By our love, by our love

My favorite Sunday school song from my childhood among the fundies was called "They'll Know We Are Christians by Our Love." The song's optimistic lyrics were countered by its sad, minor tone, so even as a kid I had the sense that it was at the same time celebrating what ought to be and mourning that it was not so:

We will work with each other, we will work side by side
We will work with each other, we will work side by side
And we'll guard each one's dignity and save each one's pride
And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
They will know we are Christians by our love

There's a nice version of this, set to a timely video, here, although this guy's bare-bones version is closer to the "Ghost Riders in the Sky" vibe of the way we sang it when I was a kid.

Nowadays, that song is commonly sung as a medley combining it with the more recent praise chorus "Awesome God." I'm not fond of that newer song. There's something a bit off-puttingly possessive about the possessive pronoun in the chorus: "Our God is an awesome God." That word "our" has become increasingly common in evangelical praise choruses. It no longer seems enough to sing that "God is an awesome God," or that "God reigns" -- we sing that "Our God is an awesome God," and "Our God ray-ay-ay-ayns, Our God reigns."

It might seem like I'm reading too much into what may be nothing more than an extra syllable added for the sake of meter, but the choice of this particular syllable reflects a larger change in the emphasis of American evangelical Christianity. That new context is all about Ours vs. Theirs, Us vs. Them.

That emphasis on conflict doesn't give Them much reason to like Us, which probably helps to explain the dismal findings of a recent Barna Group poll on the declining reputation of Christianity (thanks, Scott, for the link):

In just a decade, many of the Barna measures of the Christian image have shifted substantially downward. .... For instance, a decade ago the vast majority of Americans outside the Christian faith, including young people, felt favorably toward Christianity’s role in society. Currently, however, just 16 percent of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a "good impression" of Christianity.

One of the groups hit hardest by the criticism is evangelicals. Such believers have always been viewed with skepticism in the broader culture. However, those negative views are crystallizing and intensifying among young non-Christians. The new study shows that only 3 percent of 16 - to 29-year-old non-Christians express favorable views of evangelicals. This means that today’s young non-Christians are eight times less likely to experience positive associations toward evangelicals than were non-Christians of the Boomer generation (25 percent).

The research shows that many Christians are innately aware of this shift in people’s perceptions of Christianity: 91 percent of the nation’s evangelicals believe that "Americans are becoming more hostile and negative toward Christianity." Among senior pastors, half contend that "ministry is more difficult than ever before because people are increasingly hostile and negative toward Christianity."

Contrary to what Barna suggests, that last paragraph actually reflects an innate lack of awareness about the meaning of the survey's findings. It suggests, rather, that most evangelicals consider any hostility or negativity reflected back at them to be something wholly external -- something arising and existing wholly apart from their own attitudes and actions toward others. The dramatic increase in the negative perception of evangelical Christianity, they seem to think, is entirely in the eye of the beholder. The Barna researchers seem to share this notion -- framing their findings with all those assertions about an intrinsic "skepticism in the broader culture."

But as Barna's own data shows, this hostility and negativity is not primarily an external phenomenon. It is, rather, a rational and predictable response by Them to the attitudes of Us:

The study discovered a new image that has steadily grown in prominence over the last decade. Today, the most common perception is that present-day Christianity is "anti-homosexual." Overall, 91 percent of young non-Christians and 80 percent of young churchgoers say this phrase describes Christianity. As the research probed this perception, non-Christians and Christians explained that beyond their recognition that Christians oppose homosexuality, they believe that Christians show excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards gays and lesbians. One of the most frequent criticisms of young Christians was that they believe the church has made homosexuality a "bigger sin" than anything else. Moreover, they claim that the church has not helped them apply the biblical teaching on homosexuality to their friendships with gays and lesbians.

The respondents identify the key matter here: an antipathy that goes "beyond" any traditional opposition to extramarital sex, an unprecedented and inordinate "excessive contempt ... toward gays and lesbians." And this contempt is perceived as central to the meaning and substance of Christianity -- the "most common perception" of the faith for Christians and non-Christians alike.

This is a change, a new thing, a recent and radical alteration. It is an astonishing and deeply weird development. The great creeds of the church make no mention of homosexuality -- let along singling it out for particular and pre-eminent condemnation or suggesting that such condemnation plays a central role in the faith. Yet now the majority of Christians and non-Christians alike view this as the primary defining characteristic of Christian faith, practice and spirituality.

How in Hell did that happen? (That's a theological term, not a profane intensifier.)

The short answer is that this theological change has a political cause. The longer answer will take a longer answer, so we'll come back to that, ending here only with the lamentable recognition that the song quoted above has come to seem like some kind of bitter joke.

Comments

[hapax]

Jesu: Yep: but the "Defense of Marriage" Act is unConstitutional. It overturns Article IV. Go look it up.

Jesu, I agree with you completely about your second point. You seemed to have missed mine.

I think that DOMA should be declared unConstitutional, for exactly the reason you cite. That doesn't mean that it is.

It doesn't matter what you, or I, or Alan Dershowitz, or anybody else thinks. DOMA is Constitutional unless and until the U.S. Supreme Court says it's not--which will NOT happen with the current Court, they won't even hear cases challenging it-- r until Congress repeals or amends it. That's how the system works. No amount of fulminating on blogs will change that.

Voting in new Congresscritters and an Executive branch who will appoint sane judges might.

[hapax]

Geds, to follow up on your point -- there are already many religious organizations, Christian churches and otherwise, that offer same sex marriages. (Mine is one of them). They make it quite clear that these unions do not confer legal civil status, but do address the religious side of the separation.

[Ursula L]

I think it's all manufactured fear mongering and that is the emotional issue that we need to address.

A handful of people may be deliberately manufacturing fear mongering - but the people they monger to are, as a result, actually afraid. However idiotic the mongering, the effects are emotionally real. And people generally don't take well to having their fears dismissed as the result of manufactured fear mongering - they see it as dismissive of their actual emotion.

Plus, we're talking about a pretty significant change, here - one that was unimaginable 20+ years ago. People can be scared or confused by that type of change, even without fear mongering. In 1987, if you talked to most people about "same sex marriage" the response would have been something like "Huh? That's an oxymoron." Twenty years before that, 1967 - that was when the Loving decision came out, creating its own transformation of marriage. Heck, it's only been four years since Lawrence v Texas.

There is also a financial aspect of this, for churches, which probably underlies some of the objections.

If we were to make religious ceremonies non-binding, and make a civil marriage service mandatory, it would be taking a lot of power from churches which can now perform legally binding ceremonies. If you had to pay for two ceremonies - civil and religious - people on tight budgets would be apt to drop the religious, because the civil is necessary for the legal benefit. That would probably be a financial blow to many churches which get paid for renting the space and ministers who get paid for doing the ceremonies. People who go along with things like religious pre-marital counseling, because they see the church marriage as "part of the package" would often be opting out of that, as well.

[Jesurgislac]

Hapax: I think that DOMA should be declared unConstitutional, for exactly the reason you cite. That doesn't mean that it is.

What, in the US no one except nine Supreme Court judges is allowed to look at legislation and say "Hey, that's unConstitutional?" That sucks: I'm sorry you're not allowed to do that. But as I'm not in the US, and there's no law where I am forbidding me from looking at and commenting on any legislation, so while you may be banned from commenting on legislation in your own country, I'm not.

So: DOMA is plainly unConstitutional.

[J. Dunn]

In the case of the younger kids coming out of school now, I think a big change happened in the mid-to-late 90's, when fundamentalist kids who were programmed to "witness" in the pushy, hard-sell sort of way that Fred describes started showing up in public schools. There was none of this in my rural Illinois hometown high school before I graduated in 1997, and though not a Christian myself, I had a positive impression of my classmates of faith, who were mostly Catholic and old-line Protestant. But, by the time my sister was done in 2000, it was rampant, with these kids making lists of people who needed to be "saved" and systematically harassing them. If that's any indication, it has probably become caught up in school clique and popularity politics, with fairly nasty results. You could see how that might give lots of kids a bad personal impression of Christianity.

The other thing is that kids coming of age today are probably the first generation to be aware before college that they actually have gay friends. This is at the heart of their big problems with the cartoonish levels of institutional and public homophobia going on right now in fundamentalist circles. In light of their different and more personal generational experiences with LGBT issues, this probably seems really bizarre and hateful, as it should.

[Ursula L]

I think that DOMA should be declared unConstitutional, for exactly the reason you cite. That doesn't mean that it is.

I'm not about to treat the SC's word as final on Constitutionality - particularly as long as the other side won't take the SC's word in Roe v. Wade as final. (That is, if they argue that DOMA is constitutional because the SC says so, I expect them to accept that for Roe.)

[hapax]

@Jesu: What, in the US no one except nine Supreme Court judges is allowed to look at legislation and say "Hey, that's unConstitutional?"

What, in Great Britain, when someone says, "Hey, it violates habeas corpus to hold terrorism suspects without trial," the imprisoned are immediately set free from jail?

Wow. When you wish really really hard, does everybody get ponies, too?

[Jesurgislac]

Ursula L: If we were to make religious ceremonies non-binding, and make a civil marriage service mandatory, it would be taking a lot of power from churches which can now perform legally binding ceremonies.

This is already the case, Ursula. A religious ceremony by a celebrant who has not registered with a civil authority is not legally binding.

People have a religious ceremony for all sorts of reasons. It's not because that's the only way they can get legally married (except possibly in Israel, where you have to leave the country to get legally married any other way).

A quick quiet civil ceremony to get legally married isn't expensive: it would add little to the cost to require couples to have it separately from any religious celebration. And people would still have the religious celebration, if that was meaningful to them or to their families.

What it would make clear would be, to the dumbest, that this is civil marriage, and this is the religious ceremony, and the civil marriage is the real legal bind: any celebration you have is for your emotional or spiritual or familial benefit, not to make the marriage legal.

Any objections churches are entitled to make to same-sex marriage are already met - and are covered in all countries where legal civil marriage exists. No church has to perform any religious service for a couple unless they can do so within their rules. That doesn't mean the couple can be denied a civil ceremony. Even in Israel, any couple that leave the country to have a civil ceremony elsewhere, are legally wed when they return to Israel. (Including, it was established recently, same-sex couples who go to Canada - or elsewhere - to get married.)

[Geds]

there are already many religious organizations, Christian churches and otherwise, that offer same sex marriages.

True enough, hapax. I was thinking of mentioning that, but I was starting to bore myself...

people generally don't take well to having their fears dismissed as the result of manufactured fear mongering

Yeah, that's why I'm not a fan of just dismissing the fear mongered, but getting rid of the mongers themselves...

If we were to make religious ceremonies non-binding, and make a civil marriage service mandatory, it would be taking a lot of power from churches which can now perform legally binding ceremonies.

I'm not entirely sure what this means. It's my understanding that right now the church ceremony is non-binding in a civil sense. That's why you have to get a marriage license from the courthouse if you want it to actually count. It's also the origination point of that wonderfully tacky phrase, "By the power vested in me by the state of _______, I now pronounce you man and wife," that many pastors tack on to the end of the ceremony.

There's also the counter-examples of the cult nutjobs like that crazy Mormon guy who was just arrested out in Arizona who perform marriages that they say are A-OK in God's eyes but that the government says are quite illegal and grounds for sending in the FBI.

I'm pretty sure that the church ceremony and the civil ceremony, in the eyes of the government, are basically the same thing and equally valid as long as there is a license and a witness to sign the document. But if I just grabbed the first girl I saw and ran down to the local church to get married, it wouldn't be legally binding even if there were a pastor and a bridal party and a photographer and a reception hall and everything.

[MikhailBorg]

Just by the way, I did in fact have a civil ceremony when I was married, as my bride and I had wildly different spiritual positions upon which we were prepared to agree to disagree.

Whatever term one wishes to use, what I'm looking for is the ability for my lesbian friends and my gay friends to receive the same legal and, eventually, social status with their registered partnerships that I received.

[Jesurgislac]

Hapax: What, in Great Britain, when someone says, "Hey, it violates habeas corpus to hold terrorism suspects without trial," the imprisoned are immediately set free from jail?

What, are you playing dumb because earlier you said something stupid and you don't want to admit to it?

Hapax, in my country, anyone is entitled to comment on legislation. In fact, the government makes it easy for members of the public to comment and give feedback on legislation in process. Anyone can comment on legislation that's been made law.

Your claim that no one except nine Supreme Court judges would be able to say that DOMA was unConstitutional was stupid. You could, if you dare: I can: anyone can, who can read DOMA and read the Constitution.

What I think you were trying to say, and got confused about, was that only the Supreme Court justices can look at a law and overturn it because it is unConstitutional. But anyone, really, and you know it, can say that a law is unConstitutional.

[Jesurgislac]

Mikhail Borg: Whatever term one wishes to use, what I'm looking for is the ability for my lesbian friends and my gay friends to receive the same legal and, eventually, social status with their registered partnerships that I received.

Marriage.

[MikhailBorg]

Jesurgislac: Marriage.

Cool by me :) Now for the rest of the country!

[Ursula L]

Jesurgislac,

But the Dershowitz proposal (and the European system) would make religious ceremonies non-binding. Religious officials could not register to carry out legal marriages, you'd have to go down to city hall or whatever to have your marriage be legal, and any religious vows would be purely private.

That's a big change, and one that would cost churches. Right now, cost-wise, it isn't a huge difference between a small civil ceremony and a small religious ceremony. Two witnesses and an officiant, either way. Make a separate civil ceremony mandatory, and the cheapest religious ceremony is suddenly a purely "extra" cost. It probably wouldn't mean a huge drop in church ceremonies immediately, but over time, there would be a decline, as people grew more used to the idea of the civil service being the only one that "counts" for most practical purposes.

[Jesurgislac]

But the Dershowitz proposal (and the European system) would make religious ceremonies non-binding.

They already are. You have to have the civil ceremony carried on at the same time as the religious ceremony for the marriage to be binding.

That's a big change, and one that would cost churches.

Why? People can already just go down to city hall, or wherever, and register themselves married. Most people don't do that because most people want a wedding.

[Ursula L]

I'm not entirely sure what this means. It's my understanding that right now the church ceremony is non-binding in a civil sense. That's why you have to get a marriage license from the courthouse if you want it to actually count. It's also the origination point of that wonderfully tacky phrase, "By the power vested in me by the state of _______, I now pronounce you man and wife," that many pastors tack on to the end of the ceremony.

The licence comes from the courthouse, but the marriage itself becomes binding with the ceremony. And a (registered) pastor can make the license binding in a religious ceremony. The signing of the license gets incorporated into the ceremony.

US - you get the license at the courthouse, but the marriage can be made legally binding in a religious ceremony or a civil ceremony

Europe - you get the license and are legally married at the courthouse, and can have a religious ceremony if you want, but it has nothing to do with the marriage being legally bound

[Geds]

Wait. I've got a brilliant* idea.

If you spend a little bit of time over at Answers in Genesis or you're willing to let Ken Ham videos melt your brain for a few minutes, it becomes blatantly obvious that the argument the Creationists have against evolution boils down to one simple concept:

The call it something different, then use a lot of made up terminology and compress the time frame to obfuscate the fact that all they're doing is employing poorly thought out misdirection.

So, all we have to do is create a new word that means exactly the same thing as marriage (or, even better, blatantly rip off the "no evolution" crowd and just call it "not marriage") and allow anybody who wants to participate in this new "not marriage" the opportunity. After a while, married people will be outnumbered by "not married" people because only the whacked-out people will still be married and not "not married." Then, we can either do away with marriage entirely and leave "not marriage" in its place or we can say, "Ha, ha, now that you have no political power we can drop the pretense. It actually was marriage all along!"

It could totally work.

*Brilliance is relative.

[LL]

RE comment by G-Do | Oct 16, 2007 at 04:19 AM:

What I posted was an excerpt. I don't have the full op-ed, and couldn't find it on the newspaper's website. The Reverend was responding to an outpouring of mostly negative letters to the editor which were critical of a feature story (I believe it was in the Sunday edition of the newspaper, on the front page) about an unwed mother of quadruplets who was living on public assistance and was pregnant again by a married man (who was also the father of the quadruplets and had not contributed any money to their support). The letters were mostly "why should I feel sorry for her, yada yada yada" and he was referencing these.

And sadly, yeah, many people do need a reason to care about other people. And the guy is a reverend. He's gonna mention God. I don't agree with everything he said, but for a Dallas-based religious leader to write a rather lengthy op-ed telling people that they should care about someone even if that person seems to embody values that they believe are wrong is not something I see very often. Frankly, I don't care why someone treats anyone with decency or helps them out, whether they are motivated by self-interest or not is unimportant to me as long as people are helped. I'd prefer that people were motivated mostly by reason, but that doesn't seem likely anytime soon. So if God Guy has to reference the Almighty to get people in Dallas to care about another person, that's cool by me.

And I should mention that though I didn't write any angry letters to the DMN, I kinda agreed with some of them. I wasn't sure why I should feel sorry for someone who already had 4 kids she couldn't take care of and was now pregnant with another by the same worthless-ass guy. But I'm judgmental like that. Sorry I didn't provide the full context. It was late.

[Geds]

The licence comes from the courthouse, but the marriage itself becomes binding with the ceremony. And a (registered) pastor can make the license binding in a religious ceremony.

Um, Ursula, I still totally fail to see why this is different from what Jesu and I have said.

The religious ceremony is made binding because the pastor has the authority of bondage vested in him by a civil body. It is a religious and a civil ceremony.

A church can reject people from a ceremony for any reason it wants (my sister wouldn't have been allowed to get married at the church we grew up in because she and my brother-in-law cohabitated before marriage). This includes the right to say they do or don't want homosexual ceremonies.

However, and I can't believe this didn't occur to me the last time I was casting about for an example, hapax's denomination allows gay marriage, but they can't make it legally binding no matter how much they want to. The religious ceremony actually has no inherent civil authority unless the state allows it.

Under the current system you don't need to have both a civil and a church ceremony to be legally married as long as there's a license and the pastor has civil authority. I don't see how playing around with the gender allowances would change that.

[Jesurgislac]

US - you get the license at the courthouse, but the marriage can be made legally binding in a religious ceremony or a civil ceremony

But you have to get the civil license. You can't have a purely religious ceremony which is legally binding.

Look at the UK, which Dershy obviously doesn't want to because it totally spoils his argument. In the UK, people register to get married.

Then, you can:

1. Have a big marriage in church at which, if your religious celebrant is legally registered, your marriage becomes legally binding.

2. Have a big marriage anywhere you want, religious or not-religious, at which, if your celebrant is legally registered, your marriage becomes legally binding.

3. Have a small civil ceremony in a registry office, which is the cheapest way of doing it (costs something like £110, total, and it can be just you two, two witnesses, and the registar, or you can invite as many people as the room will hold).

After which:
3a: Do nothing - no need
3b: Have a party without ceremony
3c: Have a ceremony, wherever and whenever you like, religious, irreligious, blasphemous, whatever will make you feel that you are now married.

So what happens?

Most people have a wedding. Whether or not they separate the civil and religious ceremony (and some religious people have to, because their churches aren't allowed to register as legal celebrants) most people want the ceremony that will make them feel married.

If US churches aren't capable of doing that, they have more problems than a mere change in the law.

[Ursula L]

The point is that the religious ceremony has a civil significance. The religious and the civil are interchangable, rather than separate.

Which creates an odd symbiosis between changes in the civil and the religious instititutions, and lets the two blur and merege in many people's minds. Which makes it harder to get people to accept the idea of having legaly binding same-sex marriage when their church would consider it immoral - the civil and the religious concepts aren't clearly defined as separate things.

[Jesurgislac]

The point is that the religious ceremony has a civil significance. The religious and the civil are interchangable, rather than separate.

No, they're not. Without the civil ceremony, the religious ceremony is not legally binding.

Which makes it harder to get people to accept the idea of having legaly binding same-sex marriage when their church would consider it immoral

Well, yeah: this is the problem of everyone wanting their religion to be the "established religion". Plus, the problem of homophobic bigotry - you can point out to people that if church law ruled, marriages between first cousins, or divorced people, or marriage of a man with a vasectomy to a woman with a hysterectomy, would all be illegal, because they're all considered immoral by one church or another. And if religious marriage by itself were legal, polygamous marriage would be legal in the US. But, a homophobic bigot making use of their religion to justify their bigotry will stare blankly and claim that it's different when it's LGBT people who are being denied the right to marry.

[Jim]

Of course if you want to talk about unconstitutional, the state prohibitions on gay marriage are themselves violations of equal protection, whether the courts want to admit this or not.

[LL]

I've never been married, so I'm not sure how it's done, but my understanding of the way it works here (U.S.) is you get a license. You essentially register to marry, kinda like registering an automobile. You can have a ceremony at a church or you can do it at city hall or wherever, by a person who is legally entitled to marry people, everybody signs something, done, you're married. You can get married in your backyard, and as long as the person conducting the ceremony is legally entitled to marry people (not sure what the qualifications are for that, do you take a test, pay a fee, what?), you're married, regardless of what any religion thinks. Seems to me the DOMA is indeed a direct violation of people's civil right to marriage, completely apart from any religious tradition. It's too bad the Supreme Court doesn't have to care what we think. Apparently.

[e. nonee moose]

We all have a problem when a large segment of Christians view God as a clad-in-white Darth Vader ready to use his powers to choke the life out of their enemies if they just pray hard enough.

[MikailBorg]

Okay, I'll come in again.

We give the word "marriage" to the social institutions who are so desperate to claim and "protect" it. Catholics, Baptists, Scientologists, whoever. Even Klingons and Furries if they really want it.

We allow any two citizens of consenting age to have a civil union, with the legal privileges and pitfalls that entails. Legal entities that do not accord these unions those privileges will be penalized. With luck, social acceptance will not lag far behind.

This way, when a church says, "Marriage is a holy sacrament," we can say "okay, sure." When it says, "Marriage is between man and woman," we can say, "knock yourselves out," and get on with our happiness.

Eventually, if this works out, the churches will become bored with this, and we can reapply "marriage" to the civil union if we want. Or we can come up with a new name. Perhaps "Shirley".

[Ursula L]

And other implications...

Someone whom the state has authorized to perform marriages is allowed to refuse to marry people eligible to marry under state law, if it violates the officiant's religion.

It gives religious people a gate-keeping position in marriage - there aren't enough purely civil people authorized to perform marriage to actually carry out the number of marriages performed, which means that many people who marry must go through the religious system, for the system to function at all.

Plain old establishment issues - making religious authorities an arm of the state, for the purpose of creating civil marriages.

Incorporating the civil marriage into religious ceremonies allows religious people to make religious aspects of their marriage seem to be civil requirements - it is not necessarily clear what parts are civil, and what parts are religious. For example, I attended a Catholic wedding recently, and there was a lot of stuff worked into the ceremony about having kids, that has nothing to do with what the state of NY has to say about what a marriage is.

The fact that religious people who perform marriages can do so legally only if they register with the state has little meaning if they can turn around and add religious requirements to the civil marriages they perform, or if they, as arms of the state, can refuse to carry out their duties as arms of the state based on their religious beliefs.

[Chuck]

Jesu: What I think you were trying to say, and got confused about, was that only the Supreme Court justices can look at a law and overturn it because it is unConstitutional. But anyone, really, and you know it, can say that a law is unConstitutional.

Careful, Jesu, you're channelling Rich here. Whether or not anyone says a law is unconstitutional holds no political weight unless they're a SCOTUS justice. Therefore, when a person typically uses the phrase "saying that's it's Constitutional", they actually mean "declaring that it's Constitutional with the force of law." Must we have a flaming over pedantics?

[Jim]

Must we have a flaming over pedantics?

Apparently, yes.

[Kathryn from Sunnyvale]

There is one other type of legal marriage ceremony in Pennsylvania (and some places in the rest of the U.S.).

A self-uniting "Quaker wedding" license is signed only by the two people getting married: it does not have an official "by the powers invested in me..." signature required.

I think we have a variant of that in California- there is a special license set up for Quaker-style weddings. But I don't know the exact details.

[Raka]

Ursula: there aren't enough purely civil people authorized to perform marriage to actually carry out the number of marriages performed

Um, cite? Even if there aren't enough secular officiants at this moment to carry out every marriage that happens (assuming all religious officiants close their doors simultaneously), this seems like a problem that would solve itself within a month or two, tops. I've never heard of a case (in the US/Canada, anyway) where someone was forced to wait particularly long because they couldn't find anybody to marry them. Any particular person, or church, or venue, sure. Waiting because of obnoxious bureaucracy and paperwork, absolutely (though that's not the issue in question and wouldn't be changed by any proposal on the table). But not just an inability to find anyone qualified and willing.

In short, I don't think anybody sits around and says, "Well, Bob and Jill's marriage sucks, and that's really going to cut in to our own future marriage profits. And don't get me started on how Adam and Steve's marriage is tarnishing our reputation as a married couple. I'm really expecting fourth quarter losses in my marriage stocks." Moreover, if Bill and Jane, a good, church going couple who have been married for ten years, wakes up one morning and sees a news report that Adam and Steve were just married down at the town hall, does anyone really think that Bill and Jane are going to look at each other and say, "Well, guess that just about does it for our marriage?" and separate then and there? Come on.

Geds, that was lovely. Totally made my day. Thank you. :)

[Salamanda]

That was me. *kicks Typepad*

[Geds]

Glad I could help.

[Geds]

Oh, it also totally helps if you hear Gob Bluth saying that last "Come on" in your head.

[Jeff]

Bring on the grammar Nazis. I lose.

Off to Buchenword with you!

==========================================

Give "civil union" the legal status of marriage. A civil union would give a couple all the legal rights relating to taxes, insurance, health care, funeral arrangments, etc. that a married couple has now.

I've long been in favor of this.

=========================================

Judging Mullins' entire catalog by that song would be a lot like judging the Beatles only by the Yoko Ono years...

I sense a theme for Flamewar Friday!

(More later...)

[hapax]

Jesu: . But anyone, really, and you know it, can say that a law is unConstitutional.

*sigh* Okay. Jesu, you win. Absolutely. Anybody can say that, and anybody can say I have a pony in my backyard, too.

You're right. I did say something stupid; or to be accurate, I thought something stupid. I thought that when you said, in the original post I was responding to, that it was important to know how the system actually works, instead of the way we wish it would work, that you, you know, meant what you said.

Duly noted for future reference.

[hapax]

I also stupidly left the italics running...

[hapax]

@Geds: hapax's denomination allows gay marriage

Mmm. To clarify, no, it doesn't. The bishop of our diocese allows for gay marriage. The priest and vestry of our parish allow for gay marriage. The denomination is in the process of tearing itself apart over this issue.

[Salamanda]

Oh, it also totally helps if you hear Gob Bluth saying that last "Come on" in your head.

Ooo, it does help! And in my tiny little mind, that automatically comes with his magic show theme music, complete with flailing and scarves and pyrotechnics. Very cool.

[ako]

You can get married in your backyard, and as long as the person conducting the ceremony is legally entitled to marry people (not sure what the qualifications are for that, do you take a test, pay a fee, what?), you're married, regardless of what any religion thinks.

One of my friends did that thing where you get certified as a minister on the internet, and performed his mom's wedding ceremony (which was in the backyard). It's pretty easy. They're not strict on who performs the marriage, as long as the people getting married meet congressionally-mandated gender requirements.

Just out of curiosity, has anyone heard a non-religious argument for banning gay marriage, or otherwise legalizing discrimination against homosexuality? Because it seems to be entirely a case of people going, "I'm preventing you from doing what you chose because my religion says it's wrong!" And that sounds like it should raise major First Amendment problems (like if Mormons banned coffee, or Muslims tried to outlaw non-halal butchers).

[hapax]

ako, I've heard arguments that claimed to be non-religious (homosexuality is "against nature", or that it would cost too much money in spousal SSI benefits, or the like) but they were so self-evidently silly and transparent that I really don't remember the details.

[Michele]

Ursula wrote: Religious officials could not register to carry out legal marriages,

Here's the part you're missing, Jesurgislac. Right now, in the US, religious officials can be sanctioned by the State to carry out legal marriages. So, in that sense, you are correct that the religious ceremony and the civil ceremony both occur at the same time. I think this is also the way it works in the UK.

But, as I understand it, the proposal is that Religious officials could not register to carry out legal marriages, which means that you would have to have TWO officiants at the ceremony - one religious & one civil - if you wanted to have both ceremonies at the same time. Such is NOT the case now.

I admit it's a SMALL distinction, but an important one.

Ursula also wrote: The signing of the license gets incorporated into the ceremony.

I think that varies state-by-state. My first marriage was in Indiana; my second in Nevada; in neither of them was the signing part of the actual ceremony, but happened immediately afterward.

As a side note: when I was in London back in August, I had the pleasure of providing music for a legally-binding same-sex civil partnership ceremony. I was told that the "rules" were such that I could not play any sacred music, only secular (which was fine with both me & with the (atheist) couple). Is that common? Is a same-sex civil partnership ceremony legally not allowed to have any kind of sacred content??

Oh, and for the curious: I played "The Prince of Denmark's March" (Jeremiah Clarke) for the Processional; an original handbell composition titled "Aria" (by Cynthia Dobrinski) for the Signing of the Ledger; and "La Paix" (Handel - from "Music for the Royal Fireworks") for the Recessional.

[Geds]

Mmm. To clarify, no, it doesn't. The bishop of our diocese allows for gay marriage. The priest and vestry of our parish allow for gay marriage. The denomination is in the process of tearing itself apart over this issue.

I think I meant to say "church," but then my brain went wandering away for a moment. Although "church" probably denotes something too small, so I guess I would have been wrong either way. Either that or for some reason I was equating "diocese" with "denomination" for some reason. That would explain it, but bring up a couple of other questions.

And in my tiny little mind, that automatically comes with his magic show theme music, complete with flailing and scarves and pyrotechnics. Very cool.

Hopefully the Sword of Destiny made an appearance...

Just out of curiosity, has anyone heard a non-religious argument for banning gay marriage, or otherwise legalizing discrimination against homosexuality?

All I can come up with is, "Not having as many perfect Aryan children as you can is a dereliction of duty to the Fatherland."

And, really, that's just as bad. Maybe worse.

[ako]

ako, I've heard arguments that claimed to be non-religious (homosexuality is "against nature", or that it would cost too much money in spousal SSI benefits, or the like) but they were so self-evidently silly and transparent that I really don't remember the details.

I did hear a rather inane argument that since if absolutely everyone was gay (presumably, with no one even slightly bisexual), there'd be no children (since apparently all the technology for artificial insemination would vanish, and no one would engage in purely reproductive sex), and the human race would go extinct, no one should be gay. I liked it, because it's an equally effective argument for why no one should be a doctor.

That might be part of the reason why (from an outsider's perspective), homophobia looks like such a Christian thing; it's almost exclusively a Christian thing. In the US, nearly all homophobes who present an argument, organize political efforts to promote discrimination, or generally try to make life miserable for gays and lesbians identify as Christians, and cite Christianity as a justification for their acts. That means most of the people who tell me I'm unnatural, I have no right to marry, and my romantic feelings are immoral are Christians declaring that they're doing their Christian duty.

I know they don't make up the whole picture of Christianity, but they definitely slant the public idea of what Christianity's about. Especially since the entire debate on whether being gay is immoral and should be legally condemned is considered a legitimate debate because of prominent Christians driving it on what they call Christian grounds..

[hapax]

Oh, let's be fair, ako; diehard conservative literalist Muslims and Jews are equally wackadoodle on the issue.

(Dunno about Sikhs or Hindus. I think the Bahais are pretty homophobic, too. Anybody else know?)

[ako]

Oh, let's be fair, ako; diehard conservative literalist Muslims and Jews are equally wackadoodle on the issue.

True, but in the US at least, they're relatively rare. I never met a Jew or Muslim who cared about my sexual orientation.

[hapax]

Oh. A dear friend of mine had his family sit shiva for him when he came out.

[Kristina]

Fred: "It might seem like I'm reading too much into what may be nothing more than an extra syllable added for the sake of meter"

Not really, it could have been:

And God, is an awesome God
or
Yeah God, is an awesome God

[Salamanda]

Oh. A dear friend of mine had his family sit shiva for him when he came out.

Yikes. How awful.