cutting corners
Forgive me, but I was listening to the news while in the shower. A lot of hooplah about Prop 8 in California. A guy who was interviewed said something pretty amazing, "They do not recognize a distinction between civil marriage and religious marriage." And all of a sudden it came to me so clearly (I'm probably late on this), that if we're supposed to have a secular government then we need to have secular laws and definition of unions.
There are so many bureaucratic things effected by marriage: ability to visit loved ones in the hospital, ability to adopt children, lower taxes, easier joint ownership of things, etc. And I understand that some of these (especially the children thing) overlaps with the 'family values' of religion, but for the most part these are bureaucratic, perfunctory, civic, and SECULAR issues.
The abortion conflict I can begin to understand - it's about a value of 'life' which can be argued to be a secular moral that is shared and formed by our culture/society as a whole (even atheistic heathens don't go around murdering people any more than pious religious people do). Now the parsing of the definition of abortion and of life is what gets tricky.
But I'm leaving that be. Back to the marriage thing. Why not just pass a law that changes "civil marriage" to be called "civil union" and then the churches can keep their definition of marriage? If they're so concerned with what Marriage means because of the Book then why wouldn't this solve the problem? We (?) have been fighting so long to be included in their (?) definition - why not just redefine the civil as civil and the religious, sacred, and holy as marriage.
And bam. We're done. *does the whole vertical hand slap/brushing off thing* Easy, right?
There are so many bureaucratic things effected by marriage: ability to visit loved ones in the hospital, ability to adopt children, lower taxes, easier joint ownership of things, etc. And I understand that some of these (especially the children thing) overlaps with the 'family values' of religion, but for the most part these are bureaucratic, perfunctory, civic, and SECULAR issues.
The abortion conflict I can begin to understand - it's about a value of 'life' which can be argued to be a secular moral that is shared and formed by our culture/society as a whole (even atheistic heathens don't go around murdering people any more than pious religious people do). Now the parsing of the definition of abortion and of life is what gets tricky.
But I'm leaving that be. Back to the marriage thing. Why not just pass a law that changes "civil marriage" to be called "civil union" and then the churches can keep their definition of marriage? If they're so concerned with what Marriage means because of the Book then why wouldn't this solve the problem? We (?) have been fighting so long to be included in their (?) definition - why not just redefine the civil as civil and the religious, sacred, and holy as marriage.
And bam. We're done. *does the whole vertical hand slap/brushing off thing* Easy, right?