moneypenny20

Good job we didn't have that. The husband would have struggled regardless of the fact we'd been together 12 years by then.

Dorothy

My ex and I were married for 23 years and he could never remember what year I was born in. Or my mother's proper name - he'd only ever known her by her nickname.

commonwealth

GarryP

The interesting part is how much this is likely to play into the presidential race. It's fairly certain that the throwback states will rant and rave and attempt to avoid implementing this - so it will remain an issue for at least the next year.

The far right repubs all seem to be against it (natch) with Jeb Bush & Linsey Graham(!) being the most reasonable positioned. The US populous is 60:40 in favour, but the repub base are against. Thus it could end up being the thing the first splits the GOP and gets them to select the candidate who will then lose the race.

And strangely enough, it seems to be the catholics who are being the biggest bigots over this ruling, not the evangelicals. It's the catholics who seem to want to die in a ditch to continue to exclude. And that will be fun when they are told to recognise and not discriminate between married couples. I foresee more court cases in their future.

Swerv-o

Looks like a couple of the southern states are still going to fight it - Texas, Louisiana and Tennessee. "God is the ultimate Supreme Court and he has spoken" says Rep Holt of Tennessee. FFS.

I guess the Australian Catholic Church had best get started on their letter writing - They have a huge number to send now...


S

GarryP

Yeah, the thing I've tried to get through to a few catholics is that they don't have enough good will in the public's mind to go fighting this. It has surprised me that it's them that have been the most vocal bigots after this decision was announced - you'd expect it was the "earthquakes caused by gays" baptist lot - but no.

I guess they don't like the reality that catholic schools, hospitals, charities, etc will no longer be able to discriminate.

The pope is supposed to turn up the US in september - and I can foresee a world of pain awaiting him...

keel

I can't understand how 2 men or 2 women can get married. I object to it not on religious, I'm not religious, grounds but that it is just wrong.

Marriage is between a Man and a Woman or a Woman and a Man. That's what marriage is. I've no objection to Gay people having a civil licence or what ever it's called. They should have the same legal status as a "married couple".

But I just can't get my head around them calling it a marriage. They should get a different name for it.

Not sure what that word would be though.

I'm not a homophobe as I don't fear homosexuals.

Do my views make me a Bigot?

Keel

GarryP

I think you already know the answer to that one.....

Amazulu

Until recently you weren't but now, according to the left and PC brigade/western-haters, you are

paulry

The real bigots are the LGBT movement.

keel

They're framing the "debate" as one of equality, they just want to be like "normal" people. But it is they who don't want to be normal and in fact celebrate the fact that they are not normal.
If it was about equality they would also be in favour of a Father marrying his Daughter, or Son, or any adult having a relationship with a child. These are not "normal activities". Are they saying that they are not normal but not as bad as the others I mention?

Keel

keel

Gary I don't think those were what "normal" people in the past did but I may be wrong. But this is definitely not normal practice now.

Keel

Swerv-o

I thought the third one down was Human and Cylon. Now there were some pretty nice Cylon models out there - I could probably get behind that...


S

GarryP

The point being made, and that I made before, is that the idea of 'traditional marriage' etc. is all a misunderstanding of reality. Marriage has, and continues, to change to met the needs of society.

Bible bashers tend to say that "it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve", ignoring that in the bible itself, polygamy, rape victims being forced to marry their rapist, brothers marrying wives of dead brothers, etc were all accepted (and indeed required in some cases).

The one man/one wife setup was actually inherited from the Romans, and the primary reasoning was actually due to inheritance and dynastic purposes - you wanted to be sure who was going to get the money and who was beholden to whom. The wife was property (and indeed came with property) with marriage basically a contract negotiation.

I don't think many would want 'traditional' marriage in any of those forms?

In recent decades/centuries marriage has changed and warped again, being about "a sign of love and commitment" is many people's eyes (but with a nasty contractual sting in the tail). As such, reasoning as to why gays shouldn't marry tend to look hollow and, well yes, bigoted. Someone signing on the dotted line to demonstrate 'love and commitment' might be daft, but it doesn't hurt you - so why should you object? That they can't spawn kids is probably a benefit to society, inheritances will get nabbed by the taxman anyway, and the idea of dynastic marriages is long dead.

You can make a strong case that there shouldn't really be such a thing as marriages at all. No tax advantages, and explicit contractual negotiations on the responsibilities of kids as a different matter. You can also make a strong case that religions should be explicitly removed from what is a civil process anyway. You can't make a strong case that a particular combination of sexes should be allowed, and another not.

Gordon Barlow

The original purpose of community-approved marriage was to give tribal elders the power to ensure the stability of the ruling classes. In the earliest civilisations, marriages within the nobility had to be carefully monitored to mimimise the likelihood of factional rebellions. Marriages were designed to cement alliances of families, clans and factions. Love had nothing to do with it. The serfs were, I think, generally left alone to arrange their own marriages, though rulers kept a weather eye out for suspicious alliances. Slave families were deliberately split up in order to remove any temptation to plot against their masters. It happened to the Africans in the Americas, and the provenance is an old one.

The difference with same-sex relationships was the absence of children, but the ruling classes were probably less against homosexual marriages than for the traditional form. Long ago, empires in China were largely governed by eunuchs, whose value to emperors was that they could not produce lineages to which they might owe their primary loyalties. National histories are cluttered with examples of military dynasties jostling for political power. As individual rights have, slowly and gradually, superseded community rights, the reason for the official licensing of marriages has lessened. There is no point in the custom any more, and if it were scrapped altogether, it would be no loss.

Today, some societies harbour deep suspicion of the existence of a “Pink Mafia” whose members, like those of Masonic lodges, might be loyal to each other at the expense of loyalty to the community as a whole, or to the ruling classes. Huh. Well, that kind of loyalty might indeed exist here and there, but formal gay-marriage doesn’t and wouldn’t frustrate it. I am inclined to favour states getting out of the marriage business altogether, since it doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose in the modern world. But that won't happen now, in our control-freakery "1984" world.