Louisiana was thinking and may infact have established another system, with two separte degres on obligation in case of a divorce. They most stringent is called covenant marriage.

Yes, all that, and expect a lot of pain to come out of the transition anyway. Pain came out of the no-fault divorce revolution of the 1960′s, and pain has come out of the marry-for-love-whomever -you-will of the 1820′s, and to hear women of a certain skin tone tell it, pain has come out of the new freedom of black men to look at white women without being tortured to death by terrorists. You can say tough shit, or you can acknowledge the pain, but you can’t change the situation.

For a glimpse of what traditional marriage was really like, see Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou. And remember that that system of marriage lasted at least 3,000 years basically unchanged. Note also how much at odds it is with what we call traditional marriage.

Likewise with religious diversity. My son is faced at school with classmates who are Mormon, Evangelical, Fundamentalist and all that and it has strengthened rather than weakened his Christianity. Debate, even if it is all internal to a person dealing with the challenge of diversity, is a work out. It strengthens valid positions and threatens weak ones. That may account for a lot of the fear of confrontation we always see.

BTW the Puritans and Pilgrims were close enough by the measure that mattered at the time, toleration in the same colony. theyare alike enough to all be in the same pit in Hell too, probably. JK.

I guess I’m enough of a conservative, though, to think that if we’re going to monkey with an institution that has been essentially the same for so many hundreds of years, we ought to sit down and think it through before rushing ahead with it. And stop being so strident for a minute so we can do that.

I’ve often wondered if a two-tier marriage system didn’t suit the modern world better than the current all-or-nothing. If civil unions are good enough for gays, why not for straights, too?

Religious tolerance itself is one such compromise. The morally pure position used to be “error has no rights”. We think that an immoral position now. I guess that makes people who think the Pilgrims were real Christians some kind of moral relativists or whatever.

On the miltary compromise, there was a cicvil discussion of this issue form both sides of the debate over at GayPatriot, under a posting on an email from a West Point cadet.

Societies long had an interest and an active role in regulating marriage. The whole English Protestant revolt can be boiled down to a dispute over the power of the crown or the Pope to regulate marriage. Usually the core matter was legitimacy of issue and inheritance of property. Public morality was peripheral in such disputes. In many times and places in Western history, marriage has coexisted happily with socially sanctioned adultery (read Byron or Stendhal).

The U.S. government gradually got dragged in to the business of marriage-guardianship, without intending to, as it gradually was asked to regulate many sctivities which once had been left to the people or the free market to control. It’s not a job the government does well, but we’ve already dumped it on them. Too late.

But does this mean there will be no “exclusively gay” resorts or clubs, either?

I think it’s just a matter of time till this gets sorted out, and it could be done without5 demonizing anyone, though gods know it won’t be.

According to a Pew Research Center poll this fall, while 60 percent or so of Americans still oppose gay marriage, more Americans now favor “allowing gay and lesbian couples to enter into legal agreements with each other that would give them many of the same rights as married couples” than oppose it.

Other polls show similar tendencies. While a solid 40 percent of Americans opposes any sort of legal recognition of gay relationships, about half or more support either marriage or civil unions. The trend over time has been toward acceptance: in 1996 only 27 percent approved of gay marriage, and during 2003, when the newspapers and networks were full of pictures of obviously loving and un-flamboyant gay couples getting married, the number climbed as high as 39 percent

In none of the polls I’ve seen does a majority register for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. I’d like to think that reflects not so much people’s attitude toward homosexuality, as their respect for the Constitution and what it was meant to do and not do. Just as I like to think a lot of the objection against last year’s Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling was not over gay marriage per se, but over the idea that four judges in a little state could re-define a basic personal institution for the entire nation.

This is one of those areas where America’s religious urges and its laissez-faire attitude and knee-jerk secularism live in comfortable dissonance.

It would be possible for the Republicans to use their power now to turn America hard against homosexuals, by re-focusing the popular vision on some shadowy “homosexual agenda” rather than the happy couple of New Paltz, New York. That’s what some gay activists and Democrats were widely predicting after the last election. (Links available on request).

But Rove and Bush are in favor of letting states decide on the question of civil unions. That seems to me a “reality-based” position, and actually one slightly ahead of the curve of the mass of public opinion in this country as registered by the pollsters. It is not the new Nuremberg Laws.

Just like most military people know that there are gays in uniform. Most of them don’t mind that, and will judge a soldier under fire by how well he or she covers your ass, not covets it. But don’t make it explicit; don’t advertise it. The compromise makes no sense, logically, but so what? It’s comfortable. America is a tower of compromises.

Montag you have no idea what you are talking about, no idea what the US Constitution means. Fascinating and yet typical of a liberal.

Terry, either keep it civil or leave. There’s no room here for crap like this.

Liberals wrote the Constitution, Terry. Conservatives fought for the King. Conservatives were called Tories. You’re the one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Liberal idea: Religion is a private matter and the goverment has no business in it.

Conservative idea: Error has no rights. It is the responsibilty of the Church to teach true doctrine and of the civil authority to enforce adherence.

Liberal idea: People are born equal

Conservative idea: People are born into their station in life and that is where they should stay. Gentry are gentry and commoners are commoners and that is how made them.

Liberal idea: Government rules by the consent of the governed.

Conservative idea: God appoints princes and kings and they rule by divine right. The people do not have rights, they have whatever priveleges the sovereign deigns to accord them.

That’s how it was 250 years ago, until liberals smashed the mold. what youare (correctly) objecting to is not the action or positions of liberals, but of leftists. Leftists like Stalin or Mao Zedong were not liberal and they considered it a term of abuse.

And by the way, you are right about the intrusion into the right to assemble and wrong about how it applies in this case. Country clubs are corporations. Corporations have to be licensed. They function as businesses. They have no more right to exclude lesbians’ partners form the prerogatives accorded other members than a restaurant has any right to refuse to serve blacks or a school to refuse to hire Mormons.

Montag you have no idea what you are talking about, no idea what the US Constitution means. Fascinating and yet typical of a liberal.
Learn to read.
Terry

Someone sold you a ticket then. Government regulation of marriage goes back to the Neolithic, at least. Both Irish tribal law and texts in Hinduism (Laws of Manu) regulate mariage in detail, especially who could marry whom (think of the caste system) and what the inheritance entailments were. The latest common ancestor for these cultures is probably in the Neolithic Ukraine. These laws obviously predateChristianity, and Judaism for that matter.

I have heard form one source it was not until late in the Middle Ages that weddings were celebrated inside a church at all. They were typically done out on the steps. the theology behind this was clear – think of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees when they asked him which of seven brothers would be the husband in heaven of a woman who had been married to all of them. Paul also had a rather luke-warm attitude towards mariage. so the Church was on solid ground in leaving it to the civil authority to whom it had always belonged.

The bottom line is that gvoernment is in the mariage businees because marriage entails legal rights and obligations. That makes it purely the business of government. Churches may conduct their own ceremonies, and admit or exclude anyone they choose, to the extent these ceremonies have no legal standing. The government has nothing to say over whom a church marries, just as it has no say over the much weightier matter, to a Christian at least, over whom it admits to Communion.

“Does Christianity, or any other religion, really regard marriages sanctioned solely by government to be just as sacred as marriages sanctioned by God through the church?”

Actually yes, since the ministers of the sacrament are the man and woman themselves, not the priest or other minister. That means the sacrament is valid and sacred, with or without any recognition or action by any entitiy outside the marriage. The sex act is sacramental (Bridegroom imagery in the Gospels), which is the real reason that the Church so condemns casual sex, or sex outside that sacramental relationship. Protestants tend to prefer the word “covenant” since they generally don’t recognize any sacraments. Still those marriages are as sacramental and valid as any other, see above.

1) Should government even be in the marriage business at all? Marriage is a covenant between God and (usually) a man and a woman. Who needs government to be involved in this process?

(Side note: My understanding is that government sanction/regulation of marriage, at least in the U.S., originated in the antebellum Southern states – the purpose being to prevent interracial marriage. In other words, this whole fight is over one of the last official vestiges of the Jim Crow era! The irony of this should not be lost on anyone.)

2) Does Christianity, or any other religion, really regard marriages sanctioned solely by government to be just as sacred as marriages sanctioned by God through the church? It makes no sense to me that it would – but if it doesn’t, then the religious right is up in arms over absolutely nothing.