In most European countries, people have two marriage ceremonies. One at the government office, then they walk to the Church for the real marriage ceremony.
Personally, I think our government should be out of the marriage business altogether.
Posted on 01/27/2014 3:28:50 PM PST by Kaslin
It is Super Bowl week; Time for a football analogy to politics: The best defense is a good offense. Yep. Perhaps the most successful head-fake tactic of the left has been political correctness and I think that it is high time that we got our defense off the field and start throwing some play-action post routes of our own.
The leftist playbook includes instructions to accuse the right of being cruelly unfair in response to every assertion of a conservative standard. Reducing taxes is to “fund the government on the backs of the poor.” Opposing Obama’s takeover of health care is to “reveal racist contempt towards a black president.” Contending for the right to life is to “wage war on women.”
Democrats win many elections by painting Republican candidates as insensitive puritans who are absent one heart and the right side of their brain. What the Republican candidates are actually missing is a GOP playbook with instructions to avoid trying to be loved by everybody. Democrats have become experts at tapping Republicans with a small rubber hammer just below the knee. Watching the Republican kick his own legs out from under himself has become so predictable that it is not even humerus (rim shot, please).
You may have heard of one of my fellow Townhall.com contributors, an up-and-comer named Dennis Prager. Dennis effectively explores the tension between standards and compassion on his radio broadcast (see http://townhall.com/talkradio/dennisprager/438233). “The liberal tendency is to apply compassion to social policy when standards should prevail and conservatives’ tendency … is to place standards over compassion in personal life and they end up looking cold…”
Playing defense most of the time scores zero points. And decades of compromise just moves you closer to the opposition’s end zone. But we are beginning to see some bold maneuvers by the Republicans recently that have me very encouraged; Two examples:
Across Colorado, conservative communities have begun to take control of their local school boards. In 2013, Douglas County residents fended off a $1MM+ campaign by the union to re-take control of their school board. The first resolution passed after conservatives were elected in 2009 was to declare that the Boy Scouts were welcome on campus, reversing the prevailing attitude. This was followed by instituting merit pay for teachers, implementing a real voucher system, and disengaging the teachers union. The courage began to spread last year as inspired neighboring communities sought coaching from the battle-hardened Douglas County school board members and began replacing their liberal boards with conservative parents.
Now is the time for the Douglas County School Board to drive the conservative stratagem even further. By privatizing a high school, wholesale replacing the curricula with patriotic, anti-common-core syllabi, and banning radical environmentalism as a state sponsored religion, the board could keep the liberals playing prevent-defense. A good measure of success would be when liberal complaining turns into a thousand screams.
In Oklahoma this past Friday, State Representative Mike Turner boldly challenged, “whether marriage needs to be regulated by the state at all.” He floated a bill that would remove the state’s role of licensing matrimony. This was in response to a recent court order that strikes down Oklahoma’s definition of marriage as traditional one-man-one-woman.
Getting the state out of marriage is certainly not a new idea. But now that a state legislator has actually taken the first tangible step in that direction, the left finds itself backpedalling fast. Who would ever have thought that we would see the ACLU coming to the defense of marriage? But that is exactly the awkward role that the ACLU of Oklahoma has stepped up to. Now that they have marriage defined the way they like it, they are on their heels in a panic to keep the state involved.
America’s first Vice President and second President, John Adams, wrote in one of his many intellectual exchanges with his wife, Abigail: “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics andphilosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture,navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their childrena right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary,tapestry and porcelain."
I have long been intrigued by Adams’ sociopolitical graduation, captured 163 years later in Abraham Maslow's model, the Hierarchy of Needs. Through sacrifice, hard work, intelligence and war, conservatives build the foundations on which liberty can flourish. Subsequently, the compromises of majority rule naturally tend toward losses in that liberty. And when their sons’ sons focus all their attentions on self-actualizing, conservatives come to realize that the foundations need adjusting.
So back to my football analogy; I hope to see conservatives rain aggressive plays all over the field like a million short passes from Peyton Manning. We have surrendered far too much ground. It is time that Americans remember the basics and become champions once again.
Go Broncos!
While I agree with you that marriage is an implied (or actual) contract, I don’t see any reason we can’t still have that. Maybe have domestic partnership agreements drawn up in lieu of a marriage license? As far as children go, they already belong to whomever is listed on the birth certificate, regardless of parents’ marital status.
The feds have to be involved in defining what legal marriage is, as I described in the post and you ignored.
“”Since the feds have so much dealing with marriage, in the military, federal employment and immigration etc., do you want them accepting homosexual marriage?””
The feds cannot avoid having to make legal decisions regarding marriage for the areas described.
The Founding fathers themselves were making federal laws regarding marriage, before writing the constitution, and immediately after ratifying it.
It will never go anywhere, in my opinion. The statists and homosexualists will never voluntarily give it up. To the statists it’s a way to create more broken people reliant on the state, thus serial civil divorce and remarriage and impossibilities like ‘gay marriage.’ The homosexualists need a way to punish and keep punishing those who they know will never accept ‘gay marriage.’
Freegards
That must be why we never have custody battles? By the way, you don't need a marriage license to get legally married in the United States.
It's already done this way in some European countries (princess Grace of Monaco comes to mind). I don't care a rat's ass about the state and I've said from the beginning of this whole gay "marriage" debacle that the only way out was to remove the state from the marriage business.
The Catholic Church is in no danger of, nor has any interest in, controlling your life. At this point you may exit your panic room.
I don't care if I'm married in the eyes of the state or not. If such a system comes into place, I'll get married in Church and let the bureaucrats count me as a cohabitant or whatever they wish.
No that isn’t going to happen, clergy are not an official position for any government office, they do the marriages that they want to do.
People don’t just go into churches and demand to get married, like they can with a government official, who isn’t his own boss.
“I don’t care if I’m married in the eyes of the state or not.”
... until I want someone forced to recognize my marital or parental rights. As a hospital, school, probate court...
What in the world are you talking about, would you read the posts before you start spewing hostile personal attacks and displaying a grudge of some sort?
The registering of marriages in the United States is a quasi-religious, quasi-legal social function that has been influenced by religious belief, custom, and English law since the earliest colonial settlements.
Marriage records in the United States have been, and in some cases still are, kept by churches, ministers, justices of the peace, state boards of health, colonial governors, military personnel, and local (county and town) governments.
Churches were among the earliest keepers of marriage records. By 1640, Virginia and Massachusetts had passed laws requiring ministers to provide records of the marriages they performed to civil officials in the county or parish. Records of marriages in areas that did not require periodic reporting remained with the minister or the church.
Many churches, especially in the frontier areas, did not keep extensive records, and many records have been lost or destroyed. New England churches, Quaker Monthly Meetings, and the German churches kept and have preserved the most complete records.
http://www.ancestry.com/wiki/index.php?title=Marriage_Records
link to info on my previous reply. Read the whole thing. Marriages were only registered (in some States)with the gov’t after the fact, mostly for inheritance and property settlement purposes.
Just like they can't go into a bakery and demand they be sold a cake. Oh wait, never mind...
As I said before, if you think Catholic priests will not be forced into performing gay marriages lest they be stripped of their right to perform marriages recognized by the state, you're kidding yourself.
In most European countries, people have two marriage ceremonies. One at the government office, then they walk to the Church for the real marriage ceremony.
Personally, I think our government should be out of the marriage business altogether.
Me too.
There is no comparison between business refusing services or being at demand of whoever walks through their doors, and a preacher.
Preachers don’t sell marriage, they are not marriage clerks at the marriage counter, they pick and choose if they want to perform a marriage or not.
There has always been marriage law, no matter what the ruling authority was called, government, a state religion, tribal law, the fact is that there was law regarding marriage, divorce, children, inheritance.
We need to quit wasting time on this childish stuff, and come up with some conservative politics.
I think what’s going to eventually is that those faiths that will never accept whatever impossibility the state is deciding to call marriage at the time will quit acting as the state’s representative in civil marriage. They’ll just have to take whatever punishment the state decides to give them for not accepting ‘gay marriage,’ which is certainly no stranger than telling someone 30 years ago that by 2014 ‘gay marriage’ would be accepted by 18+ states.
But I don’t think the state will ever give it up at this point.
Freegards
My point is that in the eyes of the state, your sacramental marriage will be irrelevant. To Christians, what’s actually irrelevant (or should be) is state approval or state sanctioning. So, the hell with the state. I don’t need them to recognize my SACRAMENTAL marriage. My wife and I will sign whatever papers we need that will make ourselves each others heir, give one another durable power of attorney, next of kin status, etc.
Good Lord man, do what you want, you don’t have to have a legal marriage, you didn’t in 1780, or 1880, or 1980, or today.
If you don’t care if your marriage is legal, then don’t go through the process to make it so.
Nobody forces people to do that.
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