It turns out that many of the states which banned same-sex marriage unwittingly also banned civil unions — even though most people in those states (even the ones against same-sex marriage) support civil unions!
marriage was used as the cover for the far more consequential effort to strip contractual rights from gay couples who have formed hundreds of thousands of families in recent years across the United States.
… In pivotal Ohio, for example, the voters may not have realized it but they voted to strip people of the right to contractually arrange distribution of assets, child custody, pensions, and other employment benefits. They most definitely were not “protecting” marriage; they were attacking gay people. That is why the political and business establishment there, including Republicans, opposed the measure.
The evidence is that the voters who approved it also opposed its actual contents. In the official exit poll Tuesday night, 27 percent of the voters said they support full marriage rights, 35 percent supported civil unions, and only 27 percent oppose any legal rights for same-sex couples. In other words, to underline the importance of artifice and deception in our sound-bite culture, the voters approved a measure opposed substantively by 62 percent of the very same voters.
(via Kevin Drum)
