Posted on 06/26/2015 12:40:06 PM PDT by Marie
My two cents on the gay marriage thing.
Gays didn't destroy marriage. Neither did the Supreme Court. Hetrosexuals did that a long time ago. They forgot that marriage is not supposed to be based on romantic love. Historically, it's a contract between four entities. The man, the woman, G-d, and the State. Each party is supposed to have both rights and obligations to the other.
But we (hetros) made marriage about 'feelings' and romantic love. We chipped away at our obligations to the state and forgot that we have actual obligations to our partner. We decriminalized infidelity. We created no-fault divorce. We wanted all of the benefits, without all those messy obligations.
We got what we wanted. A meaningless, hollow union. Now we dare cry that gay people want to play in our park and get the benefits, too?
Conservatives are going about this all wrong. Don't fight gay marriage. Fight to make marriage mean something again.
- require premarital counseling and a six month (legal) engagement prior to the act.
- make prenups mandatory. (and they should include the management of future children and alimony.)
- criminalize infidelity with jail time (even when the sex act has the consent of the partner) and an automatic loss of all parental rights for the offender.
- End no-fault divorce. Make a list of legitimate reasons to leave a marriage and stick to it. (abuse, infidelity, addiction, etc)
- limit child support to $500 per child - no matter how much the father makes (women can't eat their cake and have it, too)
- have automatic 50/50 parental custody (with exceptions for abuse and addiction)
- once a divorce is initiated, there must be a 12 month 'cooling off period' where all of the rules for infidelity apply. They're still legally bound by the contract and if they stray, all of the jail time and loss of fortune and child custody apply.
Make people THINK before jumping into the lake in a fit of lust and infatuation. Create consequences for not honoring the contract. Make the contract difficult to break.
As long as it's a free ride for all of us, why do we even care who comes along?
If people still want to make *that* social contract and commit to one another once the institution has weight, then great.
Knock yourselves out.
But we won't do it because we (conservative hetros) love not having any actual responsibility. We fear the real commitment. We want the 'easy out'. We don't want to face the consequences for our actions. We don't want to have to pay a price for failure. We want to gimme, gimme, gimme and not worry too much about giving back.
You just “hear(d) this”. I cannot be held responsible for your listening or not. I’ll take it as an admission on your part that you do not know.
The one-man-one-woman family is the basic unit of society; other forms are destructive to society and thus unfree exercise of “religion”. That is not only the lesson of religion but the lesson of history.
If you are trying to imply that atrocities like human sacrifice and/or cannibalism are “free” exercise of religion on the same false premise, then good luck with that.
But shouldn't an individualistic free market society accept that? I'm not saying yes to gay marriage, just asking can you really toss romance and the individual pursuit of happiness overboard when our whole civilization has embraced it for at least two or three generations, if not longer?
Of course, you could look at this in a glass half-full way. It took how many millennia before we reached this point? Marriage had a pretty long run. Maybe the surprise is that it lasted as long as it did.
Don’t remember. Stopped watching the show after the wedding.
“Why devote entire threads to nonsense distractions about gay marriage?”
#1 - It’s not nonsense.
#2 - It’s not a distraction, you’re just calling it one to try to invalidate it without addressing its merits.
“Most threads about gay marriage seem to be not about stopping it, or supporting politicians fighting it...”
Exactly as I said in my previous post, nobody is actually debating strategies here today anyway, so this thread can’t possibly be “distracting” someone from other threads that DO NOT EXIST.
I agree with the sentiment
We devalued marriage ourselves first
Hmm? Traditional marriage is collectivist versus some differing notion of “individualism”? I don’t want to be confused on this point.
“The one-man-one-woman family is the basic unit of society;”
Never read the Old Testament I see.
L
Actually I addressed the topic in several posts, including the feminists being against no-fault divorce, they are also FOR gay marriage.
Also, I thought you were on a thread denigrating Scott Walker’s idea on fighting gay marriage, and on another thread being flippant about it, so evidently it is being discussed somewhere.
Tell me something, was it on PBS? I remember hearing about it and thinking I might catch it, but I never did.
I’m not Catholic, but that never mattered to me about Catherine. She was simply a woman of incredible faith, and she was able to walk the walk when things got terribly difficult for her. I think her story is a very moving one.
Not collectivist. Maybe communitarian or just traditionalist. Certainly not libertarian in the way that people are using the word lately.
From the article:
Hetrosexuals did that a long time ago. They forgot that marriage is not supposed to be based on romantic love. Historically, it's a contract between four entities. The man, the woman, G-d, and the State. Each party is supposed to have both rights and obligations to the other.
But we (hetros) made marriage about 'feelings' and romantic love. We chipped away at our obligations to the state and forgot that we have actual obligations to our partner. We decriminalized infidelity. We created no-fault divorce. We wanted all of the benefits, without all those messy obligations.
You can argue that none of that is true individualism -- that true individualism involves responsibilities as well as rights and that what's going on now involves people making bad decisions and expecting others to clean up the consequences. All of that would be true. But romance and the individual quest for happiness are what the article is criticizing and that is associated with at least one conception of individualism.
I haven't read through the court decision, but a lot of the court's talk of autonomy and fulfillment does have something to do with one way of understanding individualism, and it sounds like this article takes a very different view, one that's maybe more in line with the old idea of responsible individualism, but different from how many people think today.
Right. Henry actually got a dispensation from the Pope to allow him to marry his dead brother’s widow. This was against the law of the Church, but not that of the Bible, which in the OT actually required a man to marry his brother’s widow. The story behind the Book of Ruth.
So when the Pope denied him the right to divorce her, he fell back on the notion that the Pope had no power to allow him to marry her in the first place, from which it’s no distance at all to the idea that all the Pope’s claimed powers are illegitimate.
Just wanted to say that I agree your friend is thinking in the right direction. I have been saying for a long time that homosexual marriage would not be a blip on the radar screen if we hadn’t destroyed marriage already.
Matthew 19
3 The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?”
4 And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,
5 “and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?
6 “So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Wolsey and Henry devised the first strategy; Cromwell and Henry devised the second. Only one out of the three lived to a relatively old age.
Yes, it was considered incest in England to marry your brother’s spouse. That was not the case in Spain or France, I believe. Remember, these countries all had laws that differed from each other and sometimes from the Church.
You do realize that gays, their running dogs and their press (The Advocate) say the same thing, don’t you?
It was shown on PBS and is now available on dvd. Just a wonderful series that showcases the talent of the great Anglo-American actor, Mark Rylance.
Catherine of course claimed, possibly accurately, that she had never actually been married to Arthur, as the marriage had not been consummated.
She was certainly the most attractive personality of all those involved in “the king’s great matter.”
Unless I’m confused Church law applied, national law didn’t exist for family matters.
It’s possible that it wasn’t consummated. Arthur made dopey jokes about consummation the day after their marriage which makes me believe he was nervous about it. He was young. She was young. I think Isabella and Ferdinand were nuts to hand over that young girl into the Tudor fold. Creepy!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.