Ed Gillespie, senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, told Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown that the campaign would make President Obama’s support for marriage equality an issue this November and that Romney will actively push for a constitutional amendment to take away the right of states to voluntarily extend marriage equality to same-sex couples.I think it's coming to the point we're going to have completely divorce, as it were, secular and religious marriage since the religionists are demanding the privileges of marriage, which include certain legal protections and rights which most (though not all) churches are unwilling to grant to every citizen fairly. Christians in particular, but I think people of faith in general, with the exception of liberal minority, want to define marriage as one man and one woman. The rest of us want marriage to be a legally recognized domestic union of one consenting adult to another that doesn't discriminate.
So let's let everybody have it there way. Christian marriage (or Jewish marriage, or whatever faith marriage) should be its own institution, completely free from any sort of state sanctioning, or recognition. Civil marriage would be the only state-sanctioned domestic union. Want a religious marriage? Fine, get one; however, if you want it recognized outside of your church or the community of faith, then you need the civil marriage as well. The government would recognize religious marriages that meet the same criteria as the civil marriage if they apply for it. Government wouldn't tell churches to recognize their marriages, churches couldn't tell government to recognize their marriages. I'm not sure what the benefits of church marriage would be except maybe it could be some requirement before getting your child baptized or whatever the church decides it's good for.
Some religious marriages, might not meet the criteria of what we probably agree civil marriage should look like. To enter into civil marriage, both parties should have attained the age of majority -- you should be old enough to vote and enter the military before you are old enough to decide if you are ready for marriage, in my opinion -- and have entered into the arrangement of their own free will. So those religions that approve of the marriage of girls that just got their first period to much older men, first cousins, and men being allowed to marry many women and girls (FLDS, we're looking at you) could not qualify for civil marriage.It's really starting to piss me off that almost no reporter seems to be willing to point out that the proposed constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage are blatantly unconstitutional. In addition to the First Amendment, we have the Supreme Court's ruling on this already. Eric Shepherd did a great job pointing this out the other day when he wrote:
In Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971), The Supreme Court's decision stated that the government's action must have a secular legislative purpose.Those blanks are no accident. Not only were there no secular reasons to vote for Amendment One, no secular reasons for even proposing it were offered -- as far as I'm aware. If there were, I'd fascinated to hear them. If there's no secular reason, there are only religious reasons -- and basing law on religion in this country is impermissible. It's a violation of the Establishment Clause. We are not Iran. We should not be modelling our government on failed or failing Muslim states.
As voters in NC will be deciding the fate of Amendment One, let's take a look at the ten most compelling secular legislative reasons to vote in favor of the amendment:
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