Actually Dizzy, it’s something more along the lines of:
1 state (MA) striking down a ban on SSM
11 states without laws banning SSM
1 state (VT) that legalizes SS civil unions
3 states (D.C., Alaska, CA) with official state/district registries for SSM
34 states with laws that ban SSM (through DOMA or some other means)
I meant 11 that banned it just this past election, sorry for not clarifying myself.
Yes. Cid’s a bit confused about civil rights, which was my point. Doesn’t look like you got it, though. No biggy. Luckilly, in both Canada and the United States, the government protects us from extremists like Cid who would like to take our civil rights away.
This is not true. There are spiritual weddings done all over the earth which are not recognized by anyone other than the religious groups giving them out. These marriages are not real marriages. They are sham religious ceremonies and don’t really mean a whole lot in the secular world we live in.
There are plenty of marriages performed every day that do not have any religious blessings whatsoever.
No shit? It appears that none of you were bright enough to get the point I was trying to make, and that is that people like Cid here are off their rockers when they think that the only kind of marriage should be religious ones. While his type of opinion is popular in much of the US, its strikingly rare to the more progressive Canadians. Religious bigotry is one of the more disgusting things that’s popular in America right now, perhaps its traveled to the north as well.
But he didn’t say the only type should be religious, he said that the government should just call them civil unions…
Looks like Bruce Springsteen needs a new nickname, since someone is allready “The Boss”.
Actually, he did. By stating that the only type of marriage is a religious ceremony, he is excluding all other types of marriage:
As far as I’m concerned, marriage shouldn’t be dealt with by the government at all. It’s a religious ceremony. If people want to get civilly “married”, everyone should need a civil union. Civil rights yay, end of story, g’night.
He is definately allowed to his opinion, but thankfully for all of us, neither the Canadian or American governments share his opinions.
Only idiots share Bush’s opinions. >.>
He’s right, though. Government should have no say in marriage, as that’s dabbling in religion’s part of it all, and State and Church (read: religion in general) should be separated. The government should be able to lord over civil unions, while the Church can give out marriages as it sees fit.
So enlighten me, how is Cid being extremist? In stating that State shouldn’t have part in Church matters? Because it’s not s’posed to, not in America, at least.
Mr. Webster says:
This is, in other words, a legal marriage in this country.
A marriage is non-legally defined as:
‘A union between two persons having the customary but most often not the legal force of marriage’
Cid was basically correct that marriages are religiously defined in most nations. For example, if you go to a courthouse to be married, you’re actually ‘legally married,’ whereas a church makes you ‘Married.’ If you live with someone, you have a ‘Commonlaw marriage.’ Only religious cerimony can make you actually, technically, married.
If you aren’t married by the law, you are married religiously, or your marriage is not recognized as such. If the courthouse or some other such legal entity does it, it is a ‘legal marriage’ which is a literal synonym for ‘civil union.’ The point that Cid was making, whatever comments you have about it’s wording, is that, outside of religion, all ‘marriages’ are really just civil unions, unless they have religious backing, in which case, the government should stay the hell out.
You’re making way too large a deal of a minour wording technicality that really is probably not what he meant, even after that has been explained to you,
Now, Freddy, as for your comment about ‘spiritual weddings,’ you said the same thing, nearly, as the 984 did. He said that without the ‘civil union’ background, the marriage was not legally recognized, it was merely a religious marriage. You said that there were many marriages that didn’t have this, and that theywere just sham religious marriages. The only difference in what the two of you are saying is about the validity of religion-based marriages.
As for your comments on ‘no-one was birght enough to get the point you were trying to make,’ if you hold Cidolfas to his exact wording, without thinking about what he means, you should expect the same thing to happen to you. If you believe people are stupid for ‘missing your point,’ I would argue you are also stupid, as you missed Cid’s decidely more obvious point.
Finally, there is only one ‘l’ in ‘luckily’ and Cid, the comma in your statement about civil unions should be inside the quotation marks.
edit
So in other words, he was wrong. You just said that marriage can be done civilly. You actually have your logic backwards. If I go to a courthouse and get married, I’m legally and offially married. If I went to a shrine in the forest and got married by my spirit-cleric under the eyes of Zalgor, the forest god…I would not be officially married. I’d be…well full of crap basically. Religious marriages are not official. If they were, the “spiritual marriages” of polygamists would all be accepted and recognized by the state, but they aren’t. :bowser:
It depends on how you define “marriage.” It often carries a religious meaning with it, but it’s not necessarily so, as put by Arac in his definition. The legal “marriage” is carried over from Christian beliefs, because the separation between Church and State isn’t so separated. So while the government can indeed marry people, it is often not what a same-sex couple would want, because that couple would perhaps prefer a religious blessing to believe that they are truly under the blessing and love of God, and not seen as some freaks of nature or somehow less than heterosexual couples just because they won’t be married by the Church.
Why are you disagreeing with this? What Cid has explained is that the State and Church each should have its own ceremony of union, utterly independent of the other. The State would call its ceremony a Civil Union, the Church would call its Marriage. You’re being oddly possessive on the state’s behalf of the word “marriage”, as if the petty semantics of the matter are the critical point.
No, in order for it to be a recognized marriage, there are certain elements that must go with it. All marriages are either religious or ‘cicil-unions’ (‘legal marriage’). A relgious cerimony may be held in conjunction with the civil union, but marriages are either the civil union type he stated, or relgious. In this country, by definition, at this time, that is. So, no, he isn’t wrong.
First off, why not let Cid decide what he’s suggesting. He probably knows better than you do. Second, define this ‘minority’ that holds ‘religious rights.’ This country is mostly religious (less than 5 percent atheist or agnostic as of the last census. Don’t know why those two were together, but still…) and everyone theoretically has ‘religious rights.’ What Cid is saying, I think, is that the government shouldn’t have any hand in marriage; it should be a personal or religious matter. The government provides ‘civil unions’ or ‘legal marriages’ while churches provide ‘marriages.’
I fail to see what this has to do with the topic. We all know you don’t have to be religious to get ‘married.’ The point is that ‘married’ is an arbitrary term, and that, if the government doesn’t perform it, it’s basically either religious or an un-official marriage in this county. If you claim to be married it becomes a common-law marriage after a while, which is the same ‘civil-union’ type legal marriage that the government handles. That is the way this country works. You aren’t officially married unless it was performed by state or church.
Good lord. That must be the first time anyone’s ever called me an extremist. Way to completely not understand a word I said. -_-
Anyway, as every single other person in this thread got first go, all I was saying is that the government should not get involved in “marriages” at all. There’s a religious ceremony, called marriage. Then there’s a legal ceremony, called “civil union”. Anyone who wants should be able to get a civil union, I don’t care. The word “marriage”, as far as I’m concerned, is an inherently religious term and has been for thousands of years. All the rights afforded people by the currently state-created “marriage” would be exactly the same as a “civil union” - it’d just use different words. Neither I nor anyone else can see anything extremist about this idea. If you really do think it’s extremist, you could be a little more clear about why you think so rather than making vague and inflammatory accusations without actually saying why you disagree.
The state is forced to recognize you as legally married if there is ‘civil union’ backing behind your marriage, regardless of what god it’s to. As for polygamy, marriage is a two person thing, by dictionary and legal definitions, sorry.
If anyone is arguing over semantics, it would be you or Cid and not me. Cid says that all marriages are really just civil unions when its just the same that all civil unions are really marriages. We’ve been discussing marriage and homosexuals, not religious-but-fundamentally-bereft-civil-disjunctive-unions or whatever you wanna call it. In every civilized country in the world, marriage is a set of secular benefits two people can enjoy, usually with the intention of starting a marriage.
When you say that a civil marriage is not a real marriage, you are mistaken. It’s the other way around. I believe a lot of this debate can be traced to the misappropriate use of the word marriage by people like Cid and yourself. A civil ceremony performed by a judge is a real marriage. A religious ceremony performed by a priest without permission of marriage from the state is not. Throughout the entire discussion, I have been using the accurate definition of marriage, and not the biased definition Cid chooses to use.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that Cid has been using a biased definition of marriage and not its actual meaning. I believe much of this confusion would not exist if Cid were to use a more accurate definition of marriage than he has used. Finally, I didn’t miss any of Cid’s points. They were all rather obvious. The confusion here lies in Cid’s understanding of marriage. Now that that’s been addressed, we can move on.
I’ve just been using the universally accepted term for marriage used in just about every country in the earth. It’s a set of legal benefits between two people. When discussing something like this, its necessary that we try to get all this down to the lowest common denominator. Would a FLDS polygamist marriage be considered legitimate in anyone’s eyes except the FLDS? No. Will a document from the Utah State Court? Religious marriages differ from religion to religion, country to country, person to person, but a legal marriage will be (for the most part) accepted and considered legitimate everywhere.
That being said, its not very honest to say that Cid’s been discussing marriage, as only a very few people on the planet would consider a polygamist spiritual wedding as legitimate. Nearly everyone on the earth would consider a judge’s ceremony to be legitimate and would call it a marriage, however.
Marriage is not a Christian invention. Marriage existed long before Christianity ever did.
Most gay people want to get married. They already believe a god does or does not bless their marriage. If you seriously think gay people are fighting for a right to be married by priests in Catholic churches or something, then you’re delusional. They want to be married. They want the plethora of spoken and unspoken legal and social benefits that pertain to marriage. Not surprisingly, getting married in Catholic churches is not one of those benefits you see very many gay people fighting for.
Now there are some gay Christians that basically want their cake and eat it to. Some churches are pro-gay, most are anti-gay. The government has already said it won’t be able to force religious groups to marry people they don’t want to. That’s just common sense. A mosque can’t be forced to throw a Baptist wedding. Gay churches will be created. There are already priests marrying gay people. While these religious weddings are under the blessing of gods, they are not accepted by the government and are not real marriages.
To begin with, the church and state already have separate, independent ceremonies pertaining to marriage. Secondly, that’s not what Cid said. Cid said marriages are religious ceremonies and that only religious people should allowed to be married. I think that’s BS, but that’s only my opinion.
Lol. Yes, he is wrong. The FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) in northern Arizona/southern Utah marries adult men to children on a weekly basis. These marriages are not accepted or recognized by anyone other than the church (or their god). A simply religious marriage, such as these, are not legitimate marriages. If you were to include a religious marriage into the realm of legitimate marriages, then you would have to include ALL religious marriages as legitimate. Are you really trying to tell me you think the religious wedding between a grown man and a child is a “real” marriage?
The minority was referring to the religious people in the country Cid said should only be allowed to marry. I found a number of things you said to be interesting. To begin with, I used to work for the US Census and the US Census doesn’t include information regarding religion. So how you came up with your number astonishes me. More importantly, looking through the Census’s website, I found an http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/03statab/pop.pdf with some information regarding religion. Not surprisingly, your number is not accurate at all. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, atheists and agnostics account for about .0033% if all Americans, not 5%. The Survey also finds that there are only about 146 million Christians in the country (only? I know 146 million sounds like a lot!). We currently have about 293 million people in our country. 146/293 is just barely a minority, but it is a minority. Honestly, I thought Christians were a majority in this country until I checked that out just now. While Christians in general form a substantial minority in this country, fundamentalist Christians most definitely are. This was, for the most part, the minority I was referring to. The people who won’t let their children learn math or science because it’s a tool of Satan. The kind of people who think its okay for grown men to marry children.
Its rather obvious from my previous posts directed at Cid that I know what he means. I just disagree with him, and fortunately, my government disagrees with him as well. Marriage is a basic human right everyone, not just the religious, is entitled to.
Sigh. You don’t get it do you? The polygamists in northern Arizona perform religious marriages weekly between children and grown men. No state recognizes these marriages. That’s because you need more than a religious ceremony to make a marriage legitimate. You need the backing of the state, as well.
Secular marriages have existed for thousands of years. Its not a purely religious term, at least it hasn’t been since the Greeks.
Ummm. This is getting annoying now. You get to use legal widely accepted definitions for marriage, but I do not. That doesn’t make any sense, but what the hey? We’re discussing marriage, as we all know it. The only common denominator in what we’ve been talking about is a legal, legitimate marriage. You can get married in the woods, in a church, in your home…but unless you get a marriage certificate, you’re not really married. I know you understand this, because you’ve reiterated to me a few times. Why do you refuse to acknowledge things you agree with me on, just because I’m stating them?
Finally…are we discussing marriage or religious ceremonies? If you consider the marriage between a 40 year old man and a young girl to be legitimate marriages, then please lets continue this line of discussion. But if you don’t consider that type of marriage (religious) to be a legitimate marriage, then please quit referring to these ceremonies as marriages. Enough of all this semantics.
You’ve missed my point entirely. A legal marriage (euphemism for ‘civil union’) is something different than a cultural (usually religious) marriage. It doesn’t matter what terms you use. Marriage is just a word, and a rather subjective one at that. That’s what Cid meant, and he also said that the government should do away with the ‘legal marriages.’ A marriage is technically no more than a union between two people, which has really nothing to do with the topic. Therefore, I assume we’re using the legal and cultural definitions of marriage, which are the two I posted.
You claimed Cid wanted a radical religious control of marriage. I think that’s basically largely missing the point, which was that the government shouldn’t have a hand in people’s personal lives. Also, Cid’s definition of marriage is just as accurate as the one you’ve been seemingly using.
Marriage as a concept may have predated the christians, but the word didn’t, and the christians made it up for their traditions. So the idea may not be christian, but the word is. It is of middle English routes. It is a religiously oriented term. It is sometimes used to simply mean ‘union’ or ‘joining,’ but these times are rare.
The government recognizing something or not recognizing does not make it real. It makes it ‘official.’ There is a very important difference. My point about the state or church being the only officially recognized marriages is that if you say you’re married, it doesn’t work. If you get a marriage certificate from the state, you’re married. If you’re married in a church, and get state support, you’re married. The latter is a church performed, state-sponsored marriage.
Now, the government saying you aren’t married doesn’t make the marriage ‘not real’ it makes it not official, which doesn’t mean shit other than a few legal rights. Marriage is a cultural, or religious, term, now, and if people are married by their beliefs of the word, they’re married.
This is my overlying point, the government doesn’t marry you, it ‘legally marries’ you. The only difference is a few special priveledges. There shouldn’t be a ‘civil union’ people should be allowed to be married whenever they wish, without the government deciding who it’s morally acceptable for them to give their life to.
If the church in Utah accepts the marriage, it is a legitimate marriage for that religion. Because you do not share their beliefs does not mean you have the right to choose whether their ways are ‘legitimate’ or not. My point is that there are legally sanctioned marriages, and marriages that are purely religious, and not state-recognized.
As for your disagreement with Cid’s opinion, you still don’t have it really right, first off. He isn’t saying religion should control marriage, he is saying the government shouldn’t. He never said only religious people should be married. This has now been made clear several times. Now, your government doesn’t believe all people have the right to be married. Minours and homsexuals, for example. Finally, yet again, no-one has in this thread said it should be only the religious. Notice I said personal or religious. Personal meaning it’s your business. Not the government’s. Not the church’s.
Also, as for my ‘inacurate numbers,’ I believe (and the laws of mathematics back me up) that .0033 is less than 5. As for the issue of who was a minority, sorry for misunderstanding your meaning, but the statistics were not necessary. You could have stated the group to which you were referring, and it would have been sufficient.
Now, as for the gorwn man marrying the child, if the child is okay with it, and old enough to actually understand what they’re saying (the start of sexual maturity is generally a sign of this), then I am fine with it.
Freddy, you’re overanalyzing EVERYTHING! Why would one care so much to write this much over one simple statement…
Your zeal for this is insane.
You took the words out of my mouth.
But I wouldn’t know myself. My Reader’s Digest version of my two months in NYC wasn’t even that long. And it was about as long as a long fanfic chapter.
the problem here, xwing, is that most of us agree there is little reason to “control” homosexual feelings, should you have them, any more than one would want to control heterosexual feelings for whatever purpose.
From my perceptions of love, there’s nothing to prevent someone from having heterosexual feelings and tendencies. Think: What’s to prevent a gay man from become intensely acquainted with a woman, so much that he wants to live with her? Nothing, really. And isn’t the pleasure of the act of sex still there, whatever triggers it? Sure. So, what makes gay people gay? Ultimately, on some level, it must be a rational decision. The appetitive part of sex works, gay or straight; the emotional part of sex works, gay or straight; so what’s left to our control is the reasoning process by which we decide our sexual orientations. Think, straight people: when homosexual images pop into your head, do you not actively suppress them? If any homosexual feelings rise, say, in your dreams at night, do you not doggedly suppress them after you wake? Your sexual orientation is the result of actions on your part.
this presumption that the pleasure of sex is still there is invalid. certainly, the actual nerve impulses of the orgasm remain, but in humans, because our minds are so well lent to emotion there is another level of sexual satisfaction. it is the formation and consummation of sexual emotions that elevate sex from mere reproduction to what humans know it as. a gay man does not develop these sexual emotions towards females and so cannot acheive the consummation of them. a “gay” man who can is bisexual. it can also be argued (very easily) that your last few statements about the impulse to consciously supress homosexual feelings is not the result of a biological drive towards reproduction, but rather the result of millennia of outside discrimination. infact, the need to “consciously” supress them argues against your point. someone who has these homosexual dreams you speak of actually has a good chance of being a fag or, atleast, one of the many straight people whose typical heterosexual orientation occasionally, forgiveably veers into the realm of the gay.
This is from Cless:
Delita: Marriage is something controlled by the church, man, and always will be. It’s a holy matrimony between man and woman, so unless you can convince the church that their current interpretation of their doctrines is wrong, then marriage will remain a bond between man and woman.
This absolutism has no historical or rational basis and is probabaly one of the worst arguments about this entire subject I hear. Your argument takes for granted that marriage did not exist before “The Church”. This is a ludicrous. Marriage has existed since before history. Not to mention the Church’s (and we’ll take this to mean all of Christianity) closest ancestors, the Romans had established common law marriage I think by the time of the empire. Further, marriage hasn’t been controlled by the church for a long time; it hasn’t and you just can’t reasonably deny it. If you’re trying to win that argument you’re going to need a time machine, because marriage has been governed in America by the government for as long as I can think of. It is completely and routinely possible in the United States to be married entirely outside of any religious service. Your definition of marriage is outdated and impractical if you do indeed think of it as a religious institution. While civil marriage in the U.S. has its roots in the European Christian tradition, the word has come to mean much broader things though the centuries.
This little gem of historical inaccuracy is courtesy of Pickle:
Regarding the Greeks…homosexuality was en vogue at the time in ancient Greece. It doesn’t mean everyone was gay…it just means just about everyone thought gay sex was cool. A straight man can perform acts of gay sex without being gay. Look at today…lipstick lesbianism is very en vogue and I know more girls who have fooled around with girls that those who have not. Does this mean most women are gay? No…its just the in thing right now. Just like homosexuality in Ancient Greece.
First of all, when you’re talking about “the time” of ancient Greece, you’re talking right off the bat atleast 700 years. That’s not “the time” or “a time”, that’s more along the lines of an epoch. More importantly, your entire point is just wrong. It was not “in vogue” to have gay sex. It was acceptable- and in very strict circumstances. It was acceptable only for the younger man to take the submissive role and it was also unacceptable in that role to take any physical pleasure. These “gay” relationships also occured parallel to standard heterosexual marriage, rather than in place of them. There are some wonderful pieces of Greek literature, as someone else mentioned, that deal explicitly in the debate on the benefits of homosexual behavior over heterosexuality. Even these conceptions of ours of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were designations with no approximation in ancient Greek and are merely our inadequate means of describing the old, more nuanced mentalities that now elude our understanding.
I like being correct…I won’t apologize for it. When someone says something dumb, inaccurate, or a downright lie I have a hard time not responding. Some people were saying some really stupid things about marriage…so I responded accordingly.