KO on Prop 8
POSTED BY: Khyron
UPDATED: Friday, November 14, 2008 13:30
VIEWED: 7790
PAGE 8 of 10
Quote:Well, I don't want religious peeps to mess with government. And what you propose would entail rewriting so many laws it would be stupid.
The reason we have all this controversy over marriage is because marriage has been around for a long, long time. And it is a religious word.
The Christians (of which I am one) and other Monotheists believe that by re-defining 'marriage' you are soiling a religious precept that they were raised to believe was morally correct. They don't want government messing with their marriage.
And BTW you have a VERY provincial view of marriage. In ancient Greece, and in many ancient cultures, the woman became the "property" of the man.... which still exists in many parts of the world today. In India, they are arranged, often at a very early age, and occur in stages which include a dowry. In Saudi Arabia (a "monotheistic" country) it's often between cousins, and men can have more than one wife. In old Polynesia, anyone could marry anyone - except the first born of the first born were tapu (taboo) because their marrying down would dilute their sacred powers. In the Old Testament, concubinage was accepted.
Marriage is not what you think it is. It doesn't fit into a white- picket- fence- suburban- Christian- paradigm.
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Let's party like its 1929.
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according to wikipedia, Marriage not only predates the Bible, but there were occasionaly male-male marriages before the year 342, at which point, said marriages were declared illegal by Christian Emperor Constantius.
Everything i'm reading on the subject says that marriage had no religious origin, and was meant as a way of securing property rights.
So while I was willing to entertain the notion of banning the word from government use, I've changed my mind, and refuse to allow a legal word, a good word with an interesting history, to be coopted by the religious right.
Granted, marriage is not the original latin word.
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Quote:This is what I've been saying for ages already. It's the simplest and cleanest solution: if you take it out of the political realm, the problem is solved for everybody.
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Because such divisiveness and double standardization are not the function of the government, I propose we let the religious personages of the world keep their word 'marriage' and allow government to discard it in favor of the superior Civil Union, a title with no religious connotations whatsoever.
Quote:Well, the government can either change the laws regarding this issue and solve the problem, or we can wait for a couple more decades for enough bigots to die off from old age so that the people who are "liberal" on this are in the majority (after all, society progresses one funeral at a time). I propose the former, it's quicker and cleanly separates the murky interface between church and state that exists with regard to this issue.
Originally posted by yinyang:
But (and here I may be playing devil's advocate a little bit), why should the government change to accommodate people who have a problem separating church and state?
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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So because some religious people CLAIM that it is a religious word only.. it should be so?
So, when religious people claim that morality can only be born from religion, it should be considered true, also? And no unreligious person can consider themselves moral?
What other words should be struck from non-religious usage to prevent offense?
It is clearly not a term confined to religion. They simply don't have a leg to stand on and I fail to see why they can't let it go. Should the government really pander to them?
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Quote:It's not about pandering to religious bigots, it's about finding the most effective and elegant solution to the problem. Besides, it's not just religious people who are against gay marriage.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
Should the government really pander to them?
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:Quote:It's not about pandering to religious bigots, it's about finding the most effective and elegant solution to the problem. Besides, it's not just religious people who are against gay marriage.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
Should the government really pander to them?
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
I don't see it being necessarily elegant, considering that non-religious, heterosexual married couples are not necessarily going to be thrilled to have the word marriage taken away from them to be given to the religious only.
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Maybe, but as somebody who's non-religious, I'd be thrilled to be able to get hitched and say I'm in a civil union, not in a marriage, because the word "marriage" has always sounded very religious to me. But I appreciate that other non-religious people may not feel the same way about that word as I do.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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Quote:And I'm one of them. We were married by a judge, and we've been married for 30+ years thru thick and thin. (And considering our DD's brain damage at birth and hubby's health issues, there's been a lot of "thin".) We meant what we said about "for better or worse, in sickness and health...". I stack that against ANYONE who's been married by a cleric. Just 'cause religious peeps want to exclusivate the term marriage on the false premise that it's a "religious" institution doesn't mean they should.
I don't see it being necessarily elegant, considering that non-religious, heterosexual married couples are not necessarily going to be thrilled to have the word marriage taken away from them to be given to the religious only.
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Let's party like its 1929.
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Taken from the Wikipedia page on "Common-Law Marriage".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage
Some thoughts concerning marriage as a legal contract, not primarily a religious one... Look how recently the connection was even made legally necessary, between the legal and the religious aspect. That's hardly going back to the roots of the institution itself. Shows clearly that marriage is not by definition a religious institution.
Quote:
In medieval Europe, marriage came under the jurisdiction of canon law, which recognised as a valid marriage one where the parties stated that they took one another as wife and husband, even in absence of any witnesses.
The Council of Trent (convened 1545–1563) ruled that in future a marriage was only valid in Roman Catholic countries if it was witnessed by a priest of the Roman Catholic Church or, if obtaining a priest were impractical, by other witnesses. This ruling was not accepted in the newly Protestant nations of Europe, nor by Protestants who lived in Roman Catholic countries or their colonies in the Americas or elsewhere, nor by Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Common law marriages were abolished in England and Wales by the Marriage Act 1753. The Act required marriages to be performed by a priest of the Church of England – unless the participants in the marriage were Jews or Quakers. The Act applied to Ireland after the Act of Union 1800, but the requirement for a valid marriage to be performed by a Church of England priest created special problems in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland. The law did not provide an exception.
And even then it created problems to make that connection between church and state.
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It feels like we make some of these simple things way too complex. When we do that the next sound you hear is a stampede of siege lawyers and then it's gridlock.
I'm just guessing... gay couples want to show their commitment to each other through the tradition of "marriage" that is available to all citizens, and that they grew up with (like their parents and grandparents, etc) and to feel they have the same rights as any couple. "Civil Union" sounds like a door prize, it has none of the emotion and tradition that marriage has.
If churches don't want to do the ceremonies, fine. Let the ceremony that the state provides be called a "marriage by the State," and not a religious marriage. The people that care about the religious aspect will have their differentiation.
Same benefits, different place, and they can tell their friends, "We got married!"
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