Monday, August 04, 2003

Every rant against same-sex marriage seems to be a personal affront. I want to get married one day. I do have a candidate in mind, and we've already established that we do not want to produce children, and we do not want our relationship to undergo any religious consecration. But it is very very very important to me, for reasons that I can't yet completely articulate, that our union be called a marriage. Every time I hear people ranting about how marriage should only apply to a religiously consecrated union whose purpose is to produce children, it feels almost like hate speech.

And I'm very lucky - the candidate I have in mind happens to be of the opposite sex! I can only imagine how this feels for people who are marrying someone of the same sex!

For those who say that only religiously consecrated marriages should be called marriages and other marriages should be called "civil unions": Since you seem to want the two to be called differently, how about we call anything that involves a marriage certificate a marriage, and if it has a religious element it gets the further designation of "religious union"?

For those who are fretting over churches suddenly being required to perform same-sex marriages: are religious institutions currently required to perform marriages that they find are incompatible with their creed?

An issue that I'd like to see addressed: if, on the off-chance, the current draft bill is overturned, what do the opponents of said draft bill suggest we do about all the existing, perfectly legal, same-sex marriages? The government can't just unilaterally declare two people unmarried!

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