The passing of proposition eight, the repeal of the legal right of gay couples to marry in California, reminds me that America is indeed a foreign country to me. I just came across this brilliant Keith Olberman piece on it.
The passing of proposition eight, the repeal of the legal right of gay couples to marry in California, reminds me that America is indeed a foreign country to me. I just came across this brilliant Keith Olberman piece on it.
sixtysecondview.blog 
Why is America so foreign? The UK does not recognise gay *marriage* in its state’s religious canon law. It recognises Civil Partnership, but does not call it *marriage*.
Olbermann I think, thanks to YouTube, is one of the important ENG-lang thought-leaders of our age (whose reach is far beyond the grasp of MSNBC digital broadcast). But he is not Moses.
The issue here is how one perceives ‘marriage’. And some Christians – even gay ones – see it as a profound and biblical definition of Christ’s *Ideal* (which, BTW, one way or another, Christians do recognise we tend all to fall short of): falling short of the Ideal is human and neither gay not straight.
Noting, of course, that atheists, in western secular societies, can be quite Nazi (sic) about preserving the rights to opinion of the religious; being against gay *marriage* is not necessarily anti-gay. It just puts the *Ideal* (man+woman-in-matrimony+children) in a special place.
A truly liberal society should give equal legal rights to life partners, as a matter of civil law. The UK does. Most US states do.
That is not the same as ordering faiths to re-write their religious texts.
Marriage is, therefore, a theological issue state law should not try to replicate or overwrite.
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Stephen,
According to Wikipedia: Marriage is a social, religious, spiritual, or legal union of individuals. This union may also be called matrimony, while the ceremony that marks its beginning is usually called a wedding and the married status created is sometimes called wedlock.
So the legal is part of it.
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