ban gay marriage
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- Gorbie0
god embarassed itself when it created the duck billed platypus.
liek omg wtf?
- Critical0
absolutley not!
- Gorbie0
how does one go about banning something already illegal anyway?
- Bio0
DOWN with separation of church and state.
we need to keep the sinners from sinning!
GIVE THE CHURCH POLITICAL POWER AND LET THEM MAKE SURE WE DON'T SIN!!!
i don't want the opportunity to sin. free will is no longer a luxury we can afford! hooray!xo,
e.
- lilbabyarm0
the word marriage is religious in nature.
they should strip marriage of ALL legal definition and grant civil union legal status available to everybody. that way the religious folks can still have their sacred marriage but then the gay folks can legally marry and have all the economic benefits afforded to married couples.
problem solved.
- Brian220
I couldn't agree more lilbabyarm.
- ********0
i have lots of gay friends and they tell me what they want most is equal protection and benefits, especially related to the IRS. they want to call each other next of kin at the hospital, share tax and medical benefits, etc.
i can only speak for my direct friends and acquaintances, and they don't give a crap about the word "marriage".
- cinder0
Christians need to stop worrying what everyone else is doing and fix the Christian divorce rate.
It's a sad day when Christian divorce rates are higher than non-Christian rates.
- lilbabyarm0
this is exactly what the gay marriage is all about. economics.
corporations are not excited about gay marriage because it's only a matter of time before gay marriage, once legalized, becomes a normal part of our culture... at that point you can see where this is going to end up.
let's say a couple of straight guys decide they want to share benefits in some sort of swap deal. they get married they share all the economic benefits. how do you prove love? what is the limit of civil union once it extends to all? If I have a fat ass job at microsoft, and my boy has season tickets to the lakers... I would marry him for the tax benfits and trade coverage for laker tix etc.
what about multiple partners? hells yeah... I like where this could go. you can bet the money interests don't like this and that's why this issue may take some time to resolve. once the corps can erode away the benefits and coverage to suit them better, gay marriage will be legalized. it will take a few years.
- mrdobolina0
I think people's religion should be a personal thing and they shouldnt talk about it with people they don't know.
- lilbabyarm0
I agree 100% with dobolina. I can't tell you how dissapointing it was to be in college and some cute girl would walk up and talk to me... thinking to myself "yes! a girl is talking to me!" what's up... whne suddenly it hits you like a brick wall "so, would you like to come to my group on sunday?" "get the fuck outta here biatch!"
- unfittoprint0
Fell in love with a nun
I fell in love once and almost completely
she's in love with the world
but sometimes these feelings
can be so misleading
she turns and says are you alright?
I said I must be fine cause my heart's still beating
come and kiss me by the riverside,
GOD says it's fine he don't consider it cheatingI kid you not.
- gabriel_pc0
we must preserve the sanctity of marriage!
http://abc.go.com/primetime/bach…
http://www.thelittlestgroom.com/…
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/G…
- Brian220
good one.
Seriously though. The problem is in the word 'Sanctity'. Marriage is permanently intertwined with religion. It's an inherently religious institution. And government has no business playing a part in marriage or worrying about preserving the sanctity of a religious ceremony.
I saw an interview with Canada's former Prime Minister. She was saying the US is the only industrial nation that would elect a president who says the jury is still out on evolution. They wouldn't even be considered a serious candidate in other countries. Let us pray for a secular world.
- ********0
Marriage is inherently not religious. It's a primitive tradition that predates all the worlds major religions. It's a political act - designed as an act to strengthen the community. As such, during the times of great religious power - all the major churches and religions appopriated the right to grant marriage to increase their own political power.
- clint0
don't really care about marriage or gay people, but everybody should be free to do what their heart desires, if that doest involve f**cking other people, what's the problem?
the us turning into some sort of nazi state in my opinion!
- Brian220
Religion didn't start with Jesus. All homo sapiens, primitive or not, seem to have developed religion. It's probably instinctual and has been a defining trait of our species.
But, assuming you're right and marriage was originally secular. It doesn't matter. Religion appropriated marriage quite some time ago. The two have been intertwined for millennia.
We have to focus on our current cultural context. Almost half the country voted for Bush. For them marriage is a sanctified religious ceremony.
- lilbabyarm0
BY RON GROSSMAN
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO - (KRT) - When President Bush last week
pronounced marriage "the most fundamental
institution of civilization," he was in good company -
at least rhetorically. That link has been proclaimed
every time marriage has gone through changes, as it
has frequently done throughout history.The Roman statesman Cicero held that "the primary bond
of society is marriage," suggesting an immutable
institution. In fact, it has always been shaped by
social currents, sometimes progressive, but often not.Through the ages, the institution of marriage has been
unfair to women, has banned the union of people of
different races or religions, and has typically been
far more concerned with property rights than romantic
love - a very modern notion.Now, as gay marriage has ballooned into a major issue
of the presidential campaign, historians and voters
alike are reflecting on an institution that truly is a
foundation stone of society - for better and for
worse."Since the 19th century, people have treated family
and marriage as the litmus test of society," said
Michael Grossberg, an Indiana University professor who
submitted a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of
several historians to the Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court, whose ruling in favor of gay marriage
triggered the national debate."Those who fear social change see any change in
marriage and the family as a disaster," Grossberg
said.Ironically, the most enduring aspects of marriage tend
to be the very opposite of those qualities its most
vocal defenders associate with it. Romance,
companionship, the warmth of family life, were rarely
connected with marriage until recent times. In the
beginning, it was chiefly an economic institution.An engagement party in ancient Greece was a commercial
transaction, said Marilyn Yalom in "A History of the
Wife." "It was essentially an oral contract, made
between the man who gave the woman in marriage -
usually her father - and the bridegroom," Yalom wrote.
"The bride was not present."In this country, the conception of marriage as a
transaction between father-in-law and son-in-law meant
a woman went from being economically dependent on her
father to the same status vis-a- vis her husband.
Under a legal theory called "coverture," the married
pair became one - the husband.American wives couldn't own property - even that which
they inherited from their parents - until various
states gave them the right between 1839 and 1887.
Before then, even the wages a working wife earned
belonged not to her but her husband.Husbands could physically discipline their wives, as
long as they used what was euphemistically called
"moderate correction." If that, or anything else,
prompted women to leave home, their husbands would
advertise the fact in newspapers, right alongside the
ads Southern plantation owners placed for the return
of runaway slaves.---
The U.S. Supreme Court was loath to tamper with that
tradition of the man as lord and master of the
household as late as 1911, when it rejected the idea
that a wife could sue an abusive husband. The justices
called the very thought "revolutionary," "radical and
far reaching."Little wonder then, that the 19th century abolitionist
and feminist leader Lucy Stone said, "Marriage is to
woman a state of slavery."And although clerics and statesmen praised marriage's
civilizing virtues, the institution wasn't always
available to all Americans.Black Americans couldn't be legally married in the
antebellum South. The idea was seen as threatening to
slavery, upon which the region's economy depended.
Even long after the Civil War, blacks and whites
couldn't marry each other in many states. In the
Western states, where anti-immigrant fever was high,
Asians and whites were barred from marrying each
other.In 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally voided
those "anti-miscegenation" statutes, as they were
called, 16 states still had them on their books. Even
then, South Carolina didn't remove its statute until
1999.America's marriage laws and traditions had a long
prehistory by the time they came to this country,
observed Harvard historian Nancy Cott, author of
"Public Vows," a study of marriage and public policy
in American history. Ultimately, they trace to
Christian roots.When the Roman Empire became Christian in the 4th
century, the church took charge of marriage. Chief
among the rules it set for the institution was that
marriage had to be for life - though earlier cultures
had provisions for divorce - and monogamous.Curiously, that later rule finds no sanction in the
Old Testament, a text from which Christianity derives
its moral code. The Jewish patriarchs and kings were
polygamous - Solomon alone is said to have had 700
wives. Sephardic Jews, who lived in Arabic countries,
continued to practice polygamy until well into the
Middle Ages. Eventually the "ketubah," Judaism's
wedding contract, held a groom to taking an oath that:
"he shall not marry another while he is married to the
present bride."Christianity's victory also put homosexuality beyond
the moral pale.The Greeks, the ultimate founders of our civilization,
didn't have the same qualms about same- sex
relationships, though historians are divided over the
extent of homosexuality in ancient Greece.Richard Saller, a University of Chicago historian,
observes that in the ancient Greek city of Thebes,
homosexual unions were considered not a danger to the
state, but its last line of defense. The elite force
of the Thebean army was the Sacred Band, a battalion
of 150 gay couples, never beaten until it fought to
the last man against the Macedonians. After the
battle, King Philip of Macedon came to where their
bodies lay, reported the ancient writer Plutarch."Perish any man who suspects that these men either did
or suffered anything that was base," Philip said.The Roman Empire flourished for hundreds of years
after a notable pair of high-society same-sex
marriages. The Emperor Nero fell madly in love with a
boy named Sporus."He married him with all the usual ceremonies,
including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his
house attended by a great throng, and treated him as
his wife," noted the ancient biographer Suetonius, who
also reported that Nero tied the knot a second time
with a male marriage partner.Christianity's marriage rules passed into English
common law and from that into the legal systems of the
early United States. Thus, Christian doctrine was
embedded into American law, despite the constitutional
provision for separation of church and state, Cott
observed.The leading 19th century treatise on the U.S. law of
marriage defined it as: "the civil status of one man
and one woman united in law for life."Cott noted that in the 19th century, Western
colonialists and missionaries went around the world
imposing monogamy on cultures where it was not native.
The U.S. did the same, forcing Native Americans to
give up their traditions of multiple marriage. Fear of
Mormon polygamy held up the admission of Utah to the
union.---
Since the era of World War II, Americans' conception
of marriage has been rapidly changing, said Princeton
University historian Hendrik Hartog. Women entered the
workforce, making them less dependent on men. Birth
control made it practical to separate sex and marriage
from procreation. Romantic love, a theme that had been
acquiring emotional power for a century, became more
the norm."Marriage became identified with individual human
happiness," said Hartog, author of "Man and Wife in
America." "Social conservatives haven't been happy
with that shift, but they've lost at every stage of
the game."Among those stages, he said, were divorce-law reforms
that made it possible for couples to end unhappy
marriages and, should the parties wish, try again for
happiness with another partner.Hartog thinks the gay community's push for same-sex
marriage is a logical extension of the idea of
marriage as a vehicle for self-fulfillment. Yet he
wouldn't hazard a guess on the outcome of the current
battle.One thing seems sure, though: People will always
wonder and worry about the well-being of marriage.The pioneering sociologist Edward Westermarck, who
wrote the first serious study of marriage roughly a
century ago, had an ornithologist colleague who,
reflecting on divorce and adultery, concluded that
humans are morally inferior to winged species that
mate permanently."He is so filled with admiration for their exemplary
family life," Westermarck said, "that he
enthusiastically declares that `real marriage can only
be found among birds.' "
- ********0
Course it is. I'm not denying that. All i'm saying is that Marriage doesn't need religion. Maybe that;s hard for people to get their head around when the only real religion in this world is science. Also, what i meant, is that spirituality (seen as anti-science) and religion, are not the same thing. Religion is an organising power, spirituality is something else.
- ********0
I didn't read the whole thing u posted, but from the first few bits, thats the jist of what i was trying to say. More than anything marriage is a social function designed to strengthen the existing community and its structures and to protect wealth.