Sneaky Bastards In New England
Well said as always Drew but ... things of it is they don’t really care. What those ppl want is recognition that their way of life is ... normal. Once they have the marriage thing well, that makes em just like us.
Sick thought int it?
Well put Drew. Two gays getting together for a civil union through a lifetime contract is pretty much appropriate. Why? Because any contract that doesn’t include specifically illegal behavior is legal and binding.
There’s a second very important reason too. Having the government in the marriage business is unconstitutional. The First Amendment is pretty clear on the subject. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Hope I got the quote right. Regardless, historically marriage is a religious function, not a secular one. Having any governmental body do anything with it is therefore unconstitutional. I’m actually surprised that the ACLU hasn’t taken up this argument. The language of the First Amendment is pretty plain and it wasn’t that long ago that governments began to recognize civil wedding ceremonies.
Therefore, the only legal arbiters or granters of marriage are religious authorities.
That’s the good news. The other news would be that any church or religion that chooses to approve gay marriage would be able to do so. Depending on how you look at it, you can either support the Constitution of the United States and allow any religious authority to conduct a gay marriage or you can trash the Constitution and fight out in court whether or not gay marriage is legal. I look at this one as damned if you do or damned if you don’t.
If pushed into a tight corner I can accept them as normal. Unusua yes, and a rather small slice of the population. But normal. But that does not give them the right to defile something timeless and sacrosanct. Marriage is for heteros Period.
PS - since gays are no normal, there is no such thing as any kind of special legislation for them, especially note hate crimes. And no preferential hiring in the interior design, hair care, or fashion fields either.
I may surprise some of you here, but I don’t have a problem with the concept, or the legality of same-gender marriages.
There’s two faces to marriage in our world: The religious one, and the legal-framework one.
First, I’ll speak to the legal-framework one: It provides a series of legal rights and obligations that are well established, and touch many areas of our lives in terms of business and money, including taxation, inheritance, custodial rights, certain powers of attorney, insurance, etc… The list goes on.
It is cheaper and more efficient for us to extend the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, and avoid a ton of legislative and regulatory duplication to cover the same net effect for these civil unions between two same-genedered persons.
Also, because our western-society governments seem to be unable (or unwilling) to create large swaths of new law or regulation without including many things to further erode or infringe upon our rights, I propose to you all that it is better to let them make a very simple change of allowing marriage to apply to two same-gendered persons, and thus hopefully they won’t end up making our lives appreciably worse, at least not this time.
I would argue that it’s the legal framework that matters the most, because that controls how we get things done contractually with each other, with companies, and with the government.
Now, to the religious face: Not really required, but can be important for people to feel they’ve done, or it provides the necessary ritual for passing through one of those important phases in our lives. People like ritual and theater, it’s part of our psyche.
So long as the Government doesn’t try to force religions to marry people that the religions or the clergy of same does not want to marry together, we’re good. If a religion won’t marry a same sex couple, too bad. Go find another religion, or enjoy your legally, government sanctioned marriage. Alternatively, you can get all your friends together, and hold your own ceremony. I’ve seen some really nice ones done this way when folks didn’t feel any church best represented their beliefs.
If a religion wants to offer same-sex marriages, and this offends a major portion of their congregation, well I guess they’re going to have to decide whether they want to go one way, or the other because this kind of thing fractures churches and causes new denominations to form, taking a bunch of the congregation (and their money) out of one church and to another, or to form their own. That’s just life, and they’ll have to be all adult-like and figure that out for themselves.
From a personal opinion of same-sex marriage: I just celebrated 19 years of marriage with my own wife. If a couple of gents, or a couple of ladies wish to get married, more power to ‘em. It has absolutely NO impact on the history of my marriage, or the upcoming years. What my wife and I have together is ours and always will be. Finally, I see no reason to deny a couple of people the chance at the same happiness we’ve had. On the other side of the coin, if their relationship ends badly and they go through the grist-mill of divorce court and lose most of their personal savings fighting each other through the lawyers, well all I can say is this: Be careful what you ask for, you might get it. You take the good with the bad. Welcome to our world.
Tiger [ Who is a fiscal conservative, and socially I’m kinda of a ‘you do whatever the hell you want, but do it off my lawn’ kind of guy. ]
CT has declared gay marriage is now legal even though the citizens voted against it repeatedly. The CT government made civil unions legal in an effort to satisfy the gay mafia. However this act was used by the CT Supreme court to overturn the will of the people when they failed to recognize the difference between a civil union and marriage in the eyes of the law.
Allowing civil unions is a bad idea.
Now they are trying to pass laws that force schools to teach the gay lifestyle as normal. Tommy has two daddy’s…
Posted by MJS
05/08/2009 at 09:21 PM
Marriage is the ONE institution of Judeo-Christianity which was created by GOD Himself, prior to the fall of Mankind into Sin. Therefore, when He says “Let No one put asunder”...He means it!
I support civil unions for gays and lesbians. That’s as far as I go.
05/08/2009 at 12:40 PM
05/08/2009 at 05:52 PM
