| Grey Acumen said: here's my take on this: Marriage - Any Man may marry any Woman, and vica versa if those two choose to make that commitment. This does not grant unequal rights based on sexual preference, a gay man has the same right to marry a woman as a straight man does. Just because he isn't interested is his own issue to deal with. Marriage to me is religious. If you want to give homosexual couples a civil union that grants all the legal rights and privileges of a marriage, then that's okay with me, but it is not a marriage unless it uses the religious ceremony, and making the distinction is important to maintaining the separation of church and state. Now as far as the religious end of things, you leave that the fuck alone. If a religion says that it recognizes a marriage between 2 men or 2 women, that's fine, but you're not going to find a legitimate Christian, Jewish, Catholic, or Islamic custom that will allow that. If you try to force the issue, you deserve to be dragged out and hung on a steeple. You don't decide religion, you either follow it or you don't. If you want to say you're christian and get the christian ceremony, then you follow the basic doctrines of that religion, and if you don't follow those doctrines, then I hardly see why you should get the religious validation on the matter. |
Your operating under two common misconceptions:
1) Marriage is fundamentally religious in nature.
This is not true, and the law does not recognize a marriage unless people go through the legal proceedings to become married. And marriage existed long before any Judeo-Christian conception of marriage existed.
2) Churches are being forced to marriage gay people.
Your first point is understandable, but this is the ultimate red herring. No church has been forced to marry gay people. The government cannot force churches to marry gay people and has not forced churches to marry gay people. Neither the government or any specific individual has the right to force a church to do anything (unless the church is systematically discriminating against people because of race or some other factor and will not allow them to attend church services).
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
