Ever since the beginning of recorded history, there has been marriage. Dating back to thousands of years BCE, it has been a formal ceremony with religious overtones, with each society and religion determining what ceremonies and rituals would be appropriate for two people getting married.
What many people seem to forget nowadays is marriage is not purely a societal recognition, it is also a religious one.
Dating back to one of the earliest religions that is still extant today, Judaism, there have been rules for the married couple to recognize. They have legal, moral and religious obligations to each other, with varying degrees of exclusivity and longevity. “What God hath put together, let no one put asunder.”
Now we have men wanting to marry men, and women wanting to marry women, and one man wanting to marry many women.
Let’s make it perfectly clear. If a gay or lesbian couple wants to go through a religious ceremony to declare their exclusivity to the world, I have zero problem with it. There are religions that exist out there who would be happy to perform such ceremonies (for the right price, of course).
But that isn’t what they want. They want to force the State governments to issue a license that will give them the same legal recognition as any normal marriage, which exists between a man and a woman.
We now have a handful of judges who have issued orders to a co-equal branch of government (violating the separation of powers, but who cares, right?), dictating what laws must be passed, and in what form, based on an obscure phrasing in a document that was written more than 220 years ago. Not to mention the Liberal Mayor of the Most Liberal city in the Most Liberal State in the nation ordering the city employees to issue marriage licenses in direct defiance of California State Law. (Proposition 22, defining marriage as being only between a man and a woman, passed by a vote of 61.4% to 38.6%.)
But this Mayor knows that nothing will happen to him, because the LLL has defined the debate on this issue (and many others) by declaring that if you argue against the granting of special privileges to certain minorities, you must therefore be prejudiced against that minority (homophobic, racist, misogynistic, what have you).
Which is the purest form of what makes the north 40 grow green…
Just because I don’t think that women should serve in combat doesn’t make me “a male chauvinist pig”. Similarly, while I think that homosexuality has absolutely nothing to do with the capability to perform most jobs, there are exceptions, and those exceptions do not mean I am judging them based on their proclivities. (I would not want a homosexual male as a troop leader of the Boy Scouts any more than I would want a heterosexual male being the troop leader for the Girl Scouts, and precisely for the same reasons.)
But this issue of gay marriages, I still don’t get it. We had this discussion a few months ago, and the only thing that could be shown (as far as I remember - correct me if I’m wrong) to be the special benefit that heterosexual married couples get that committed homosexual couples don’t get is the “automatic-ness” of the benefits, because there is nothing that married couples get that homosexual couples cannot also get.
Let me repeat that: There is nothing that married couples get that homosexual couples do not also get.
Inheritance rights? Write a will.
Medical control? Fill out a Power Of Attorney.
Want kids? Ask Rosie O’Donnell or Melissa Etheridge for advice.
But don’t re-write the laws to suit you! The vast majority of Americans (barely) tolerate “civil unions”, but are adamantly against “gay marriage”, and the homosexuals pushing this issue don’t seem to care.
It’s going to take either a Constitutional Amendment, which requires approval of 38 states, or a case appealed all the way to the Supreme Court (which would likely lose, given the fact that one or more of the Justices of SCOTUS are likely to be replaced by Bush within the next few years - Rehnquist, aged 80, has been in office since ‘71 and Stevens, aged 84, has been in since ‘75).
But in the meantime, we have judges dictating from the bench and elected officials deliberately violating both State Law and their respective Constitutional mandated job descriptions. And neither of them have anything to worry about, because the Governors of those states don’t want to commit political suicide by telling these asshats - who are being paid at taxpayer expense, by the way - to do their jobs, and quit trying to take over other branches of Governments.
And let society determine what it wants, and when it wants it.
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There’s something to this, I think. Throughout the entire history of humanity, there has been strife, war, pestilence, famine, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Jimmy Carter and even during this time, religion as well.
You’ve heard the phrase, Hell on Earth. How appropriate.
Or I’m just rationalizing the fact I don’t go to church or read the bible...regardless, I just know when my time comes, I’ll deal with it then.
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