Dear gays in America: Refocus your efforts to get the government out of marriage.
The gays in America seeking their marriage equality are barking up the wrong tree. Instead of seeking to make the government completely trash the tradition of marriage in practically every religion on the planet that recognize marriage — and as far as I know the ones that do only recognize it between man and woman — what they should be doing is fighting for the government to get out of the marriage business all together.
The USA was not founded on the premise that the religious get brownie points over the non. The fact that marriages grant people legal and financial benefits amazes me and is in my opinion a gross violation of the separation of church and state. How these laws still exist are beyond me. This is what the gays should be campaigning to get rid of. If people want to be married in the eyes of their god, so be it. Go do it in a church, but let’s not have the government treat you special now. If gays want a means to scream to the world that they have a partner that they love, then fine, do it before the justice of the peace and let the strength of the love between you both be recognized as on par with that of a marriage done under religious tones in a church. Simple as that. But let no legal and financial benefits come from it.
But the people campaigning for marriage equality are very shortsighted on the matter. They dont realize, or maybe don’t care that they are asking the government to further infringe upon the separation of church and state and that they really have no right to force churches to rewrite their bibles to their liking, no matter if the writings are true or not, or whether or not you think they’re silly. Just because one might think something to be silly doesn’t give them authority to mold it to their will. I myself am an agnostic and I think religion is ridiculous, but alas, it’s real and however cult-ish it may be, millions of people believe it and therefore we have to live with it. How would you like it if a religious group was pushing to implement a law into society based on its traditions? I’m sure you wouldn’t like it. But if you want to force churches to re-write their bibles to accommodate you, then you by all rights should be open to churches looking to re-write the laws of the land to accommodate them, and I’ll bet a lot of money none of you are willing to let that happen.
To the gays of America: Refocus your efforts. Realize what you’re tryng to accomplish is really wrong and selfish in regards to trying to change hundreds of years old religious texts. Despite your ego, you’re not important enough to have bibles re-written to your liking. Also realize that what the government does is very wrong and selfish too when it comes to how it handles marriages, and work to make people realize this and work to change it. Then you will have true equality.
10 Comments »
Leave a comment
-
Recent Comments
orgott on Warstorm: A Game Or Expensive … Greytips on Warstorm: A Game Or Expensive … forerunner on Dear gays in America: Refocus … cmadler on Dear gays in America: Refocus … Robert Kight on Dear gays in America: Refocus …
-
Archives
- November 2009 (1)
- March 2009 (2)
- February 2009 (5)
- January 2009 (1)
- September 2008 (1)
-
Categories
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
So far as I know, NO (gay) marriage proposal has EVER required ANY religious entity to recognize anything they don’t want to (in their religious activities). While I agree with your suggestion in principle, getting the government(s) to remove the benefits they accord to married folks is going to be a very hard sell. Tax deductions, default inheritance rights, to name just two. Some Gay Rights advocates have cataloged several hundred financial incentives governments provides for marriage.
This sounds to me like a libertarian argument. I used to be a Libertarian myself, in the last century, when I still believed that insurance companies could provide the financial incentive to solve social issues. AIG, et al., put the lie to that. They’re just interested in feeding at a government trough and/or using government to mulct the public.
One small hitch there. Marriage predates religion. That’s right, Marriage is a social construct, not a religious one. This can be seen by the fact that every religion has a marriage ceremony. If it were a religious creation, one would expect it to belong to said religion and to no others. Even the wording is specific: “we bless this union” not “we create this union”. Basically you get married and then ask the church to bless it before God.
The trouble is, we’ve let religion play with our ball for so long, they think they own it. They don’t.
I say get religion out of marriage.
[...] Dear gays in America: Refocus your efforts to get the government out of marriage : Interesting thoughts here. Makes me wonder why marriage has to be sanctioned by the government, and why we care? Instead of seeking to make the government completely trash the tradition of marriage in practically every religion on the planet that recognize marriage — and as far as I know the ones that do only recognize it between man and woman — what they should be doing is fighting for the government to get out of the marriage business all together. [...]
Pingback by Should the government have anything to do with marriage? :: DeaneBarker.net | November 4, 2009
No, you are all wrong. Yes, marriage is social, not religious. But it used to be that the government only intervened to PRESERVE the rights of a marriage. They enforced the contract law, etc. MARRIAGE LICENSES, where the government ALLOWS you to get married in the first place, are new. They are an artifact of Reconstruction, where, in the interest of “racial hygiene,” state governments decided they didn’t want blacks marrying whites, and for “public health” weaseled their way into LETTING people get married in the first place. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_licenses#United_States
That’s how the government always gets its way, by abusing its spending power. Holding over your head incentives, like marriage tax breaks in this case, to get you to go along by offering you YOUR OWN MONEY back to you. We need to get a grip on government.
It’s good to draw people’s attention to the provision in the gay marriage bill that requires rewriting all Bibles. Really I don’t know why that’s in there at all.
you are exactly right. The government should not have anything to do with determining whether two people are “legally” married. The government has nothing to do with marriage. They need to be removed from the business altogether. However, the Amerikan public is nothing but a herd of sheeple and they’re too muddled at this point to realize the benefits of ‘freedom’ – and by this I mean ‘limited government’. Once a people have surrendered their freedoms, as we have, then trying to sell them on the concept of being free is like trying to explain to the cows that they should leave the farm. It seems risky and appears to offer very little in the way of tangible benefits.
This argument would presuppose the idea that gay marriage is simply a fight over gays being able to marry. The larger issue at stake is the idea that marriage can and should be the union of equals. That two women or two men should join together in marriage, neither one the superior to the other one, neither one “wearing the pants in the family”, so to speak, flies in the face of thousands of years of paternalism.
Marriage equality, simply put, is gender equality
Thank you for such a clear explanation of what seems to be the only reasonable approach.
My suggestion (which I think is similar to what you advocate) is that ANY two adults can get a “civil union” (or whatever else you want to call it), which generally confers the legal rights currently associated with marriage. Basically this would serve as the government’s acknowledgment that this is a special relationship, without saying anything about the exact nature of the relationship. If you want to get married, that would be a purely religious thing, but the religious marriage would have NO legal bearing.
It’s great to take away marriage from the non-religious.