Cranbury Forum | Bulletin | Info Sharing

Post a reply

Username

Subject

Message body

Emoticons

Font colour: Font size:

Close Tags

[quote="Guest"]People make this issue too complicated.  There are church marriages and there is the State's role in marriage which not only includes officially "permitting" it but the dozens of ways the laws give legal advantage and status to marriage people from taxes to shared property rights to legal protection from recrimination to parental rights to health benefits.

Churches should be able to do whatever they want in regards to gay marriage consistent with their own principles.  But the state has no business discriminating.  It should either get out of the marriage business, which it doesn't need to be in and historically wasn't, and stop giving legal privileges and advantages to married people, or it should let gays enjoy all the status and advantages of legal marriage.  I have no issue with people who feel like gay marriage is against their religion, even if I don't agree, but when they feel like they should enjoy state-sanctioned benefits from something they argue is religious in basis, they can no longer base their argument on religion.  Civil unions are not adequate in solving the State-sanctioned side of this because they still create a discriminatory lesser status and enjoy some but not all of the same level of protections in some cases.  Again, if you want to protect the word marriage, then change ALL state-involvement to "civil union" for any couple, gay or heterosexual.  Someone can still be declared "married" by their church while state's acknowledge "civil unions."

The arguments that marriage has "always been" between a man and woman or that the state has always acknowledged it as such are both wrong.  There have been gay marriages going back to ancient cultures and in fact most ancient cultures were more tolerant of them, and the state did not historically play a formal role in marriage until relatively recently in history, and only when they started using it to extract taxes or confer special benefits and rights.[/quote]

Options
HTML is ON
BBCode is ON
Smilies are ON

	Disable HTML in this post
	Disable BBCode in this post
	Disable Smilies in this post