Posted on 03/16/2009 9:03:38 AM PDT by Zakeet
When a Jewish boy turns 13, he heads to a temple for a deeply meaningful rite of passage, his bar mitzvah. When a Catholic girl reaches about the same age, she stands in front of the local bishop, who touches her forehead with holy oil as she is confirmed into a 2,000-year-old faith tradition. But missing altogether in each of those cases - and in countless others of equal religious importance - is any role at all for government. There is no baptism certificate issued by the local courthouse, and no federal tax benefits attached to the confessional booth, the into-the-water-and-out born-again ceremony or any of the other sacraments that believers hold sacred.
Only marriage gets that treatment, and it's a tradition that some legal scholars have been arguing should be abandoned. Two law professors ... say the best way out of the intractable legal wars over gay marriage is to take marriage out of the hands of the government altogether.
Instead, give gay and straight couples alike the same license - a certificate confirming them as a family, and call it a "civil union" - anything, really, other than "marriage." For those for whom the word marriage is important, the next stop after the courthouse could be the church, where they could bless their union with all the religious ceremony they could want. The Church itself would lose nothing of its role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that it finds in keeping with its tenets. And for non-believers or those for whom the word marriage is less important, the civil union license issued by the state would be all they needed to unlock the benefits reserved in most states, and in federal law, for "married" couples.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
While new terminology for all may at first seem awkward - mostly in greeting-card shops - [it] dovetails with the court's important responsibility to reaffirm the unfettered freedom of all faiths to extend the nomenclature of marriage as their traditions allow," wrote [Pepperdine University] professors Douglas W. Kmiec and Shelley Ross Saxer.
This was the goal from the start.
And then read their signs to see what they REALLY want.
It is ALL about the money. Social Security/pension survivor benefits, immigration (to bring in your gay lover), health benefits, etc.
Ridiculous image. I love it! :)
AOL Time Warner are media jihadists.
How about just getting gooberment out of it all together and leave it to the Church where it belongs.
Society has a vested interest in maintaining a legal definition of marriage. As people have changed their idea of what a family is, our society has gone downhill in many ways. No one can deny that fact.
Marriage should be about a religious institution, or a private secular social institution.
Get government out of it. No discrimination based on marital status, which includes taxes and benefits.
A Global Kidnapping
Around the world, the two-person, mother-father model of parenthood is being fundamentally challenged.
In Canada, with virtually no debate, the controversial law that brought about same-sex marriage quietly included the provision to erase the term “natural parent” across the board in federal law, replacing it with the term “legal parent.”
With that law, the power in defining who a child’s parents are shifts precipitously from civil society to the state, with the consequences as yet unknown.
In Spain, after the recent legalization of same-sex marriage the legislature changed the birth certificates for all children in that nation to read “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B” instead of “mother” and “father.” With that change, the words “mother” and “father” were struck from the first document issued to every newborn by the state.
Similar proposals have been made in other jurisdictions that have legalized same-sex marriage.
In New Zealand and Australia, influential law commissions have proposed allowing children conceived with use of sperm or egg donors to have three legal parents.
In the United States, courts often must determine who the legal parents are among the many adults who might be involved in planning, conceiving, birthing, and raising a child. In a growing practice, judges in several states have seized upon the idea of “psychological” parenthood to award legal parent status to adults who are not related to children by blood, adoption, or marriage. They have done so even over the objection of the child’s biological parent. Advances in the same-sex marriage debate have encouraged group marriage advocates who wish to break open the two-person understanding of marriage and parenthood.
The National Health Education Standards has gone further and envoked in loco parentis by redefining parents as families. Families have been classified as stakeholders. Children’s stakeholders are being identified as any entity that is seen as a resource in a child’s community.
Quote from NationalGuidelines.org
http://www.nationalguidelines.org/guideline.cfm?guideNum=0-12 :
>>Schools often have insufficient resources to provide a comprehensive and multifaceted continuum of interventions. By having direct contact with families and key informants in the community, schools are better able to identify barriers to student success and well-being and better equipped to develop solutions that overcome these barriers. Schools can enhance home-school links by sharing concerns with families and developing solutions that address students’ unique needs.
In addition to the benefits for students’ education and well-being, students’ families, and school staff, there are reciprocal benefits for community agencies who partner with schools. Businesses, the justice system, community health and safety systems, and others may benefit from a healthier population. Community agencies and organizations that provide services to children and families often gain a more visible profile when they become partners with schools.
Examples of neighborhood stakeholders in student health and well-being are students themselves, as well as their families and teachers. Other school staff, community business owners, police, faith-based institutions, universities and colleges, local health departments, health and mental health service providers, dentists, emergency medical services, educators of first-aid, departments of health, justice, education and social services, and other agencies that serve families have stakes in the well-being of the student population and school staff. Communicate regularly with partners and potential partners in order to learn what each has to offer.<<
PING
Better solution end gay’s
Society consists of individuals. If we are free, then I can choose to recognize the marriage of A and B, you are free to not recognize it.
When Government steps in, I must recognize a marriage when if and only if the government says they are married, and you are restricted.
Say you note that married men have lower life insurance claims. You may seek to gain market share of this niche by offering them lower rates. Of course if you disagree, you are free to chose a different company, or start your own.
Ah, but homosexuals who claim they are married have the same life insurance claim rate as other homosexual men, which is high. You are then not allowed to illegally discriminate against homosexuals, so you must raise rates for heteros to make enough money that you don’t lose your shirt because of the homosexuals.
Freedom is better.
The first time I heard this term was when Algore used it. Why can't they just say "my faith" or "religion." Guess those terms are too stark. FT sounds like something out of an anthropology text.
Apart from the importance of lineage throughout history, the most critical part of formal marriage is survivor benefits - the two together define inheritance.
Lineage is still a personal/family/church matter for the most part. But...
I don't trust government to protect my right to pass on wealth (what's left anyway) when drafting any legislation changing the civil meaning of a family.
I agree, government should not be in the “marriage” business. Separation of church and state. It has always bothered me that when a reverend or priest marries someone they have to say “By the power vested in me by the State of (whatever)...” As if it is the state that rules over the church!
And anyone who has ever been divorced knows that “marriage” by government’s definition is nothing but the co-mingling of financial assets and income.
Marriage should remain a religious institution, act of love, etc. Government should stay out of it.
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Regarding their signs, and I have asked this before, can anyone give the name of a SINGLE HOSPITAL that has a policy where homosexual partners are denied visitation rights?
Agreed. Gov’t involvement in registering marriage is also pre-emptive, i.e. making sure children and wives are not abandoned by the breadwinner. Can you imagine how much more difficult it would be if you had to prove a marriage existed before you could make a claim?
I've always thought this.
My best friend and I, in college, used to say if it were legalized, we'd declare 'married' (but celibate) until one or both of us found someone to really marry ... so that the one of us with the good corporate job could provide benefits to the other. Just a legal formality. Certainly we liked each other ... what more do you need for a union? We aren't asked to prove consummation. If we, the timid and the law abiding, could think of this, just imagine the abuse real gamers could do? Not that it doesn't go on now between friends of different sexes, but I suspect not that prevalently. For us, anyway, a token civil union would have been of no consequence, unlike a church marriage.
So now what? I'll name all my friends, male and female, as part of my new multi-partner union?
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