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On the purely linguistic side of the Minneapolis shooting (which looks as a totally intentional assassination by ICE to me) and the media reports on it. Does anyone, like me, feel puzzled from the naturalness and ease that media use when they talk about (the unjustly and brutally killed) Renee Good's "wife"? It's the same strange feeling I get when I read the online discussions on the PLURIBUS tv series and the first episode in which the female protagonist's "wife" is killed. What I find strange is the absolute nonchalance that is used in media to describe the partner of a woman as her "wife". The grumpy conservative in me would like to say: "No, no, no! She is a partner. She is a significant other. She is a lover. She is everything but she isn't a "wife". The word "wife" has a very different meaning!". Of course this is a tiny minority position: I understand that the zeitgeist, today, has completely normalized the use of the word "wife" to describe a woman who is sentimentally joined with another woman. But still I find a sense of uneasiness when I hear such uses of the "wife" word...
The gay marriage debate was always built around forcing society to give gay unions as much respect and reverence as regular marriage. It's stolen valour. If they want those unions to be respected then they should prove it through example that they are serious partnerships meant to last for life. They know about the instability and promiscuity rife in gay relationships and the big question marks hanging over child rearing by gay parents, but want you to ignore all that because there are laws telling you to do so. You're meant to pretend its the same as an institution with more than 4000 years of history behind it.
Edit: Should make it clear I'm all for equal legal rights in gay unions. I'm just against calling it marriage.
OP is talking about a lesbian relationship. Lesbian relationships tend to be monogamous and serious. They report lower infidelity rates than straight marriages and have a predisposition towards commitment.
By your standard, why shouldn't lesbian relationships qualify for marriage status ?
Don't they also have staggeringly high rates of domestic abuse? Though it wouldn't shock me if that were just an artifact of women being more likely to report domestic abuse and thereby the two-women relationship being more likely to report it.
Even wiki seems to suggest that experience of intimate partner violence goes gay men (26%) < straight men (29%) < straight women (35%) < bisexual men (37%) < lesbians (43%) < bisexual women (61%).
That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?
Part of it may be that women are just more likely to report violence, yes. Another may be different patterns in forming relationships - as the commenter one post up notes, lesbians are the demographic most likely to commit to a relationship early, whereas gay men are the slowest. Perhaps lesbians are therefore more likely to get into a foolish or inadvisable relationship, run on to the rocks, and end up facing violence? Sexual culture more generally may play a role - you might expect more promiscuous groups to encounter more violence, but that's counter-intuitive with gay men, by reputation the most promiscuous group, encountering the least. And something very disturbing seems to be happening with bisexual women.
Different types of violence may count differently - my understanding is that while men are more likely to be physically violent, women are usually more likely to be emotionally abusive, so if emotional or lifestyle abuse counts as violence on that study, that might be raising the figure? However, the wiki page I linked says 43.8% of lesbians reported "physical violence, stalking, or rape", and even with only two-thirds of that being exclusively female perpetrators, that's still pretty bad. Even if we consider the possibility that lesbians who have dated men are victims of male-originated violence at disproportionately high rates, female-on-lesbian violence is still unusually high.
I don't have enough to state a conclusion here, and I'm naturally somewhat skeptical of the way Wikipedia frames these results. So I'll just say that I don't know what's going on with sexual orientation and domestic violence. These figures are striking enough that it sure looks like orientation is a factor, but it's nothing so clear as "men/women/straights/gays are more violent".
I worked as a bouncer through college and for a few years afterwards. I took a lot of shifts at the nearby LGBT+ night club as the pay was better and it was not any worse than anywhere else, though the dangers were...different. I made a lot of friends there too. I can't help with stats on this stuff at all, but I can share the sort-of popular, tribal understanding of these things from within part of the community. Its well understood within the LGB community that lesbians are hitters. They were also the most likely to attack the bar staff by a wide margin. In fact I'm pretty confident that all of the people we had to call the police on were lesbians, they were definitely all women, some could have been bi. On the subject of bisexuals, they are often looked down upon by the Ls and Gs. I'm talking about people who actually experience genuine attraction to both sexes that they have acted on and continue to pursue, not self ID bisexuals who are straight in practice. They are seen as unreliable, undependable sex-addicts who lie constantly. Some parts of the community have significant anti-bisexual bias to the point of not allowing them in some clubs/events at all.
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