A Question About Same Sex Marriage

[Jacco]

I am very religious myself, and don't agree with homosexuality, but I do agree with fair treatment under the laws for all. Marriage cannot be legislated because it is religious, its pretty much saying "That kid there has a toy I like, make him give it to me!", but union laws cannot be denied because of civil right, which is like saying "I have this toy and I dont want him to have one like it, dont let him get one!"

Marriage is not the same as a union.

i'm not in the US, so maybe i misunderstand the laws there, but marriage is not religious. Marriage is a legal contract between two individuals, that grant some right and obligation in the eye of the state. that's the root of the marriage. Now that contract is often signed in a ceremony that may or not be religious. When the ceremony is religious, it's done in a church (or whatever place your religion use for that). The religious sacrement, that we call marriage, is totally independant from the legal contract we call marriage. Can we legislate the legal contract to accept same-sex couple : totaly. Can we legislate the religious sacrement to force religions that don't accept homosexuality to perform them : absolutely not.

I'm married myself, to a lovely person that i love more than anything, but happen to be the same gender than myself. In Canada, my marriage is not call a civil union, it's a marriage, plain and simple. The marriage took place in a courthouse in front of a celebrant that held the civil ceremony, and we signed the legal papers. The religion didn't had any involvement in this, at all. So i really dont see why religion should have a word to say in same-sex marriages, it's just not a religion business...

There's a difference between the legal definition of marriage and the religious defininition of marriage. For the most part they match up, but not in all cases. I think the main gripe of the anti-marriage people is that allowing such interferes with the religious definition and thus their religious beliefs. In that sense, they would be correct (depending on interpretation, of course). As for the legal definition, most of them seem not to have any real problem with a "union" as it does not connote the idea of a religion-sanction marriage.

So in essence, it is a battle of word semantics. The anti-gay religious followers dislike "marriage" as it gives the impression the church sanctions it and the pro-gay followers more or less seem to want it under the legal definition and, in my opinion, they want to call it marriage to stick it to the religious people.

Edit: I have no opinion of the matter one way or the other. The Pro-gay marriage movement has everything it wants in the idea of civil unions except the name of "marriage." I'm not really sure why it's discrimination to call one a civil union and one a marraige as they are just different connotations of the same thing. But there you go.

 

[Random Numbers]

I am very religious myself, [b/]and don't agree with homosexuality

Ok, so don't get mad at me, I just want to talk and I'm not here to bash you or anything, but why? You seem like a very smart person and I hope we can have a good discussion about this, and actually I think people like you are the ones that would have an opinion on the matter. So I just want to know why, you don't approve, because if a ay couple want to be married you saying no to them because of your religion is still pushing your beliefs onto them. And I hope this isn't too graphic, but honestly I can tell you from experience that it isn't really a choice. I spend quite a few years in middle and high school thinking I was straight but occasionally I catch myself staring at another man, and then when I thought of my friend while fapping it felt really good, and although I never stopped being attracted to women and it wasn't till after I talked to a friend about it that I realized I was bi, well that and sitting in the car on the way to school and feeling extremely turned on after remembering something from a video I watch the night before. Anyway this is getting wierd, but I guess I just needed to get that off my chest, hope to hear from you soon.

 

[Subscriptism]

The law has let them get away with it until now because before this there was little to no secularism in America and anyone who disagreed was brow beaten by the dominant Christian population. Anyway, while "Gays shouldn't get married" is a view held by a lot of religious people it's not exclusively or necessarily a religious view. Even in purely secular terms marriage has always been defined as mixed sex, and so it has continued, opposed almost exclusively by religious zealots who wish to impose their views on everyone. Most of these people are the same morons who don't believe in evolution and think that separation of church and state is a liberal lie and that the US really is a Christian country.