I’m watching Maggie Gallagher on MSNBC arguing that same-sex marriage will impact your marriage because it’s the government defining marriage and that’s bad for marriage.

What do you do with people this stupid?  Seriously, did the fact that she had to get a license from the government in order to get married clue her in at all to the realization that the government defines marriage in this country?

This is pretty much the only hope they have left—convincing stone-cold morons that the license and certificate that they got from the government when they got married were really deeply religious symbols that had nothing to do with the government.  Even if they did arrive on paper that made them look exactly like the title for your car.

Wingnut logic:

  Problem: OMG!!  The government is defining marriage!!

  Solution: Have the government define marriage.

Yep, looks about right to me.

From the article, emphasis mine:

Same-sex marriage is quite different from bans on interracial marriage in one powerful respect: It asks religious Americans to surrender a core belief — not only Leviticus (disapproval of gay sexual acts), but Genesis (the idea that God himself made man as male and female and commanded men and women to come together in a special way to image the fruitfulness of God).

Who on Earth is Maggie Gallagher to speak for the millions of religious Americans who SUPPORT gay marriage, who don’t believe homosexual sex is wrong, and who don’t give a shit what the Bible has to say about procreation?

So crazy.

My husband and I, who are adults of opposite sexes who were not currently married to anyone else, would not have been married by churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, or any other religious community to which we did not belong, and whose religious requirements for matrimony we did not meet.

Of course, we got married by a justice of the peace, because he doesn’t believe in religion.  But it wasn’t like we could have waltzed into our local Catholic church or Orthodox synagogue or mosque and said “Hey you have to marry us because we’re heterosexuals!”

A lot of evil is lurking, hiding behind the “religious” label.  Persons claiming to be religious while practicing bigotry and hate, and pointing to ‘god’ and a bible for justification.  If America and most of the world doesn’t accept the Bible’s directions on slavery, why should we bow to it’s view of marriage, which is pretty weird as I recall.

Bunch of Snivel Snots.

Actually, the logic goes (and is wrong on most counts) that religion invented marriage, defined it, then turned it over to the government to grant thousands of special privileges, none of with changed in the slightest until the homos came along. In their fantasy, this is the first issue on which the government has had any say in changing the rules.

Since three days is about the current news cycle on anything that isn’t (metaphorically) kept alive on media life-support, it isn’t a surprise that they can convince people that marriage as it is c. 2009 is the way it’s always been.

How many people really understand things like women not being able to even keep the money they earned by their own work - that it belonged by law to their father or husband? That the problem (the sin) of divorce wasn’t that it violated God’s plan, but that it kicked a woman (and often kids) out on the street with no money, no property, no prospects, and very little likelihood of ever marrying again to remedy that?

For that matter, how many people get that involuntary shock treatment was a common treatment for homosexuality within the lifetime of many (most) of the gay people alive TODAY (not to mention imprisonment, with only went away this decade)?

Last week, the Iowa supreme court found a constitutional right to gay marriage, rejecting the arguments for marriage accepted by the state supreme courts of New York, Maryland, and Washington.

Wait…  don’t the states have different constitutions as well?  So like…  what the state constitution of New York allows may not apply at all to Iowa?

Same-sex marriage is quite different from bans on interracial marriage in one powerful respect: It asks religious Americans to surrender a core belief

Wow, there’s no lie they won’t tell, is there?  The arguments against interracial marriage were all religious, too, a bunch of hooey about how god didn’t intend the races to mix.  If she’s okay with interracial marriage, I guess she’s not religious anymore.

Impact is not a verb. Never has been.

“Wait… don’t the states have different constitutions as well?  So like… what the state constitution of New York allows may not apply at all to Iowa?”

...which is why they phrased it the way they did.  Most Americans will think first of The Constitution (federal) so the implication - false, of course - is the Iowa Supremes interpreted the federal constitution and not their own.  (Those gosh darn Activist Judges!)  The same thing was implied here in Cali by the Prop H8’ers…

Actually, the logic goes (and is wrong on most counts) that religion invented marriage, defined it, then turned it over to the government to grant thousands of special privileges, none of with changed in the slightest until the homos came along.

The fun fact, of course, is that marriage in Christian Europe started off as a non-religious contractual agreement.  You signed the contract and did the ceremony outside of the church and then went in afterwards to celebrate it, because you weren’t supposed to soil the church with your filthy financial agreements.

Not to mention that only people with large amounts of money and/or property even bothered to get married until about a hundred years ago, especially in rural areas.

The only marriage that will impact your marriage is Ann Althouse’s marriage, rightly so.

“Not to mention that only people with large amounts of money and/or property even bothered to get married until about a hundred years ago, especially in rural areas.”

...you filthy libruls with your “history” and your “facts”...you make me sick!

Everything anyone needs to know about anything is in The Bible, written in King James’ own English, as spoken by Jesus directly to King James.  The whole ceremony is described in there, somewhere, even the use of rice and everything.  Here, let me find it for you…

...Darn it!  (pardon my french)  I know it’s here somewhere… 

Well, anyways, God said, I believe it, and you’re going to Hell…

Imagine an ad in 1965 declaring that the Negroes got civil rights by rejecting the courts’ holding on equal rights, then they started casting for California restauranteurs and Mississippi bus drivers whose lives were ruined by uppity blacks.

I don’t know.  If PSAs and political ads had been more common back then, maybe you would have seen shit like that:  A bus driver complaining that he’ll have to quit his job because letting black people sit in the front might mean that one of them will brush up against him.  A restaurant owner complaining that he’ll have to shut down because letting black people sit at the counter means that white people will stop eating at his restaurant.  Etc., etc.

Doesn’t every religious institution have the right to decide which couples they’ll marry and what said couples have to do in order to be married there? I’m pretty sure my brother and his wife had to produce baptismal certificates, go through pre-marital counseling with a priest (yeah, I know), and go on some god-awful couples’ retreat before the Catholic church would marry them. I don’t think civil law has any impact on a religious institutions in this regard, and frankly would like someone to ask these conservatives to cite legal precedent on this assertion. Was there ever a church that was legally required to marry an interracial couple after miscegenation laws were scrapped? Has a church ever been forced to marry an interfaith couple, or an atheist couple? Has the judiciary ever interfered in a religion’s right to be completely stupid and bigoted when deciding who can get married in their Super-Special Magic God House?? “Find me a Supreme Court case or shut up” is the appropriate retort to these people.

You signed the contract and did the ceremony outside of the church and then went in afterwards to celebrate it, because you weren’t supposed to soil the church with your filthy financial agreements.

Yes.  Or you didn’t even go inside, in many cases—hence the Wife of Bath’s “husbands at church door I had five.”

Not to mention that only people with large amounts of money and/or property even bothered to get married until about a hundred years ago, especially in rural areas.

Not true in the US, actually.  Those Puritans were marryin’ fools.

Let’s take Gallagher back to 1682, so that she can write a stirring piece about the way that the Pennsylviania legislature’s pronouncements on divorce require “people of faith” to surrender a core belief, namely that marriage properly contracted is indissoluble.

It kind of makes me queasy that there are people old enough to remember religious arguments against interracial marriage who will still swallow her “difference between then and now” statement without a second thought.  People my own age and younger will, of course, have to wiki that and may not make the effort.  People who don’t read their Bible will pretty much believe anything’s in it, so of course it’s been used for all kinds of shit that embarrasses us now.

My favorite “read your Bible or shut the hell up” quote comes from my ex: “People say we don’t know what heaven will be like.  Not true, the Bible is very explicit.  You’ll sing.  All fucking day, singing in the heavenly choir about the glory of God.  Do you like singing?  Because it’s all you’ll fucking do.  That’s what you’re looking forward to.”  He was also fond of a picture of a bible captioned “Keep Closed for Maximum Power”

When MA legalized marriage, we suddenly had lots of arguments.  You see, we had so many weddings to go to and presents to buy that it caused strife in our relationship to sort it all out.

Bad gay people.  You make straight married people fight.  No nups for you!

Just to comment re: past ads and the civil rights movement, there actually were such ads.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZ4G251WR4

The really scary thing is that nearly ten million people saw these ads and voted
for this campaign.

We got married in Vegas, baby. Two hours in line at the Clark County courthouse will destroy any argument that same-sex marriage will hurt the institution, because really, they couldn’t possibly fuck it up any worse.

Weren’t these assholes using government definitions of marriage as a “defense” not five minutes ago?

Eh, hardly matters. This is a non-debate. Churches can already do what they want vis-a-vis marriage: they can mary, and recognize, any marriages they choose. The problem, of course, is that gay-bashers really want to control what other people do with their lives. Their divorces are private. Your marriages are public. This is why they run to religion for “values” to protect but then run from religion (to “tradition”) for justification for their protection. If you were to repeat the whole argument, out loud, in one sitting, the bullshit will be obvious.

Same-sex marriage is quite different from bans on interracial marriage in one powerful respect: It asks religious Americans to surrender a core belief.

GAAAH.

It asks no such fucking thing.  Religiously bigoted assholes right to continue to behave like religiously bigoted assholes will in no way be impacted by whatever the courts and legislatures decide to do in respect to giving gays their constitutionally mandated rights.

If First Trinity Church of Gay Bashing wants to define marriage as a union between an orange and a broccoli, nobody will stop them from doing so.  If they don’t like gay marriage, they have an easy out - don’t perform gay marriage ceremonies.  Nobody will ever take away these assholes rights to be assholes.

But what happens in a City Hall or before a secular civic official, they have no fucking business dicatating.

Fucking assholes.

I was surprised to hear the spokesperson from the defense of marriage organization state that the greatest good in a marriage between a man and a woman is that it creates a loving environment in which the children of that union may thrive. Her implication being that a homosexual union is incapable of forming a loving relationship. Her statement exposes the bigotry of the anti-gay marriage proponents and illustrates their desperate attempts to find some justification for condemning millions of gays and lesbians to second-class status under the law.

Their argument that the recognition of gay marriage would somehow devalue heterosexual marriage is indefensible. One need only substitute the word Negro for gay in their statements opposing gay marriage to expose the bigotry motivating the defense of marriage movement.

This is what happens when bigotry ties itself to specifics as its justification. Gays are bad because we don’t form stable relationships, refuse to raise children (can’t have any, refuse to adopt), won’t have anything to do with church, and don’t even try to contribute to society. And the buttsex.

But then when gays show up, IN stable relationships and/or trying to cement them, with children (some they’ve spawned themselves, others they’ve rescued from a flawed foster or adoption system), going to churches that are happy to embrace them, contributing to society all around them, and point out that straight folks are having the buttsex - and that ALL those things have been true pretty much all along, their heads explode.

Am I the only one seeing that even “gay marriage is wrong” is slipping as a primary argument, and “gay marriage will lead inevitably to incest and polygamy and then there will we be” is taking over? We’re at the tipping point now. Just need to keep shoving for just a little while.

Brace yourself for having to explain to the next generation that yes, people really did have a problem with gay people in the olden days.

First of all, not church has to marry anyone they don’t want, and that’s the way it should be.  Churches should not be forced to marry gay couples, and they’re not forced to do that, and no one is trying to make them do that.

The only fear these people have is that successful gay marriages undermine their justifications for misogyny and strict gender roles.

It asks religious Americans to surrender a core belief — not only Leviticus

If the person who said this eats shrimp or pork (which are banned in Leviticus also), then they are a glaring hypocrite.  Even if this person doesn’t eat shrimp, but also doesn’t want to make it illegal, they are still a hypocrite.  And what about the countless Bible verses that tell Christians to love and tolerate everyone, and not to judge others?  Banning gay marriage asks many religious Americans to surrender several core religious beliefs - separation of church and state, and the duty to love and tolerate all people.  Also, legal gay marriage does not force anyone to surrender a core belief, even if they insist on believing gay marriage is wrong.  Gay marriage is optional, not mandatory, and people who don’t like gay marriage simply don’t have to have one.

Same-sex marriage is quite different from bans on interracial marriage in one powerful respect: It asks religious Americans to surrender a core belief.

It wasn’t long ago that a lot of Christians in this country wanted to ban interracial marriage due to their core religious beliefs.  Specifically, it was commonly believed (and still is, unfortunately) that dark skin was either the mark of Ham (Noah’s son who disrespected his dad), or the mark of Cain (who killed his brother), or both (some people believe that the original mark of Cain was passed down through Ham’s wife).  Either way, it is meant to mean that they deserve eternal punishment, and they are unclean and shouldn’t be mixed with the “pure” Christians.  That sounds like a core religious belief to me.

All of these fundies have such short memories!  They forget all about the biblical rationalizations for racism that were used less than 50 years ago.  And they forget about how common polygamous, incestuous, and child marriages are in the Bible and throughout history.  Maybe they always want to go back to the Good Old Days(TM) because they can’t remember how bad those days actually were.

“It wasn’t long ago that a lot of Christians in this country wanted to ban interracial marriage due to their core religious beliefs.  Specifically, it was commonly believed (and still is, unfortunately) that dark skin was either the mark of Ham (Noah’s son who disrespected his dad), or the mark of Cain (who killed his brother), or both (some people believe that the original mark of Cain was passed down through Ham’s wife).  Either way, it is meant to mean that they deserve eternal punishment, and they are unclean and shouldn’t be mixed with the “pure” Christians.”

I’m pretty confident in saying that many/most of the hard-core opposition to interracial marriage still feel the same way, they just keep it a little more on the DL.  Those are the kinds of beliefs that some people cannot give up, and will take to their graves.  Legalization didn’t and will never legitimize it to them.

I hate to say it, but the hard-corp anti-SSM people are certainly the same.  Legalization will not change their minds at all; if anything, their opposition will only get stronger and more incoherent.

A lot of bigotry seems to be like that.  It gets in there so deep you can’t get rid of it…

MikeEss, I agree that plenty of racist people still think that way, and I don’t believe making gay marriage legal will make people accept it.  But that’s not the point.  People don’t have to accept it; they are entitled to their opinions.  The point is that interracial marriage is legal.  Same-sex marriage should also be legal.  Certain people don’t have to like it, they just shouldn’t use the law to force their views on other people.

I agree.  Their inability to overcome their bigotry is no reason not to make progress…

One of the first gay marriages that I went to: a minister and her wife.

Then the minister, who had lived with her wife for over a decade, eschewed an immediate honeymoon and turned right around and married several other couples within the space of a couple of weeks.

What was that about religion?

Note also: churches can refuse to marry interfaith couples.  Churches can refuse to marry interracial couples.  Churches can refuse to marry non-congregants.

You know what these churches are really afraid of?  Losing revenue to justices of the peace if the government decides that churches cannot perform LEGAL weddings and that LEGAL weddings must take place with a government officiant. 

Not that many people wouldn’t do the church wedding on top of the state wedding ... but many would realize that they don’t have to become joiners to get their wedding done.

Ms Kate, I think that couples who get married in a church already need to register with the state, and people can already get civil marriages without any church involvement.  I don’t think that churches are afraid of losing wedding money, because many gay couples will still want a church wedding.

The bigger fear is that successful gay marriages will challenge fundies’ rationalizations for their misogynist marriages and strict gender roles.  They like to insist that they treat wives badly because it’s just plain necessary for marriages, families, and society to function.  If same sex marriages turn out fine and don’t make the sky fall, then it shows that fundies are really just control freaks and jerks.  They don’t need to treat their wives that way; they just want to.

“If First Trinity Church of Gay Bashing wants to define marriage as a union between an orange and a broccoli, nobody will stop them from doing so.  If they don’t like gay marriage, they have an easy out - don’t perform gay marriage ceremonies.  Nobody will ever take away these assholes rights to be assholes.”

The actual worry is that people will call them bigots if they cling to their beliefs that gay people are inherently not as good as straight people.

Histro-geek, do you realize how much recruiting that churches do though marriage stuff?  Because you now have to go to church if you are married and you have to go to church if you are going to have kids, etc.  Lots of people think that way - weddings pull people in the door.  If straight people get turned off for whatever reason, or the bigotry in their faces pushes them away, the church loses.

Churches don’t actually care if their bigotry turns people off.  They get off on feeling holier-than-thou.

Catholic parishes vary widely.  As I’ve said before, my pre-Cana classes were run by a married couple who didn’t discuss NFP at all, but said there were pamphlets somewhere if you wanted to know about it.  “If you don’t play the game, you don’t get to make the rules” is what they told us, though.

On the other hand, my friend in MN had to lie to their parish priest that they weren’t living in their new house together yet.  They claimed her fiance was still living at home until the ceremony.  If they hadn’t lied or if the parish priest had discovered them living together, the ceremony would have been off.

That’s right.  Two Catholic kids, parish members both, would have been denied a wedding b/c no church is required to provide the ceremony unless you jump through their hoops.

I church-shopped b/c my cousin has a beautiful soprano voice and I wanted her to sing.  Some of the more ‘popular’ churches use that popularity as a cudgel to insist you use their musicians and forbid using anyone else.  Seriously, WTF?  It’s my wedding, and the music isn’t a ritual requirement.

Churches are private.  They do not serve the public, so they aren’t required to serve everyone.  They can make anyone, including their own membership, jump through any number of hoops.  Legalizing marriage equality isn’t going to change that.

EVERYONE gets a civil marriage license.  We joked with our priest that we could sign the document 2 days ahead of time, and then just have the ceremony, but then we did it the right way:  Have the sacrament, then go and sign the document that makes it legal.

Allowing everyone the right to form a family unit doesn’t infringe on any church.  It’s more bullshit from assholes who want a theocracy b/c they don’t trust themselves to be able to fight temptation.

Jesse, you understate the buncombe buffoonery of our opponents’ case, by more than half.

No governmental power has the power to compel any religious institution to perform a religious rite, period.  The right of any religious institution NOT to marry, ordain, baptize, circumcise, confirm, bat mitzvah, call to the Torah, give Communion, administer the Sacrament of the Sick, etc., anyone/to anyone, or to excommunicate anyone, etc., is absolutely clear.  To force such an institution to act in violation of their beliefs, or even consistently with their beliefs, would violate multiple provisions of the First Amendment: free exercise of religion, freedom of assembly (which, analogously to its counterpart free exercise, include the freedom NOT to assemble/associate), freedom of speech. 

A case can be made that when the state compels a religious rite, it is in fact committing an establishment of religion as well, insofar as the state reaches inside the church/whatever and compels its movement like a hand in a glove.  In other words, when the state compels a Catholic church to marry two men, it is not only denying the free exercise, etc., of that church, but it is implicitly making that church an apparatus of the state with approval of that marriage ceremony (which the state would arrogate onto itself to compel.)

Of course, this is all law school “asshole bingo” discussion here, because it would never, never fucking happen.  People who believe Maggie Gallagher for one second are the sorts of people whom the late Steve Gilliard (may we never forget him) identified accurately as “stupid motherfuckers.”

Caren:  “Churches are private.  They do not serve the public, so they aren’t required to serve everyone.  They can make anyone, including their own membership, jump through any number of hoops.  Legalizing marriage equality isn’t going to change that. “

Right, but this could affect some quasi-religious institutions that aren’t churches if they have a hall they rent out for weddings or wedding receptions.  If an organization is set up as a non-profit organization, they could either lose their tax-free status, or have their facility open to all weddings, gay or straight.

The Knights of Columbus in Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada, was embroiled in such a controversy.  They are one of many non-profit organizations that are associated with religious organizations (in this case the Catholic Church).

So some religious groups do have something to lose, because they are essentially running organizations that are not explicitly churches or places of worship, but convey those values, and benefit from the tax-free status of those organizations. 

I think it’s appropriate that they should lose tax-exempt status if they discriminate on such a basis, since their service to the community shouldn’t stop at the feet of a gay or lesbian couple.  They don’t think so.