I appreciate your legal expertise! I offered my opinion and that is all it was. But here is my bottom line.
I don’t care who marries who. If the states or Feds say gays can marry, no skin off of my nose unless they unconstitutionally force religious organizations to perform those marriages.
God alone is capable of sorting that stuff out. If gay marriage interferes with the free expression of religion, I am opposed to that alone.
But if all of the states must recognize gay marriage, what do I care? It is a legal thing, not a religious thing.
But to force a pastor, priest or rabbi to perform such marriage, I believe violates the religious freedom clause.
The mischief does not stop there, little feline. There are boatloads of things that people are required to do to all married couples if they do them for some married couples. Bye bye either businesses or consciences.
There is a minimum age.
There must be sufficient mental capacity.
One and/or the other partner can not already be married to someone else.
One can not marry a non-human animal or plant.
There can be no third party in addition to the man and woman.
The list can go on. But the point is marriage was established by God. He makes the rules. Anyone who changes the rules is making a mockery of His institution.
The caring comes because the terms “husband” and “wife” will be taken out of documents and gay couples will be afforded all the same rights to adoption, leading to the necessity to take out terms “mother” and “father”. Schools’ curricula will become involved, etc. This is how they do things. Nothing is JUST about the issue at hand. We let it go and they push for the NEXT and the NEXT thing. Up next is normalization of what is now called Pedophilia, but will be changed, first in terms, then in the Diagnostic manual and in time we’ll be where we are now with gay marriage. If you doubt it, I will point out that an episode of Private Practice recently had a pretty sympathetic piece about a pedophile who suffered from his compulsions, etc. but was a good person. From those standpoints I do feel that I care. Otherwise, I agree with you.