Pretend, for a second, that you’re a state agency that wants to shut up a special interest group.  They want you to provide benefits to their domestic partners, even if they’re gay.  How do you do this without, y’know, actually doing this?

CARSON CITY (AP) - A Nevada panel that oversees health insurance benefits for state employees voted Thursday to extend coverage to domestic partners, including those of the same sex, despite budget problems that could make the $2.7 million cost unaffordable.

State Public Employees Benefits Program board members voted 5-3 to move forward despite concerns about the cost voiced by some members.

If funding doesn’t develop during the 2009 legislative session to pay for the expansion of benefits to domestic partners and their children, the regulation won’t take effect.

Candice Nichols, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Center of Southern Nevada, praised the decision, saying it “enables Nevada to recruit the best and brightest employees for the state.”

That’s right - you create a regulation and state that it takes effect so long as it’s paid for, then promptly ignore the fact that it is, in fact, not paid for.  Brilliant!

I wonder how many other “problems” can be solved this way?  Universal health care?  No problem - we’ll provide universal coverage to everyone and everybody so long as it’s paid for.  Universal housing?  No problem - we’ll buy every American a house, provided tax revenues are sufficient.  Heck, we’ll feed everyone, clothe everyone, and wipe everybody’s diapers… at least on paper.

Folks, I am a genius.

Perhaps it’s because I spent 10 hours today in a class on a rather intricate computer-based PBX system, but I feel the need to go off on rationality and the need for a rational basis between right and wrong. Especially after this wonderful thread on Something Awful. Yes, I know Soemthing Awful really isn’t a great source of hard-hitting journalism, but if there’s one thing that Teens-4-Christ has proven to me, it’s that people really need a clue.

Things are right or wrong not because God or some other invisible being said so but because they either benefit us as individuals and as a group OR they don’t. For example, murder is wrong because doing so ends the existence of whomever is murdered as an individual (clearly doesn’t benefit them) and, if every person lived in constant fear of their life, nothing would ever get done. On the contrary, you’d probably be inclined to listen to any leader willing to promise to end the murder, even if they’re the ones perpetrating it. This would be a big part of the dynamic that leads to some of the more “popular” leaders in poorer countries.

With that in mind, allow me to rant on… gay marriage and polygamy.

The problem with gay marriage is in the name - those of a religious persuasion believe that gay marriage demeans the institution of marriage. Slate had a wonderful article explaining this a little further, which brings me to my solution:

Split the religious institution of marriage from the civil institution of a contractual union between two people bestowing the legal rights and responsibilities of a marriage. All people that choose to engage in a union with each other will engage in a civil union (or some other similarly catchy name). If they choose to get married, they can find a priest to do so. The priest-run marriage, however, will not have any legal standing, unless accompanied by a civil union certificate (same as a marriage license, only with a different name). So, in short, judges will no longer be marrying people - they can unify them in a civil ceremony, but that would be it. However, that doesn’t stop someone from getting a civil union certificate, getting a notary to sign off on it, then running down to some Pastafarian and getting married in the religious ceremony of their choice. If two men feel like getting married, great! As long as they can find a religious figure willing to accommodate that and as long as they get their civil union certificate notarized, their marriage will be just as legally legitimate as that of a straight couple. Would it be equally religiously significant? I’m running for President, not for Pope, so it’s not my problem.

Now, the slippery slope… if we allow gay marriage, why stop there? Why not allow marriage between people and animals? What about polygamy?

Let’s rule bestiality out right now - animals do not possess the cognitive capabilities to engage in a mutual contract, much less understand the ramifications of one, so it’s pretty easy to shoot that down. Besides, that’s just cruel to the animal. Polygamy, however, is a slightly harder nut to crack. I say “slightly” because it really doesn’t take much to explain why gay marriage is legally acceptable and polygamy isn’t.

It’s all about legal precedent.

To understand where I’m going here, you have to remember something - marriage, legally speaking, is a contract between two people that, if a party chooses to break it, defines how assets, rights, and responsibilities are divided between the two people. This includes things like alimony, child-related issues (support, visitation, custody), dividing up of assets (house, furniture, retirement funds) and debts (credit cards, loans, etc.), and so on. Since existing laws are now much more gender-neutral than they used to be, thanks to decades of hard work from women’s rights groups, it doesn’t take much to just write out the genders entirely and let it be between any two consenting adults. The rules would still be identical; there’s little legal distinction between a husband and a wife these days, so it wouldn’t take much to take existing laws and apply them to a gender-neutral union.

Polygamy, on the other hand, is a different story. All of our laws are designed with a civil union/marriage having only two parties involved. Consequently, if we needed to rewrite the laws to authorize polygamy, how would we approach it? Consider the following:

1. If a husband has five wives and one of them choose to leave, does the ex-wife get half of the assets of the family or just 1/6 of them?
2. If a wife leaves and had two children with the husband, does the husband have sole responsibility to pay child support, or do the responsibilities get subdivided evenly between the husband and the other participating wives? If it’s divided between all members of the family, what happens if one of the wives wasn’t in the family before one of the children was born?
3. Take #2, but it’s one wife and her kids and five husbands. Now what?
4. Extremely ludicrous but still worthwhile to consider scenario: Let’s say I decide I want to run a sweatshop. If polygamy were legal, what would stop me from finding 10 impoverished women, engaging in a “civil union” with them that ties into a pre-nup that guarantees them absolutely nothing if they choose to leave (perhaps even having a provision where they have to pay me to leave), then working them as my “wives” and thus avoiding all minimum wage labor laws?

Point being, legalizing polygamy isn’t just as easy as saying, “Eh, let’s do it.” We’d have to rewrite significant portions of marriage law to do it, which is not something that should be done lightly. Since I don’t see a whole lot of people volunteering to rewrite that particular social contract, I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

A couple of quick caveats before I begin:

1. My girlfriend’s best friend is lesbian that is absolutely huge on gay rights and the like, so I get a regular dose of the subject every time I see her - we’re talking at least once a week here.
2. I’m an atheist and a rather proud one at that. I’m not the kind that rubs religious people’s noses in it, mind you, but, as far as I’m concerned, religion just doesn’t make any sense to me.

That said…

Rosie O’Donnell, a lesbian that is an absolute case study in my theory that gays have an opposite sense of fashion compared to their straight compatriots (i.e. gay men have fashion sense, whereas most straight men don’t, and gay women don’t have fashion sense, whereas most straight women do), blurted out between feedings that, “And just one second, radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.” Now, let’s keep something in mind here - in fundamentalist Islamic doctrine, it’s okay to kill gays. Furthermore, they actually practice what they preach in some parts of the world. We’re talking state policy here, not isolated incidents.

I know that Christianity is certainly not clean on this issue. I remember the case of Matt Shepard, along with the play produced in response to that. I also know about Jerry Falwell’s thoughts on the subject, as well as the infamous Chick Publications cartoons. That said, fundamentalist Christian dogma, contrary to what you might think about the Bush administration’s stand, is not official state dogma. Killing gay people is a crime in the United States, just like killing anyone else; it doesn’t matter if God told you to do it or not.

Come to think of it, it doesn’t matter if Allah told you to do it or not, so I guess Rosie does have a point - radical Christianity and radical Islam are, in fact, just as threatening in a country like the United States… hardly at all. Let’s keep it that way.