Did you hear that one of the things the Prop 8 people were saying in California is that legal gay marriage would mean that churches had to perfom gay weddings whether they wanted to or not? I mean, I can disgree with an opinion and still respect the holder, but they were spreading outright and outrageous lies. Of course, if we actually taught and talked about the separation of church and state in a clear way in schools, perhaps people wouldn't have believed it, except for the people who already believe what any pastor/preacher/priest tells them.
That's totally ridiculous. I'm ordained, and I have absolutely no responsibility to perform marriages for anyone or anything if I don't want to.
Although there's a part of me that wants to go to Utah, drug some Mormons, and impose some extra marriages on them unknowingly. Only later I would report to authorities that I was victimized and used to further their plural marriage agenda, and that they're trying to change the definition of marriage we've been using for centuries.
Exactly! As a baptized Lutheran, I could not walk into a Catholic church and make them perform my wedding ceremony! While the State certainly has rules about what churches can and cannot do (mostly in terms of protecting their tax free status) it cannot tell them who they have to serve. It's ridiculous. There are also some op-ed pieces commenting on the incredibly high African American turn out, and the demographic tendancy towards homophobia in those same voters.
There is a high tendency towards homophobia, yes. Ironically, the imposition of "Christian Values" is another thing we can blame on the time of slavery.
There's a lot of talk about the hypocrisy of people who were voting Obama voting against Prop 8, and as much as I want to believe it, I just have to remember that we're not going to be in, and will never be in, a utopia. We're making positive, progressive change, but we can't make people think rationally and reason inductively overnight.
I know that I wouldn't mind such a redefinition but I'd place a heavy bet that most people would.
I think that a lot of people would see that as marriage being "taken away" from them and would be very upset about that.
I wanted to get legally married to Jared right after we got engaged - save the ceremony for later, have plenty of time to plan, but get the legal stuff out of the way. The legal stuff, is, to me, like waiting at the DMV - and less like anything sacred or special.
Both my family and his family objected strongly to this, because they felt that then the ceremony would have less meaning. marriage, legal barrage, seems to be tied very close in people's heads, logical or not. And even if it's not logical, that emotional connection can still move people to irrational ends.
But legal stuff aside, ceremony is ceremony, legal is legal. They are two separate entities.
You can have a ceremony all you want. I could go have a ceremony with my pet cat, if I found the right person willing to do it. There's no legal official mandate to it, but of course that's the same as if I were to go to a church and hold a wedding but not back it up with application for marriage license.
Hypothetically, say Bob and Sue go to the church and get married, but don't go through the legal side of things (I get it all the time working in a college, a lot of people aren't even aware that they're not legally married.) They go through life without ever having done so. Nobody knows, it's assumed. But does it really change anything? And when it's revealed 10 years later, does anyone care? Isn't the default answer, "Well, you're married in our eyes?"
The mistake you're making here is thinking about this logically. This is not an issue that the folks on the other side of this issue are thinking about logically
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But here's the rub, anyone who it matters with -has- been married in a Church or would be, so nothing changes for them. You don't do this obviously by demanding people come in and get their licenses renamed, you do it subtle. Subversive even. Like it's just some bureaucratic change of policy. Like it's all legalese and not all that important.
If we want religion out of our government, we have to get our government out of religion.
This is the exact same thought I was having today. Make the governmental aspects just the civil union between two people, with all the legal rights that come with it. People can still get married or joined or united or whatnot by whatever religious, social, or unorganized ceremony they want and call it whatever they want. Why cloud the issue?
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Although there's a part of me that wants to go to Utah, drug some Mormons, and impose some extra marriages on them unknowingly. Only later I would report to authorities that I was victimized and used to further their plural marriage agenda, and that they're trying to change the definition of marriage we've been using for centuries.
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There's a lot of talk about the hypocrisy of people who were voting Obama voting against Prop 8, and as much as I want to believe it, I just have to remember that we're not going to be in, and will never be in, a utopia. We're making positive, progressive change, but we can't make people think rationally and reason inductively overnight.
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I think that a lot of people would see that as marriage being "taken away" from them and would be very upset about that.
I wanted to get legally married to Jared right after we got engaged - save the ceremony for later, have plenty of time to plan, but get the legal stuff out of the way. The legal stuff, is, to me, like waiting at the DMV - and less like anything sacred or special.
Both my family and his family objected strongly to this, because they felt that then the ceremony would have less meaning. marriage, legal barrage, seems to be tied very close in people's heads, logical or not. And even if it's not logical, that emotional connection can still move people to irrational ends.
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You can have a ceremony all you want. I could go have a ceremony with my pet cat, if I found the right person willing to do it. There's no legal official mandate to it, but of course that's the same as if I were to go to a church and hold a wedding but not back it up with application for marriage license.
Hypothetically, say Bob and Sue go to the church and get married, but don't go through the legal side of things (I get it all the time working in a college, a lot of people aren't even aware that they're not legally married.) They go through life without ever having done so. Nobody knows, it's assumed. But does it really change anything? And when it's revealed 10 years later, does anyone care? Isn't the default answer, "Well, you're married in our eyes?"
Just a couple of thoughts.
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If we want religion out of our government, we have to get our government out of religion.
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