Once in a while, to everyone's surprise, the future actually arrives.   

Ireland is buzzing for sure. Landslide result. Highest turnout for a referendum in 20 years. It's been called the social revolution.

There won't be a lot of pregnant women from gay marriages, so I suppose they are still being consistent.

Personally, I don't care whether people call themselves husband and wife, husband and husband or wife and wife or partner and partner. Good luck to them. The one thing I would object to is if tax benefits intended to support the upbringing of children are grabbed by people who have no intention of raising children but who just want to game the system for their own profit. And I really don't know if that is a consequence of "gay marriage", maybe someone else does.

There won't be a lot of pregnant women from gay marriages, so I suppose they are still being consistent.

Personally, I don't care whether people call themselves husband and wife, husband and husband or wife and wife or partner and partner. Good luck to them. The one thing I would object to is if tax benefits intended to support the upbringing of children are grabbed by people who have no intention of raising children but who just want to game the system for their own profit. And I really don't know if that is a consequence of "gay marriage", maybe someone else does.

Many straight couples don't have children either nor want them.  On a planet with over 7 billion people, the idea of marriage being only about procreation is outdated.

I don't know what the tax system is in Ireland, but it would be odd to have a system that gives tax benefits for kids to any married couple that don't have them.

The divorce attorneys love this.  Some years ago one of the mainstream stations (ABC or NBC I think) did a post mortem on gay couple "marriages" to investigate if there was a difference when they split up.  They found that those unions that split or "divorced" were every bit as brutal as heterosexual marriages can be.

There's a fantastic positive buzz in this thread. 

Ok someone has to spoil the party first , I just hope those who consider to be open minded one one side can accept a different opinion on some of the things written here, that we can have fully argumented conversation  and that topic will not be closed.


 

Well done Ireland.

Now if you'd only extend the same courtesy of dignity and empathy to pregnant women seeking an abortion I'm sure the rest of Europe will cheer you to the rafters.

Im wondering about dignity and empathy on right of a fetus or a new life if you may call it.  Who can be the one to judge when the life really starts and when the conciseness of a human being  is fully formed. Wrong judgment would led to nothing else than a murder of a human being which is not able to defend its interests.

On the other hand there is always an option to give the newborn life to someone who will appreciate it and even an option of changing mind after experiencing the new born, but there is absolutely no irreversible option to abortion.

And yet many women clam they should have never done it and that the fact they did changed their life in the way they suffered mental pains the rest of their life.

What about possible misusing the given option, one example...persuasion of minors by their parents that can be easily hidden in various mental evaluations by the people responsible of approving the procedure or not which can lead to very bad things.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32873562

Now there's an interesting twist! I would have thought that the usage was contrary to the usual terms, since there is no doubt that the issue is controversial and should have required specific consent.
I'm glad I don't shoot people (in any way).

Marriage has nothing to do with being parents. Just saying.

From the C of E marriage service:
"The gift of marriage brings husband and wife together
in the delight and tenderness of sexual union
and joyful commitment to the end of their lives.
It is given as the foundation of family life
in which children are [born and] nurtured
and in which each member of the family,in good times and in bad,
may find strength, companionship and comfort,
and grow to maturity in love."

OK, I don't care what the Church says about anything, but if marriage isn't about children what is it about? Getting God's blessing on your personal shacking-up arrangments?

I really don't understand what the passion for being allowed to be classed as married is if the legal status is identical with civil unions, which are already available.

But marriage is a religious invention, anyway.

I know people have strong feelings on this issue, and I am strongly pro. To put it statistically in perspective, in Canada, where it is legal, there are 10 million male/female married couples, 1.6 million common law male/female couples and 20,000 same sex married couples. The number of same sex marriages is such a small percentage of the population that any economic or other impact is very low. Live and let live. We have bigger issues to worry about in my opinion.

OK, I don't care what the Church says about anything, but if marriage isn't about children what is it about? Getting God's blessing on your personal shacking-up arrangments?

This is exactly what it is. In my Anthropology course it was taught that marriage was the form that society has found to regulate and normalize sexual intercourse. This way it would allow women to start their sexual life (which is highly controlled and regulated in many societies) and provide men with steady sex, reducing conflicts regarding the chase of sexual partners. This is very, very roughly put.

Plus, in many societies (including ours until more recent times) the birth of a child was not considered to be linked to the practice of sex, but an action of the deity. Something like a blessing by god or fertility deity to the couple by their union. You have paintings where god is sending a (floating) baby into the belly of a woman.

In Hawaii women bathe in the ocean to receive the baby into their bodies from the deity after the "signal" that It has chosen her to carry a baby. Again, very, very roughly put.

If you go back thousands or tenths of thousands of years ago when the first marriage was performed I'm pretty sure that the knowledge of the relation between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was even less evident to the people than in the recent past in Europe.

I really don't understand what the passion for being allowed to be classed as married is if the legal status is identical with civil unions, which are already available.

Marriage instantly gives all the benefits a married couple has rights to. Civil Unions, at least where I live, require living together for two years before it's recognized being gay or straight couples. This means that if a member of a couple gets sick the other has the immediate right to visit him at the hospital.

There was a case here where a couple had lived for many years together and after the civil union was approved, including for gay couples, they were in the process of being recognized as a couple. But in the mean time one of them got very seriously ill.

The result was that he was in the brink of death for a long time totally abandoned in the hospital. The family renegaded him for being gay and didn't care if he died, and the long life companion was not allowed to get into the visits in the ICU because he was not related to him in any way. Occasionally the staff of the hospital closed their eyes, risking their jobs, and let him visit. If at the time they were allowed to get married he would get immediate rights of visit.

Plus, if the ill partner died he would lose almost everything because the family that renegaded him would be the ones entitled to receive the inheritance. The house and other goods were probably in the name of the ill man, and his partner could not claim anything.

Marriage also allows you to choose to share everything you already had prior to marriage. Civil Unions only allow to share what you acquire after it has been recognized. If you consider many people live as couples for a long time before making the union official, both contributing to the household it's very unfair. And there are many more examples.

Religion has nothing to do with this except if people were claiming the right to marry in church, which they are not. Marriage is nothing more than a type contract like the ones we agree with the stock agencies.

I'm glad Ireland voted yes. In my country some fanatics were screaming that this would be the end of the world and to be true, marriages are happening and no one cares the least or notices any change in any aspect of their lives. Well, except for those holding grudges blinded by the hate that seems to be the central core of religions.

Thanks for that reply, sfa.  The hospital situation is very regrettable, I have no idea if there is a similar time delay in recognising civil partnerships elsewhere - it seems rather odd.
As for getting "god's" blessing, the latest news from the Vatican seems to be that it won't be coming from the god the Pope talks about.

@ BaldricksTrousers

In Portugal, a Civil Union (Uni�o de Facto) is recognized after two people filling their tax forms conjointly as a couple for two straight years. After that, I don't know exactly what happens. I have the idea that after these two years the union is automatically recognized, but I don't know if they are entitled to have a document proving the union or even need to ask for that document to be recognized as such. And the union is automatically considered dissolved once they fill the tax forms separately. Thinking about it, the Civil Union may only accept the Separation of Goods. Each property/object belongs to each person, even after the union is recognized to avoid the divorce procedure.

The delay is meant to, among other things, to avoid frauds as they will benefit from the few advantages in terms of taxes, regarding single people.

And since they are equal to an actual marriage in most things it's a way to assert the stability of the relationship since in the worst case scenario one member of the couple may have to make life or death decisions like to shutdown life-support on the partner.

Since marriage is considered a bigger step due to all the fuss around it, I guess that the stability of the relationship is something considered as acquired by the time the contract is signed. In fact, if we look well into it, it looks like the Civil Union ascertains more the stability of a relationship than marriage...   

I think that I'm relatively correct about what happens in the case of Civil Unions in Portugal.

When gay marriage was approved in Portugal, the most important arguments used by those in favor, and hardly had any opposition even among people totally against gay marriage, were the ones referring to health and life and death issues like the one I mentioned in my previous post, and inheritance. Basically no one could argue against the logic and justice of at least those two extremely important issues.

In some conversations with people who were against it, after I explained these issues people changed their opinions. They still do not like the idea of gay marriage much, but can't argue about the fairness and feel bothered on the injustice and cruelty of the discrimination.

By the end, the discussion was basically restricted to semantics, where the only thing people against gay marriage disagreed was about calling that union as "Marriage". If the ones in favor of gay marriage wanted to call it Nutella or Porsche insted, no one would care or seriously oppose about it.