Steve Benson for May 18, 2014

“Marriage = Man + womanGet your own word…like same sex civil unions…”.Separate but equal? Is this progress?

Who gave you ownership of marriage? Marriage is a religious issue, not a civil one. If your religion solemnizes marriage between same-sex couples, it’s a marriage regardless of what YOU think.For example, the Church of Christ in NC is rightly suing the state for violating their civil rights by banning gay marriage and, according to the law, throwing the clerics in jail. THAT is a violation of the First Amendment.http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/28/religious_liberty_hypocrisy_in_north_carolina_which_forbids_gay_marriage.html

If its VB Day then why I am still seeing stories of segregated schools?.Seems like they should using Bush’s old “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Oh, wait. My bad…Its football. Who cares about the schools when football is soooooo much more important.

A proposed compromise between the marriage for anyone and the One Man + one woman groups. Marriage is a an religious institution. And as such should be defined by the religious organization granting it. Furthermore as an religious act NO local state or federal government institution may recognize, provide special benefits for, dissolve, or regulate it any any way.

Hmm, stories, and reactions to them, out of NBA as well as NFL lately indicate that bigotry isn’t all that dead.

As to the constant flap over “marriage”, even “idiot” has more than one dictionary definition.

“This is like when we thought that electing the first black president would be the end of racism. Stupid. Cartoonist.”Then it matches your comment. An interracial gay kiss has nothing to do with racism.

“The only ones making this an issue are Liberals, Conservatives do not care”Obviously people do care, otherwise gay marriage would be legal in all 50 states, people wouldn’t be pitching fits and Gresch wouldn’t have posted his demand that gays not use the word marriage.

^Adventists don’t eat pork either.

I see no reason why gays shouldn’t be able to share in the glee of an expensive divorce.

Go for it!

“So pork producers should have the right to label their meat as kosher?”They can call it Kosher all they want, but they’ll never get certification for it by a reputable group. If you look on the packages of Kosher product, there’s almost always a trademarked symbol representing the group that certified the product’s Kosher classification. BTW, Jews are free to choose not to keep Kosher. It’s not forced upon them.

" But asking us to sanction it and even make it into a sacrament is something else entirely."In case you haven’t noticed, marriage is a legal contract filed with the local government and recognized by the state and federal government. You can obtain that legal contract without receiving sacrament or blessing from a church.

“No man’s pe**s belongs in another man’s rec**m. It’s just that simple.”If that’s what you believe, then don’t put yours there. What two consenting adults do is none of your or your minister’s business. It’s not up to you your your minister to define beliefs or morals for others. It’s that simple.

While I tend to favor “civil union” for legalistics, leaving, perhaps, “Marriage” up to the religious organizations, it still strikes me that serial heterosexual marriages seem fine to the vast majority of Americans (even Roman Catholics today), and spousal abuse gets a “tsk tsk”, but prosecutions fail because the beaten spouse rarely hangs in there.(which is why some states take the choice out of their hands after a criminal complaint is called in) Abuse remains a far more serious challenge to the “sanctity of marriage” than gays or lesbians will ever pose.

You say “you can’t redefine the word ‘marriage’”? Why not? Are you under the impression that the meaning of a word can’t change? Words constantly change their meanings. A computer used to be a person who did mathematical computations by hand. Now it’s an electronic device. In any case, the definitions you quote certainly allow for same-sex marriage. “Husband: a married man considered in relation to his spouse.” Notice, not “wife”, but “spouse”. So my friend James has a spouse named John. He says that he’s John’s husband. John says that he’s James’ husband. No conflict with the dictionary there.

I disagree with government sanctioning of gay marriage on the same grounds that I oppose government sanctioning of straight marriage. It is none of government’s business whom or how many we marry. If all parties are freely consenting adults, what gives government the right to tell them they may not marry> What if a woman wants to marry two men, or a man to marry two women? What if five men and five women decide to marry each other? If government keeps its nose and grabby, cash-hungry hands out of marriage, then there is no need for divorce courts and all the expenses associated with them, which cost me money through taxes. Let churches manage marriages. If Gays and Lesbians want to marry, let them found the First Church of the Iron Codpiece, or something like it, and have that church oversee marriages and divorces. KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF OUR BUSINESS AND OUR BEDROOMS AND MARRIAGES.

The full faith and credit clause was broken over slavery. It no longer applies, unless you’d like to re-allow slavery or female subjugation in civil rights or something just because say, Alabama passed such a law.

Keep government out of ALL marriages.

Thanks Benson!

First, social institutions are not fixed. For example, kinship terms differ from society to society. In English, my mother’s brother and my father’s brother are both uncles, but in Latin, my mother’s brother is “avunculus” and my father’s brother is “patruus”. It’s a mistake to think that social institutions are natural.Second, even mathematics isn’t quite so simple. On a clock face, 11 plus 2 equals 1, because the clock face is modulus 12.

On which planet?

In English, the word for the brother of your Father’s husband would be “uncle”.

As social practices change, the language used to describe those institutions will change. In societies with plural marriage, there can be words for “first wife”, “second wife”, and so on. (I’m reading an old Chinese novel at the moment, “The Story of the Stone”, and it’s full of such words.) We don’t recognize plural marriage, so we don’t need the words that do what that practice. Until recently we haven’t recognized same-sex marriage, but now we do. And since we do, the language will have to change to reflect that social change. There is nothing in non-human nature to determine what counts as marriage. Each society decides what counts as marriage, and whatever that society decides, that’s marriage in that society. The dictionary definitions follow the social practices. And the dictionary definition that churchillwasright quoted above did not exclude same-sex partners. When he said “you can’t redefine marriage” he was just wrong. You may not like the redefinition, you may try to stop it, but there is nothing about society and language that means the word can’t be redefined.

Okay, explain to me why the word “marriage” can’t change as social practices change.