Homosexuality and marriage
May 11 '05
The Bottom Line If the civil aspects of marriage are separated from the religious aspects, much of the controversy surrounding the acceptability of same-sex partnerships disappears.
What are your spiritual beliefs or religious affiliations?
I have no spiritual beliefs nor religious affiliations. I am an atheist
What is your sexual orientation?
Heterosexual
How do you see your own religious/spiritual views as influencing your opinion of sexuality?
With no religious or spiritual views the question is irrelevant to me. However, I do have views about the ethics of relationships. See below.
(Required)
How do you define marriage?
What matters is not my definition of marriage, it is society's definition, which contains two threads, one necessary and one optional. The necessary thread is a compulsory civil contract. Everybody who gets married, whether it is in St Paul's Cathedral, or the tin tabernacle in a fishing village on the far northern coast of Scotland, enters into a civil contract, and it is the civil contract together with legislation and the common law that imposes the rights and obligations of the couple involved.
When I was married in 1969 I was married in a Register Office, where my wife, Janet, and I signed the marriage contract, without the involvement of religion of any kind. The marriage contract defines rights and obligations to do with the ownership of property, rights and obligations concerned with the maintenance of children, rights to property and pension in the event of the death of one spouse intestate, and so on.
I believe that all of these rights could be established without marriage, legally, by dealing with each issue in turn and agreeing an appropriate clause of a contract relevant to that issue, but the contract of marriage gives a general boilerplate-contract which saves a great deal of administration and consequent expense. The very rich usually hedge about the boilerplate with extra conditions in a pre-nuptial agreement.
In Scotland matters are slightly complicated by the category of common-law-wife. When she starts to live with you the pejorative term for your mistress is bidey-in, but when you live together as husband and wife, have children---she talks like a wife, acts like a wife---she is transformed into a common-law-wife and together you acquire many of the rights and obligations of a regularly married couple.
Many people combine a religious rite with the civil contract, and indeed many religious people place so much emphasis on the optional religious element that the legally binding civil elements seem barely relevant, but seeming is different from being.
What thoughts or reactions do you have to these two pictures?
(all completely safe for work, home, etc.)
1. http://www.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2004/03/10/ba_knight01.jpg
I suppose that this picture represents some kind of solemn religious service celebrating the pseudo-wedding of two men, though it's hard to tell if it is meant to be a christian ceremony. The chap at the back with an open-necked shirt(!) might be some sort of clergyman, but he could very well not be.
2. http://www.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2004/02/13/ba_gaywed_01_lm.jpg
This looks like a secular celebration. In Britain we have always been more tolerant of single sex relationships between women than between men. The myth is that nobody dared to explain to Queen Victoria that there were female homosexuals, as apart from intimate friends, or that if somebody did try to explain it to her, she refused to believe it; this meant that when the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which made homosexual behaviour between males illegal, received the Royal Assent, no mention was made of homosexual behaviour among women.
For myself, the wonder has always been that women are prepared to live with hairy, smelly, untidy, potentially violent creatures like men. In an attempt to imagine what it must be like, imagine the physical differences between men and women, then imagine another kind of creature that stands physically to a man, as a man stands to a woman. You get a thing much like Frankenstein's monster, only not so well dressed. If the choice was living with a creature like that, I'd certainly consider living with another man.
If I were a woman I think that living with another woman would be the only acceptable option. I am relieved that my wife doesn't think so.
How does one of Christian faith reconcile these two pictures? Is one ?right? and one ?wrong?? What reactions do you have to seeing these signs?
1. http://www.sushiesque.com/photos/boston_common_031104/dscn1373.jpg
From the time of the Romans, some unkind people have identified christianity as the self-deluding consolation of the losers. Looking at the two types in this picture you can see why reasonable people might think that.
2. http://www.sushiesque.com/photos/boston_common_031104/dscn1419.JPG
The handwriting indicates that the writer is barely literate, and probably insufficiently educated to do anything other than parrot the ideas that have been drummed into him/her under the positive reinforcement of hell and the negative reinforcement of heaven.
Why do you think the topic of homosexuality is so polarizing in religious communities?
Taking the simplifying approach of dealing with christianity: the only acceptable form of sexual behaviour for christians is sex between persons who are married together, and up until now it has been pleonastic to state sex between married persons of different sexes. Since christian marriages cannot involve two members of the same sex, homosexual sexual activity must always be sinful.
As an atheist, as far as I am concerned, anything goes, provided that the people involved give informed consent about what they choose to involve themselves in, and provided they take care to avoid harming others not directly involved. I do not believe that children are in a position to give informed consent, and therefore that sexual behaviour involving adults together with children ought not to be permitted.
I despise the trimmers. Christian teaching is unequivocal on the matter of homosexual sex. The openly practising gay clergyman is acting in defiance of the teachings of the christian church. He is treating the teachings as optional; it suits him to follow some teachings but not others. It seems to me that a person who subscribes to a religion ought to subscribe wholeheartedly, accept the limitations imposed on his freedom of action, and not pick and choose: to do so is as silly and self-deluding as I would be as an atheist, if I believed that there was an afterlife in heaven.
The teaching, until recently, of the anglicans, from whom I lapsed so long ago that I find it hard to believe I ever took them seriously, was that homosexual feelings are not in themselves sinful. You cannot help your feelings. Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides 'Today, for fun, I'm going to turn into a homosexual'. The anglicans taught that the virtuous response to homosexual feelings was abstinence. They seem to be trimming now, at least in Europe and America.
This reminds me of a joke: An unusually morose man in Hell is asked
'What's the matter with you?'
'What I'm here for isn't a sin any more.'
Should the government be in the business of defining marriage? Why or why not?
Since the primary civil function of marriage is to allow for an orderly disposition of property and social responsibility, of course the government ought to be involved. Remember that the government is subject to the will of the electorate, and cannot flout that will with impunity.
The glorious American Constitution separates the church from the state and so presently the government cannot interfere with the religious aspects of marriage.
Would you support the legalization of gay marriage?
No.
I have no objection at all to people forming longterm contractual obligations to one another covering all of the issues that are covered by the laws governing the traditional marriage contracts between a woman and a man. My objection is to the term marriage. In a society containing a vocal proportion of intolerant bigots, it seems to me unnecessarily provocative to call such contracts, entered into by two people of the same sex, marriage contracts. Call them Domestic Partnership Agreements, and nobody would give a damn about people entering into them. In fact, I do not know of any legal impediment that would prevent people from entering into Domestic Partnership contracts now.
If you answered no, what are your fears behind its legalization?
I am not frightened about the legalization of gay marriage. To me the religious element is irrelevant, and the civil element could provide an equitable way of disposing of the goods belonging to the partners. It poses no threat to me, or to my values.
In linguistic terms I have a lingering conservative feeling that the word marriage has the connotation of the joining together of a man and woman in matrimony, but I suppose that coming to terms with the changing meaning would be no more difficult than it was with the change of the use of the word gay from a synonym (more or less) for merry.
If you answered yes, what are your fears behind it remaining illegal?
The freedom of belief that is necessary to a progressive society is under threat in America. If the fundamentalists get their way and an amendment to the American constitution is passed to prohibit homosexual marriage, they will spread their attention to other areas of human activity, and impose their own stifling opinions on the rest of America. Once they bridge the gap separating church, the fundamentalist, protestant variety, from state, American society will lurch into a new dark age.
Notice that I am not arguing that fundamentalists should not be allowed to act as they see fit among themselves, but that they should not be allowed to interfere with the rest of us acting as we see fit.
Would you support government-sanctioned civil unions between homosexual couples?
Yes. See above.
Do you see any way of bridging this current divide in our country over "wedge issues" like gay marriage or abortion? Or should we even be trying?
Poor old Chazzer recently had to postpone the blessing of his union with his mistress because of the inconvenient death of the Pope. He married her in the civil ceremony, but he wasn't allowed to marry her in church because when he divorced Princess Diana he had broken indissoluble vows made before the high altar of St Paul's cathedral during his wedding. (He must be kicking himself for divorcing her. A widower could marry whomever
he liked in church, and for him, with the the full pomp of the state.)
Chazzer's example ought to solve the problem of gay marriage. A civil contractual arrangement for the homosexual couple sorts out issues of property. The blessing by a complaisant clergyman gives some kind of religious gloss for the partners, and everybody lives no more unhappily ever after than they would have done without the mummery. In this arrangement the words gay marriage are never mentioned, and the bigots would not have noticed what was going on under their noses.
Instead of using common sense, the gay-marriage-lobby decided to sharpen a stick, harden it up in the fire of publicity and stick it into the eye of the increasingly powerful fundamentalist lobby. It is hard to think of a more foolish and counter-productive action.
What do you see America's view of homosexuality and gay marriage being in 100 years from today? What will those future Americans think of us in 2005, as they look back?
In a hundred years time---Dincha know?---the righteous will have been long gone, swept up in the Rapture, leaving the rest of us to fornicate ourselves into insanity until the trumpet shall sound. Nobody will marry then.
Final thoughts
Once again we see the irrationalities of religion being invoked to frustrate the pursuit of happiness.
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Epinions.com ID:
johngo
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Member: John Ollason
Location: Scotland
Reviews written: 83
Trusted by: 62 members
About Me:
I used to work at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, a lecturer in ecology.
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