bride and groomHere’s a shocker for you. If you’ve read my various rants, you probably have me pegged as a standard issue liberal cum angry atheist with an odd (and not particularly funny, I suppose) sense of humor. But would you have guessed that I’m opposed to gay marriage? It’s true, and that’s in spite of the fact that I happen to be friendly with a couple of men who are married to each other.

OK, it’s not because I don’t think same-sex couples deserve the same things that straight couples do. It’s because I’m opposed to marriage itself, for anybody.

Maybe a bit more clarification is needed here. I’m not opposed to two people choosing to devote their lives to each other and create a family. I’m not opposed to them gathering their friends and family together to celebrate that commitment. I think it’s a lovely idea. I just don’t like the idea of governmental or religious organizations “pronouncing” marriages, as I don’t think it’s any of their business, much less something they should have any control over.

True, when you get married you expect the government to recognize the relationship and the rights and responsibilities that go with it. The way I see it, it’s simply a matter of telling the government that you’re married. The newlyweds go to a notary public, sign a declaration of marriage, get it stamped and sent to the government. In other words, they themselves have married, and that right isn’t granted by the government; it’s a right they already had without the government. The government’s only role here is to put it on record so that there won’t be any question of inheritance, next of kin, etc.

So, now New Jersey has joined Vermont and Connecticut in “allowing” same-sex couples to have “.” Yippee for them. I live in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, where we recognize that separate but equal ain’t equal.

As I understand it, the people who are opposed to same-sex marriages (and who claim it has nothing to do with hatred of gays) feel that . They don’t always come out and say that, but I haven’t heard a single opinion on that side that hasn’t come down to a religious basis one way or another. Any other claims don’t make a lot of sense, because it’s not as if marriage is an institution that has remained unchanged for millennia. It was about property for most of the last few thousand years (including counting the wife as the husband’s property, given to him by her father), along with giving men a degree of assurance that the children they were raising were really their own. And until fairly recently in most societies, you didn’t get to pick the person you married. In some societies, it’s still that way. With that in mind, and if you don’t oppose gay marriage because you oppose gays, marriage is for a man and a woman because that’s what the religious organizations want, and when you seriously discuss this with someone who holds this position, all the points outside of religious dogma just don’t stand up. But religious dogma is religious dogma. There’s no point in arguing with it. I’m certainly not in a position to tell a Catholic that I know what their god wants better than the Pope does.

I’m thinking maybe we can all compromise. What if every state turned every “marriage” into a “civil union”? What I mean by that is that if the role of the government is simply to recognize the legality of a relationship between two people, whatever their gender, then what those three states call “civil unions” are really what the rest of the states currently call “marriage,” and ought to call “civil unions.”

And what happens to “marriage?” We can leave that to the religious organizations. If you want your relationship recognized by the government, go to city hall and get yourself a civil union. If you want that relationship recognized by the church, go to the church and get a priest to bless your civil union and pronounce it a marriage. If the church doesn’t want to bless your union, they don’t have to. We have religious liberty in this country, and religious groups are free to view things however they like. Jehovah’s Witnesses, as I understand it, don’t vote, because they don’t recognize the government of the United States. They only recognize the Kingdom of Jehovah. That’s their right.

So if your church won’t bless your marriage because you’re the same gender, because one of you has been divorced, because you’re not both members of the church, or even because the voice of god told the priest that this marriage was not to be, then that’s the church’s decision. Your options are to go to a different church, to work to change your church’s mind, or just to live in a civil union. You have the same rights as any couple as far as the government is concerned, but being recognized by the church requires you to meet the church’s criteria. The government doesn’t have the right to discriminate in that way.

Seems pretty simple to me. If we’re going to separate church and state, how can the church and the state both perform the same role when it comes to relationships and families? Get the government’s blessing (or recognition, anyway) from the government, and the church’s blessing from the church. They’re two different things.

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