Wednesday, January 19, 2005
More stupidity about same-sex marriage
I realize that everybody's tired of hearing about same-sex marriage, and that something approximating my blog's entire readership agrees with me on the matter in any event, but something else just occurred to me, and when things occur to me I post them (yes, that means that things occur to me only about once every couple of days or so). If we assume that the state must define marriage (and it appears that the BNA Act didn't contemplate the state failing to do so), opposition to defining it in such a way that it includes same-sex couplings seems to be predicated on the belief that marriage is more a cultural/religious institution than it is a legal one, so the state shouldn't deviate in its definition from what God and tradition says it should be (I find this a little specious, but I can live with it for the purposes of this argument). So how do these opponents deal with the fact that Canada's largest Protestant denomination - and the second largest denomination of *any* religion in Canada - is all about same-sex marriage? Even if marriage, at the civil level, *is* fundamentally cultural/religious as opposed to legal, why should Parliament be sanctioning the Roman Catholics' version of what it is over the United Church's? Why are these advocates for religious freedom (a point on which they're quite right) not up in arms about the fact that Parliament is, effectively, denying the United Church the right to perform same-sex marriages?
Repent, ye hypocrites.
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I realize that everybody's tired of hearing about same-sex marriage, and that something approximating my blog's entire readership agrees with me on the matter in any event, but something else just occurred to me, and when things occur to me I post them (yes, that means that things occur to me only about once every couple of days or so). If we assume that the state must define marriage (and it appears that the BNA Act didn't contemplate the state failing to do so), opposition to defining it in such a way that it includes same-sex couplings seems to be predicated on the belief that marriage is more a cultural/religious institution than it is a legal one, so the state shouldn't deviate in its definition from what God and tradition says it should be (I find this a little specious, but I can live with it for the purposes of this argument). So how do these opponents deal with the fact that Canada's largest Protestant denomination - and the second largest denomination of *any* religion in Canada - is all about same-sex marriage? Even if marriage, at the civil level, *is* fundamentally cultural/religious as opposed to legal, why should Parliament be sanctioning the Roman Catholics' version of what it is over the United Church's? Why are these advocates for religious freedom (a point on which they're quite right) not up in arms about the fact that Parliament is, effectively, denying the United Church the right to perform same-sex marriages?
Repent, ye hypocrites.
