The Backlash to the Backlash

>> Personally, in a business relationship (even if it's an intimate kind of job like home nursing), I don't want to know anything about a client's or customer's personal relationships. <<

Often true. I am especially aggravated when a business takes a stance on issues that have nothing to do with its product or service. If you sell chocolate then it makes sense to have a stance on fair trade chocolate. But in general I don't want to mix business and politics...

>> If I did business only with people who live by the same standards I do I would have starved before age eighteen. <<

... because of this.

>> If other people want to sabotage their business by discriminating against customers they don't "like" for whatever reason...yes, that's happened to me too, and yes, I think it's their right. Stupid, self-destructive, but not as stupid and self-destructive as trying to legislate that everybody "like" everybody else. <<

You don't have to like people in order to do business. I almost never do, in the mainstream; hell, I don't even anticipate they'll be competent, but I have to try something. But in order for society to function, its goods and services and facilities must be open to citizens. Otherwise you have people rattling around loose in ways that cause problems for everyone. Like when a hospital refuses to recognize queer next-of-kin and then cannot get the NOK things done and the blood relatives are estranged or having fuckawful fights in the lobby and it makes a gigantic nightmare for dozens of people that could have been avoided by just acknowledging the marriage.

>> The real question is: given that almost 50% of all people who stay coupled will wind up single again due to widowhood, and a lot of them will also be elderly and vulnerable when they become widows, why would anybody be making a fuss over anybody's "right" to celebrate their marriage instead of their more important "rights" to equal treatment under the law whether they're married or not? <<

* Because society values people for what it can get out of them, and if someone is useless, society wants them to do. I don't think that's right, but it's a prevailing trend at this time.

* Because marriage conveys hundreds of rights that make a tremendous difference in people's ability to have a livable life. The bang-for-buck is tremendous. And because most of those rights focus on couple dynamics, they don't easily translate to people not currently in a relationship.

* Because people who aren't in the midst of an issue often don't see how it connects to their own interests. That activist skill faded at least a couple decades ago.

* Because they're focused on surviving now and if they can't manage that, they're never going to reach the challenges of old age. They just don't have the spoons to spare for it.

* Because one branch of homosexuality is all about normalizing it. Huge powderkeg in community.

>> Why is the homosexual lobby actually promoting discrimination against widows? <<

I hadn't heard that. But it probably ties into some of the above, with the possible addition that they feel threatened by some or another thing that would benefit widows.

>>In view of the fact that fewer than half of all people who were married at some point are still married at the end of their lives, doesn't it make sense that the human rights issue should be just removing the special privileges from marriage?<<

Marriage has special rights because it can work. It is massively more efficient to bundle together a bunch of rights into one action than make everyone go through hundreds of steps -- because when you have to do lots of little things, you miss some and that's a problem.

I don't think that marriage should be the only option, but I do think that bundling rights is a good idea. Society has legitimate reasons to know who's moving together as a social unit. That's why ignoring gay, poly, and platonic relationships causes problems. They bash into all those things that marriage is meant to resolve.

>>Which means that homosexual activists who aren't interested in the rights of the vast majority of human kind, but are only screaming about their "marriages," are acting out hate for widows--possibly including their own shortsighted selves. Not to mention perpetuating oppression of the unmarried.<<

I doubt that it's hate per se. I think they just see something that would be extremely useful to them immediately, and they want it.