The Fiction of Traditional Marriage.

Christians opposed to marriage equality are just another example of Christians trying to control everyone else's lives.  "They can't even run their own lives I'll be damned if they'll run mine" as was said in the song lyric. It is an attempt to assert dominion over the rights of people of other faiths or of no faith at all. After all this is what the Church does. It is what the Church is for. They have a long history of doing just that. This is why the first colonists braved the open sea for weeks to get here and away from the actual persecution of the Church. Those people eschewed the authority of religion over their lives and fought a war of independence from England to make it permanent.

So today we have a people who claim the rights of definition of what "marriage" is and shall be. They claim that anything less than their interpretation sullies the notion of Traditional Marriage by extending it to two people of the same gender. It was not so long ago that people of the same ilk objected to inter-racial marriages, specifically between Caucasians and the other races. Black and Asian marriages were not so big a deal it seems. 

The claim that allowing marriages between two men or two women is spurious in its contention that it somehow denigrates the value of "traditional marriages." Where is their fierce objections to divorces and remarriages? Where is their ire when Hindus and Buddhists claim that their adherents are married and did not invoke the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, in their ceremonies and subsequent lives? And how about the atheist couple who seek a marriage license from the county clerk? Has any clerk, judge or cake baker ever refused to provide their services to people in any of these above examples? No? Maybe it is because, first their State Legislature didn't explicitly set out to discriminate based on Christian assumptions of superiority. Second, they don't a have ready-made profile to identify people as with a same gender application. Third, no one has cranked them up and told them to not do it

No religion has a lock on such definitions as who is GOD, what is marriage, who can marry, at what age, in in which configurations, who goes to heaven, who goes to hell or who "is all dressed up with nowhere to go." No religion completely agrees on that is okay to do and what is sinful. While there is agreement on many thing, actual practice appears to be largely a matter of personal interpretation and local denominational discretion. Christian sects even killed other Christian sects over the matter of the relationship among the Father, Son and Holy Ghost (excuse me, Spirit.) The other Abrahamic religions have similar disagreements, as do religions which were founded centuries before Abraham.

So here we have a social authority that has been updated to be more inclusive and less discriminatory. We the People call it the U.S. Constitution. Its defenders and protectors have informs Us the People that we are going to go in a different direction now.  Like it or not, marriage confers two distinct classes of rights. One, it confers the right to be "of one flesh" in the eyes of a god. This aspect may easily be denied by clergy of any religion. Two, it confers a multitude of legal benefits and responsibilities too numerous to discuss here. These are the domain of the U.S. Congress as upheld or rescinded by the Supreme Court of the entire country. There was a time that traditional Christian marriage made a woman into a slave and property of a man and entailed a multitude of egregious conditions that we no longer accept in America. We did away with THAT notion a long time ago. Let's not revisit that any time soon. 

Captive virgins, polygamy and sex slaves: What marriage would look like if we actually followed the Bible      by Valerie Tarico, AlterNet

The blog post is here

Here is just a little something to think about while pounding the Good Book and spewing vitriol.

---

"He can't even run his own life I'll be damned if he'll run mine" ~ Sunshine by Jonathan Edwards (1971)

---

TweetTweet This Post