NOM wants to protect "marriage"
I sometimes get all worked up, to the point of crying, all by myself just thinking of abstractions.
I watched the coming storm NOM commercial on Youtube just now, and have read several pages of the Nationformarriage.org website, and have come to the decision that we have to remove "marriage" from our legislatures. Our society has reached an impasse regarding the definition of marriage, based on conflicting religious sentiments. To preserve freedom of religion, we need to separate the religious marriage state from its legal effects. People have a right to define marriage as between one man and one woman, but the state cannot do so without discriminating against those who define marriage otherwise. It's a problem of religion. Therefore, the government should offer civil unions only, which offer the legal protections of marriage regarding shared insurance and inheritence rules, etc., but religious institutions can offer marriages to complement the governmental union. Then a person can say to another, "I and my church don't recognize your marriage because you are two men and therefore cannot in our eyes provide the proper vehicle for child-rearing" without impinging on the others' rights. In a nation that prides itself on separating church and state, a social construct that has been defined by religious institutions can't be maintained through governmental channels without aggravating such conflicts as we now see.
On the other hand, I disagree with those who insert definitions unnaturally into our education system. A teacher has no reason take a first-grade class to a wedding. It isn't really an opportunity to learn, regardless of who is getting married or how. That is a teacher taking a political stand. Also, I wonder how explicit the 8th-grade teacher was in describing sex. As part of a unit on reproduction and sexual diseases, clarity on methods of transmission is necessary (especially with regards to prevention), but people generally figure sex stuff out by their own trial and error, and so anything beyond the clinical is unnecessary at best.
I just hate the way people get angry to the point of violence in these things. I know that certain issues are emotional and frustrating, but that's why it's all the more important to keep our heads and reason. It's why we separated church and state in the first place.
I watched the coming storm NOM commercial on Youtube just now, and have read several pages of the Nationformarriage.org website, and have come to the decision that we have to remove "marriage" from our legislatures. Our society has reached an impasse regarding the definition of marriage, based on conflicting religious sentiments. To preserve freedom of religion, we need to separate the religious marriage state from its legal effects. People have a right to define marriage as between one man and one woman, but the state cannot do so without discriminating against those who define marriage otherwise. It's a problem of religion. Therefore, the government should offer civil unions only, which offer the legal protections of marriage regarding shared insurance and inheritence rules, etc., but religious institutions can offer marriages to complement the governmental union. Then a person can say to another, "I and my church don't recognize your marriage because you are two men and therefore cannot in our eyes provide the proper vehicle for child-rearing" without impinging on the others' rights. In a nation that prides itself on separating church and state, a social construct that has been defined by religious institutions can't be maintained through governmental channels without aggravating such conflicts as we now see.
On the other hand, I disagree with those who insert definitions unnaturally into our education system. A teacher has no reason take a first-grade class to a wedding. It isn't really an opportunity to learn, regardless of who is getting married or how. That is a teacher taking a political stand. Also, I wonder how explicit the 8th-grade teacher was in describing sex. As part of a unit on reproduction and sexual diseases, clarity on methods of transmission is necessary (especially with regards to prevention), but people generally figure sex stuff out by their own trial and error, and so anything beyond the clinical is unnecessary at best.
I just hate the way people get angry to the point of violence in these things. I know that certain issues are emotional and frustrating, but that's why it's all the more important to keep our heads and reason. It's why we separated church and state in the first place.