re: #423 Fenway_Nation

I never said anything about opposing civil unions.

There’s no difference at all between civil unions and marriage except the name. Insisting on a different label simply because of gender is as offensive as apartheid or “separate but equal” laws.

What needs clarification here is the role of the state versus the role of the church - any church. The legislation currently working it’s way through several state legislatures broadens the definition of marriage to include people of the same sex - as far as the state is concerned. As far as the church is concerned, it says absolutely nothing, which is as it should be. The state’s recognition of such a partnership simply provides legal certification that the partnership exists, which also opens the legal doors to various benefits (and detriments) available only to those who are deemed to be married - spousal inheritance, inclusion in spousal benefit programs, a special (higher) tax rate at the Federal level and so on.

The church, meanwhile, has it’s own completely separate criteria for what constitutes an approved marriage, and no amount of state legislating is going to change that. The Catholic Church is not going to start performing gay marriages. Neither are the Baptists. The Unitarians probably will. None of this is any different from what already exists today. When the wife and I got married, I approached a priest from my church I had known for several years about performing the ceremony. When he learned that the wife-to-be belonged to a different faith, he flat-out refused. He later softened his views and said he’d do it if she went through a six-month course leading to conversion and renunciation of her old faith, at which point I bailed on him and his faith for the duration of my time on this planet. But that’s how his church sees things. I doubt that it would be hard to find fundamentalist churches that felt exactly the same way about marrying people from different faiths; of different races; or of the same gender. Whether you feel that’s right or wrong, that’s between the church, it’s members and whatever god they worship. The state has nothing to say about it. Period. End of story.

The state’s role in granting a marriage certificate is strictly legal. Period.

If you’re uncomfortable with the state issuing marriage licenses to homosexuals, I’d suggest a simpler solution: stop issuing them to anyone at all, and give everyone a certificate of civil union instead. The use of the term “marriage” by the state may be long-standing, but it’s a holdover from a time when church and state were essentially one. In today’s more enlightened society, it would be best to do away with this fuzzy overlap entirely and simply eliminate the term “marriage” from what the state grants. Or, people could just as simply understand what is meant by the term when it is used by the state and how that differs from the use of the term when applied by a church. Either way, problem solved. The state and it’s endorsement are entirely separate from anything any church may have to say.

Church-goers to whom such things matter will still be free to refer to state-sanctioned same-sex couples as “sinners” or “tools of Satan” or “destined for eternal damnation” if that’s really what they think they ought to do.