Posted on 06/13/2010 2:38:39 PM PDT by Recovering_Democrat
Actually, there is far more historical precedent for polygamy than there is for same-sex marriage.
Unfortunately, what you think is silly is just what they argue for. There is no end to it with these people...
“Thor Heyerdahl and his wife moved to a small Pacific Island and found out how screwed up it was. They left what they had thought would be a utopia for them for a few years. Heyerdahl wrote a book about it.”
Interesting, I looked it up and it’s called “Fatu Hiva” and Thor learns a big lesson regarding turning into a nature-boy: It ain’t fun. Something that our present government is trying to do to our society, and will have the same results.
And by the way, I think he got out of there just before the Japanese started moving out - would have even been a bigger lesson for him.
Looks like the gay mafia has taken over the CATO Institute.
If people were controlled by their faith we wouldn’t need divorce courts, civil marriage or government for that matter. And if the Good Lord would just let us back into the Garden of Eden we wouldn’t need clothes!
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Puke.
And not only that, but the entire libertarian philosophy claims that self-interest by definition supersedes any moral, societal, or ethical standards. See, for instance, their stance on “consensual crime” or their willingness to support abortion as long as no one’s “liberty” is infringed upon.
Unfortunately when they start using loaded lofty terms like “equality for everyone” they leave the realm of honest debate. Of course everyone is equal in this country and everyone has the same right to marry — period. What they don’t have is the right to make new rules for marriage.
I say they are discriminating against me in California for not allowing me to live in love and happiness with a 50 caliber BMG rifle of my choosing. How dare anyone define what love is for me? I have a right to drive like every other adult, so why won’t they let me drive the way I love, in reverse on sidewalks at 80 mph?
If they want to make an argument for gay marriage they have every right to do so, but please spare us the specious “equality” argument.
Exactly so! Marriage is not an ‘individual’ right. You cannot force someone to marry you.
“If people were controlled by their faith we wouldn’t need divorce courts, civil marriage or government for that matter.”
My faith doesn’t need the government. The government doesn’t dictate who is or who isn’t married in my faith. In fact, the only way I can see that I would be forced to accept an impossibily like “gay marriage”, in contradiction to what my faith teaches, is if government is in fact involved with the religious institution of marriage and forces me to do so under law.
This is about gays using government to force others to accept something that their faith teaches them is impossible. Relying on the gov’t to protect something as important as the institution of marriage is doomed to failure. Trusting the gov’t to protect marriage has been a huge mistake, just like trusting the gov’t to do anything really important is a mistake, in my opinion.
Freegards
Speaking as an ex-Lib who moved right THROUGH libertarianism I must remind you that libertarians are NOT conservatives. The are generally as likely to support leftoids as they are us.
The fellows at the Libertarian Party stink tank, the Cato Institute, are following Party lines ver batim.
Homosexuality, abortion, pornography, prostitution, recreational drugs, open borders, and "Free Trade", they got it all.
Their platform says it all, starting with their preamble: "As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others." Look at the attached link and see if God is mentioned anywhere in it. You'll then realize that their preamble should say "As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others, including God's."
Link to LP Platform
You're wise to stick with the CONSERVATIVE Heritage Foundation and Acton Institute.
I'm not sure I totally buy that argument. Almost all societies place boundaries on sexual activity and there are other civilizations that shared the values of marriage that you classify as being initiated by the Jews. The Ancient Egyptians, for instance, had a very defined idea of the nature of marriage as did the Romans. In fact, the Romans had a strong sense of the importance of the nature of marriage and monogamy, from which the Christian Church took a huge influence.
Christian marriage is probably as much influenced by Roman ideas of marriage, as it was by Jewish ideas. (Monogamy is one of the Roman marriage values that comes out really strongly in Christianity. The Romans required monogamy by law and spread this and other customs around with the legal framework of the Roman Empire. In fact, several aspects of Roman marriage customs still survive in modern wedding ceremonies...The wedding ring, for instance, originates from a Roman custom of putting an iron ring on the middle finger of the left hand. It was believed that the artery/nerve there controlled the passions of the heart, and therefore, the iron ring on the finger symbolically put the passions of the wife in chains to the husband.)
In any case, it is true that before Rome was Christian, it had a moral collapse in the realm of sexuality. During this crisis, which occurred both in the Late Republic and apparently again in the Roman Empire, Rome appears to have abandoned its traditional values of marriage that it had originally espoused, which helped lead to a lot of the debauchery and social breakdown.
Regardless, however, prior to the modern age, the idea of marriage in the West was primarily a Christian one which descended from a mixture of Roman, Jewish, uniquely Christian, and even medieval Germanic sources. So I don't think it is fair to say that the Jews initiated this view of marriage, because many of our views on marriage were held by more than just the Jews, and many of the ideas the Jews held were already held by other civilizations as well. By the way, one of the reasons that there is so much Roman influence on our ideas of marriage is because most of our societies marriage values come from the Christian Church which was merged with the Roman Government in the fourth century A.D.
You are right. It hasn’t been about tolerance or even acceptance for a long time. Now it is about the forced celebration of homosexuality. And it will be just that, as everything down to grade school text books will be rewritten to reflect the expanded view of marriage that our judicial masters will soon impose upon us.
That is the nuclear option (actually favored by some libertarians); don’t have any state recognition of marriage at all.
While I completely reject the idea that the state must recognize gay unions if it recognizes traditional marriage (you can only arrive at that with a ‘living Constitution’ view), I would probably prefer no recognition of any kind for any unions to having to bow down before yet another outrage from the Sup Court. Though if that happened, the Supremes would probably come back and say the state must recognize marriages.
I think the difference is that Jews and Christians believe that women are equal before God, always. That “man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” as it says in Genesis.
That depends on what you mean by "Jews and Christians believe that women are equal before God." You probably need to define what the phrase "equal before God" means. Equal in what? The word equal is definitely a loaded word these days and one must be very clear what they mean when they use it. (You are probably right, but your statement may be interpreted in different ways.) The sentiment expressed in the above statement may also be anachronistic, taking the values of today as the values of long ago.
The people who make up Judaism and Christianity today are very,very culturally different than the ones who lived 2000 years ago. Ancient Judaism did not believe that men and women share the same social rights and responsibilities before God, even if they did believe that men and women were equally valued by God. (If you know of any source, that explicitly states that women and men are equally valued by God, please let me know, I think it would be pretty interesting. The man and woman becoming one flesh scripture that you mentioned does not say that man and woman are equal, just that the woman and the man are one flesh...man was apparently dominant in this relationship in the minds of the ancients. This is why Jewish men were allowed to divorce their wives unilaterally, but not the other way around. Early Christians also inherited these views, as St. Paul makes very clear in several of his epistles when he calls man the head of the woman etc.
Christianity also did not believe that men and women shared the same social roles and responsibilities as men. Nevertheless, Christianity elevated the status of women beyond what other religions had done, because Christianity uniquely said that marriage was indissoluble. Therefore, a man could not cast off his wife on a whim. Also Christianity completely rejected polygamy, which elevated woman's social status. Despite these difference,however, men and women still did not have the exact same social rights and responsibilities though there was a certain degree of overlap since most of the commandments of God apply equally to men and women.
Giving different roles, expectations, and responsibilities to men and women means by definition that men and women are some how different from each other and therefore are not equal in some ways. Men and women are not equal, they are complementary would be a better way of describing man and woman's relationship with each other. (After all, the word equal means the "same" and we all know that men and women are not exactly the same). However, even if men and women have different roles, responsibilities, etc. this does not mean that God values men and women any differently than each other, and I think that it is obvious that women were esteemed in early Christianity as being "precious to God", and equally precious at that, though I don't know if the word "equal" is ever explicitly used in any ancient texts to say this.
Oh, how the hate drips from those words...why just one person? Why limit it to the same race or species even? That would be perfect equality, where every one can marry whatever person/animal/object they wish to. /s
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