That Oregon county announced it was not going to issue marriage licenses a couple weeks ago. Seems like we're pretty close to ending marriage as it is.
Someone needs to do a study to determine how much money will be shifted from gay couples onto other folks as a result of the extension of marriage to the gay community.
This debate is lost because the right side can't even muster the correct argument. The sanctity of marriage isn't the issue. Homosexuality is the issue.
Stripping the primary family unit of any legal protections would guarantee the end of our society as we know it.
Look to the Democratic National Convention coming soon in Boston (or a "Gay Pride" parade) for a concrete look at the society that would rise in its place.
I prefer the traditional No Sex marriage.
If anything needs defining, it is sex itself.
This is the position of libertarians (generally extreme secularist cultural liberals) who don't have the guts to say they want sodomite marriage.
Marriage is a contract between two people and society. A contract between two people is just in a lawyer's office. A marriage is and has always been a very expensive public ceremony surrounded by elaborate ritual. Society no longer has the power to use tradition, family, religion, or fear of ostracism to protect marriage, to protect wives and children from the vagaries of male hormones and mid life crises so it employs the state to do so.
Government recognition of marriage makes no more sense than government regulation of the sacrament of baptism.
Many of the arguments for government recognition of marriage center on the need to legally protect the family from government intrusion. Do we really believe that a power hungry government will be stifled by its own regulatory institutions.
If we aren't living in a nation that dutifully respects the god given rights of each of its citizens then a government supplied contract is going to do little to help that.
It's Time to Privatize Marriage:
http://www.zetetics.com/mac/ifeminists/2002/0716.html
"Why is marriage declining?" — the question buzzes in the news.
I believe one reason is because marriage has become a three-way contract between two people and the government, which is regulated by the state from wedding vows to divorce decrees.
Marriage should be privatized. Let people make their own marriage contracts according to their conscience, religion and common sense. Those contracts could be registered with the state, recognized as legal and arbitrated by the courts, but the terms would be determined by those involved.
*click the link for more*
Paine was married a couple of times. His issue was with England and the Monarchy.
This article ASSUMES that civil law has no deterant value which IMHO is incorrect.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Manifesto
of the Communist Party
1848
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
My,my...your ideas seem to have been espoused in 1848.
Absolutely. In the early days of this nation, a young feller and his girl thinking about getting marriage would NEVER have thought about asking their government for permission. The church was the source of marriage. Government should be out of the marrying business altogether.
I have infinitely greater trust in the ability of religious institutions to make moral and ethical decisions than I do in the government.
Do you? What about Gene Robinson, the gay Bishop in the Episcopalian church? What about the pedophile-shuffling within the Catholic church? Pedo-priest commits a sexual crime - he is shuffled off to a different parish. These are the first two that come to mind. I'm sure we can add to the list of "moral and ethical decisions".
agree mostly
What are you a lawyer, trying to drum up business?
Lets get government out of enforcing contracts, too! That will teach them!
If we were to do away with gov't's recognition of marriage and link those now provided benefits to children's birth certificates, it might just end the Homo agenda.