Posted on 06/27/2015 6:16:55 AM PDT by MalPearce
Hi
I don't post on here much anymore but in the wake of this decision I thought I might as well.
Civil partnership is not a religious marriage, and a religious marriage is not a civil contract. They are not, and never EVER should've been, merged and confused in the first place.
Half the mess the world is in now, and the reason marriage is so under threat, is because even on the freedom loving Christian right of politics, too many people don't seem to grasp that ANY regulation of marriage at ANY level (states or federal) is an intrusion too far.
Take the politics out of marriage!
Churches can have their rules and procedures to instruct a couple entering the marriage so they understand the solemnity of the contract (through reading of the banns and so on), and perhaps it has to check that people are able to marry e.g. aren't already married / too young to consent / being coerced. So when the time comes to officiate in the marriage, the job of the priest should merely be to WITNESS it, not rubber-stamp something.
Religious marriage used to be defined in no terms beyond it being a solemn undertaking between any two people and their deity, in accordance with their personal religious beliefs, with witnesses. And even the presence of an official wasn't a pre-requisite to being married. Common / natural law allowed for people to have their marriage recognized by simple virtue of them living as man and wife, together, for a long time, because that was just as relevant to witnessing a marriage as having a priest present during the exchange of vows. (Quite an important ability in the early days of American settlement given people could easily live too far away from a church). In Britain, similar concepts applied.
There is nothing political there at all.
All the politics in marriage stem from "civil" marriage being used for convenience, financial gain or for political reasons e.g. to resolve feuds or unite warring factions. The treatment of wives as chattel is another example. Even if some of that has a biblical precedent, this kind of marriage is too tainted.
If you want to see how vile "civil" marriage can get, look at what ISIS is doing right now - "marrying" nine year olds to Jihadis who rape them for a week or two and then get a "divorce" so another Jihadi can "marry" that same girl and rape her for a week. Sick, but it's no different to how "civil" marriage has been since the year dot.
And there are still green card marriages, and teenage bombshells marrying 80 year old perverts for money.
Let's go back to first principles and stop calling ANY of this cynical stuff "marriage" because ALL OF IT cheapens the institution of marriage.
I take my marriage very seriously because I know it's a contract between my wife, me, and GOD. I do not care if the state, or any of my JW, Catholic, Muslim or Jewish neighbours, or any nation on the planet, thinks it is a valid marriage or not. I do not care if some whackjob chooses to persecute me over it. It's none of their darned business. They weren't witnesses to my marriage vows. My wife was. I was. God was. The people in church at the time were. Nobody elses' opinion on the validity of my marriage matters to me. NOT ONE JOT.
So by extension I have to ask - why should MARRIAGE BEFORE GOD ever be defined by anything other than how a church, and its congregation, and its pastor, and the couple concerned chooses to define it? Why the heck should even a STATE or TOWN COUNCIL be telling any pastor who can and can't make a solemn vow before God? What the hell has it got to do with ANY of them?
If I don't want Jews or Muslims telling me that my marriage is valid or not because it's NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM then I certainly don't want any other Christian sect other than my own having any opinion on it. Nor do I want ANY politican doing it.
If we'd gone back to first principles, and marriage reverted to being all about a vow between two people in the sight of GOD, then this whole debate about gay marriage would be killed stone dead for that reason.
The civil contracts can be whatever they need to be... as long as THEY ARE NOT MARRIAGE CONTRACTS.
If two old queens who've lived together for many years in a monogamous relationship want a bit of paper to say "what's mine is yours, what's yours is mine" then let them have it already. Letting them have it cannot be worse than endorsing a Vegas marriage license between two raving drunks who got married for a laugh, and get it annulled a few weeks later once they've sobered up.
But PLEASE let's stop calling civil contracts marriage, and according any legal status to marriage.
Marriage is a vow before GOD. Being married is a state of mind. Being faithful is a matter of self-control and honouring your vows.
Civil contracts on the other hand - they are designed for profit, to limit liability, to safeguard investments, and THEY ARE DESIGNED TO BE BROKEN WHEN IT'S CONVENIENT.
We gain absolutely nothing by trying to conflate the two and for this one reason, I am facepalming like a good'un at all the good ole boys who reckon the solution to this current crisis is to just move the federal interference in marriage down to the states level. WAY TO MISS THE ENTIRE POINT.
Any attempt to get the state out of marriage will be attacked by homosexuals. I guarantee it.
It was never about marriage to them. It was about control and the state is the only tool they have.
Nicely done. I’d not read my own opinion in print before.
However, some here ain’t gonna like that. Put on your flak jacket....
Oh I don’t know. I think its going to become a fairly popular opinion pretty quickly.
With this latest ruling they got into it big time as the natural outcome of this will be to only recognize state preformed unions. The ones done in a church will be up to the various religions but not recognizable by the state. IOW you'll need to do it twice.
The best bet is not to get the government out of marriage, but for Orthodox and conservative religions to take their marriages away from the government.
That is, there is no real benefit to having a secular marriage anymore, or even to registering a religious marriage with the government. So couples who belong to an Orthodox or conservative faith should be married by their church, and not even bother to get a secular marriage license.
This idea can be given teeth only if there is an agreement among Orthodox and conservative churches to *only* recognize religious marriages conducted by them. That is, for them to *refuse to recognize* secular or even religious marriages carried out by others, including liberal churches.
The government will not like this one bit, because they want control over the *sacrament* of marriage. But because they have so watered down marriage with an “anything goes” attitude towards both it and divorce, religions can tell the government to go fish.
Churches have long held that they should “embrace the sinner”, but have forgotten that unless the sinner stops sinning, it is like drawing an asp to one’s breast. They must stop sinning.
So this means couples with secular or liberal marriages have to be remarried, at least “on paper”, before their marriage is recognized.
By separating sacramental religious marriages from the “scrap of paper” secular and liberal marriages, is the first step on the road to redemption of religious marriage.
Bump for later reading.
I would not disagree with most of your post.
Mr. niteowl77
“couples who belong to an Orthodox or conservative faith should be married by their church, and not even bother to get a secular marriage license.”
At least this debacle has a silver lining. We will know once and for all which churches intend to capitulate to the secular world and which churches remain steadfast to God’s word.
A church can meet anywhere and be of any size above one person. God is using the homosexual movement as judgement to test and purify His church.
Christians and conservatives just want to go on about their business and be left alone.
However, the braying masses that worship at the alter of perversion and big government do not want to leave us alone.
It’s all well and good to talk about “getting the government out of marriage” but the braying masses want government involved in everything.
Next will be group marriages, and then marriage between siblings/family relations. Once we can all marry each other & claim everyone as a dependent, tax revenue will drop. At that point we’ll go to some kind of flat tax.
Maybe this particular ‘slippery slope’ will have unintended good effects. ;-)
From what I’ve read many years ago, the government was never involved in marriages of common people. Only the elite had marriage contracts (between high-born men and women) drawn up to pass along kingdoms to the kids.
The common people went to the priest or preacher who then married them in church and entered it in the church records. If there was NO clergy handy, the two made a public declaration of living together as man and wife, then later when a clergyman came by they and their kids would go to the church and get religiously married.
Then some politician found he could bring in MONEY by demanding a government license to get married.
I don’t believe there is an instance of two men getting married other than the pervert NERO. I believe the historians noted it only because it had never been done before.
I’ve been saying this for years. No more marriage “licenses”.
L
I want marriage abolished with the State, make people create corporations.
Marriage is a religious institution only. The State should have no power over it.
Two words: tax advantages. Two more words: Social Security.
People won’t allow states to stop registering marriages if it means they lose the special tax treatments.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of other governement benefits. Here’s a few: property transfer upon death without probate or will; no federal gift tax on cash transfers; exemption against testifying against spouse.
Small ball. The issue is a lawless Judiciary.
It’s really all about the money - - for both sides.
Could you imagine the lawyers and courts without the endless stream of divorces? Damn law system would go broke!
You cannot ignore the fact that the legal institution of marriage has one purpose: to protect the children resulting from that marriage. There is a whole body of law existing for that purpose, consisting of laws to ensure the legal distribution of property among the surviving spouse and progeny of that marriage, to ensure that property stays within the biological family, to ensure that the children are cared for, etc., in the case of the death of one spouse.
A religious marriage with no legal foundation does not give any legal standing to resulting children. If both parents should die and there is no legal framework in place, those children are thrust upon the mercy of strangers—or they are thrown in the middle of family squabbles as the relatives fight over who gets to keep the wealth and who is stuck with the kids. Yes, I know, people should have a will—but how many actually do?
Since secular marriage is about the legal framework existing to protect the children of such a marriage, the Supreme Court ruling that there is such as thing as same-sex “marriage” is nonsensical. Homosexual “friendships” cannot result in children, and homosexual lifestyles are inimical to the raising of children. Thus, for homosexuals to claim to be married is an impossibility.
It is outrageous that the Supreme Court decided to invalidate real marriage to appease the mentally ill delusions of 1-2% of the population.
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