Really? We have not even been a country that long, and it's our laws we are talking about. Further, appeal to tradition is an especially weak argument.
An institution that has been thus established for millenia across hundreds of cultures in a certain general format, and endured in that general format for all that time, is irrelevant. Gotcha.
But there is no law saying that children must be an outcome of marriage. Therefore, from a legal standpoint, the ability to create children within the marriage is irrelevant. The number of gay people with children may surprise you, it is quite high. Further, adopting and fostering are both very much about families. If you want to argue from a family standpoint, arguing against gay marriage is hypocritical.
Gay couples do not produce children without the intervention of an outside person. Again, I'm not talking about what this couple or that couple might do, I'm talking about as a "class" of coupledom. Hetero couples can and usually do produce children. Gay couples are inherently unable to do so without assistance from outside the marriage. To me this makes it two entirely different things.
You can, but it is stupid to do it so. If it is the same thing, then the only reason to get upset about using the term marriage is personal bias. You do not want to share the term with people doing the exact same thing.
Those are not the only possible choices, nor even the only likely ones.
Because we should not tailor laws to the personal emotional reactions of people. If marriage and civil unions are the same thing before the law, then there is no logical reason to have separate categories for both
.
Maybe I should just cut to the chase here.
I haven't read the whole thread, I don't know if Blackdog has covered this, but let's get it out in the open.
The reason why most theologically-conservative Christians oppose calling same-sex unions
marriage is because we are
forbidden to do so by our religious beliefs.
Specifically, the Bible teaches that homosexual activity is a sin. Yes, in the New Testement also.
Also, the Bible teaches that marriage was originally instituted by God, and that it is a
holy institution.
In our beliefs, Gay = Sin and Marriage = Holy. We can't call something Holy Sin, that doesn't work.
In fact we are specifically warned not to. "Woe unto them who call evil good, and good evil." If we
agree to let a holy institution be used to legitimize something we believe is sin, we are ourselves committing a sin.
You're asking us to call what we consider
sin by a term we consider
holy, when we are specifically forbidden to do so. This is one of the most basic and core reasons why so many Christians cannot accept the redefinition of marriage to include homosexuality.
The only way to convince us otherwise is to persuade us that the Bible doesn't mean what it plainly says. Lotsa luck with that.
No, asking us to seperate our religious convictions from our political position won't work in most cases either. This is matter of personal spiritual conscience and something we have to live with when we try to go to sleep at night.
Some of us have, with no small amount of personal internal struggle, managed to convince ourselves that we could accept "Civil Unions" as a compromise position, since it does not apply the same word (marriage) used for holy matrimony. Do you understand that even that is difficult for many of us? Do you understand that we're
trying to find a way to compromise with you in a manner that still allows us to live with our conscience?
When you want to
insist on calling it marriage, and insist that we ought to
support it, what you're insisting on is that we
violate our conscience and our religious convictions for the sake of giving you that word.
Perhaps, in ten or twenty or forty years, you'll get to use the word "marriage" legally nationwide. If so, those like me and Blackdog will have to deal with the fact that our society and government has done something we disapprove of... not like that's anything new. :roll:
But to ask us to
support it, is to ask us to violate our own conscience and religious convictions. Do you realize what a big deal that is to people like us? You're asking us to do something that we believe God has specifically forbidden us to do.
If you attain your goal of redefining marriage, we'll have to live with the outcome... but you'll have to attain it without our support. We are not
allowed to support you.