Straight” To The Point

It’s being reported today that two straight Canadian guys are going to get married just to prove a point about gay marriage. And avoid paying some taxes.

Cue the Apocalyse in five…four…three…two…

Doubtless, the neo-conservative segments of the American political spectrum find themselves in a moral dilemma. I can hear their internal monologue already: which would make God happier – achieving eternal salvation, or a lower tax bracket?

Tough one…especially if you believe God is a Republican. (Which, for some reason, reminds me of line from a Tragically Hip song: “Don’t tell me how the Universe is altered, when you find our how He gets paid”)

But where there’s controversy, there’s opportunity. If you’re like me, you spent a fair chunk of your university years living with members of the same sex (called “room-mates”). All those wasted tax-savings! If only they’d had same-sex marriage in my college years – a quick prenuptial agreement and a civil marriage to Kevin (call me crazy, but John, Jesse and Sean weren’t my type) and we could have kept all of our meager internship earnings for ourselves. Hell, had we taken legal guardianship of Kevin’s brother, Jamie, we could have even scored some stone-cold sacrilicious Child Tax Credit dollars!

I think I just identified the solution to the Student Debt Crisis – get married to your roommates and reap the tax savings until you’re debt-free. Some enterprising young lawyer out there is already whipping up a boilerplate prenuptial contract for this purpose and about to make a killing.

Of course, this only works if you’re smart enough to get a pre-nuptial agreement in place before you move into your off-campus pad with your buddies. If you don’t, one has to wonder whether the concept of common-law marriage might rear its ugly head just as graduation rolls around. After all, after living together for over three short years in Canada, me and my room-mates might technically be considered married under common law (or to have achieved common-law status, as it’s called in Canada). If you thought a graduation party hangover sucked, try paying alimony to your four, same-sex, bigamist college room-mates on top of Canada Student Loan Payments.

Of course, this move will only pave the way for the true concern of the neo-conservatives – that, for some reason, people might want to use the same-sex laws to forge (or perhaps graze) a path to allow them to marry farm animals. Why, I can’t imagine – plentiful farm subsidies, perhaps?

(And on a somewhat unrelated note, please welcome my almost-but-not-quite bigamist same-sex college room-mate, Kevin Cheng, to Silicon Valley. He started at Yahoo! this week.)

February 25, 2004April 17, 2012 by Brendon J. Wilson

All Over A Word

Oh no, here we go again: gay marriage has come to the forefront of American politics, spurred by San Francisco mayor Gary Newsom’s recent decision to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Cue the delirious claims of the imminent downward spiral of family values and the collapse of society.

I really don’t get the opposition to same-sex marriages, much less the call for a constitutional amendment, for a number of reasons. The biggest annoyance is the lack of structured, logical arguments against same-sex marriage – if it’s so wrong/destructive/inappropriate, shouldn’t it be simple to demonstrate why?

Time for a quick tour of the arguments…

Let’s start with the claim that the traditional definition of marriage is between a man and a woman. These arguments are grounded in religious beliefs that God/Allah/your-deity’s-name-here says it’s wrong, according to an interpretation of the Bible/Quran/your-scroll-here. This viewpoint tends to ignore that said religious documents have been revised, tweaked, or changed wholesale at the whim of numerous rulers over time. I don’t mean to be sacriligious, but if I was The Almighty, I think I’d seek a better representation of my will on Earth than a document that’s seen more patches than a version of Microsoft Windows.

Another version of this argument attempts to dress up religious rhetoric in scholarly garb: gay marriage serves no purpose, as the purpose of marriage is to provide an environment for rearing children. I’ll be honest, there might be something to this – after all, if a gay couple can’t reproduce, aren’t they just taking up space, from a strictly evolutionary standpoint? But on the other hand, the same argument could be applied to couples who are incapable of producing offspring, either by choice or physiological incapability. I’m a stickler for consistency, so if we’re going to make propagation of the species a prerequisite to recognizing marriage, we’d better be prepared to apply the same rule across the board, right?

The final argument has less to do with whether or not same-sex marriage should be recognized, but the legal and legislative process by which it should or should not be recognized. Some groups claim that the Mayor has no place changing the law – I’ll agree with that. However, I won’t agree with the same groups’ claims that the courts are “out of control” and “rewriting the laws” without legislative oversight. Here’s a clue: that’s their job, to enforce consistency in the law. If one law says “we don’t recognize same sex marriages” and a higher law says “by the way, the federal government can’t discriminate”, then the courts have to apply the higher law. This isn’t something new; it’s the way it’s always worked. It’s the way it worked when equal rights for minorities were enforced, and when women won their right to vote, so why should we expect it to work any different now?

The most unsettling part of this debate is watching people trying to justify their own prejudices on screen, while trying to not come off like jerks. If you believe the soundbites, then nobody’s against same-sex marriage, they just don’t want to call it marriage, due to the traditional connotations of the word “marriage” as being a union between a man and a woman. It sounds to me like all the laws need to be re-written to replace “marriage” with “civil union” and make the separation of church and state definite. Of course, I’m not about to believe that this would actually solve the problem, but it’s nice to think it would. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure we have bigger problems that affect all of us that we should be solving instead of quibbling over a word.