I can actually buy that. I think that gay marriage is icky and a sham, but as long as the state differentiates between the institution of marriage as a religious practice, and civil unions as a legal construct, I have don't have too much difficulty with it because I believe in the smallest possible of governments. If government keeps its nose out of marriage, that's about a half million fewer bureaucrats the taxpayer has to support.cb1000rider wrote:Want a marriage policy that we call can agree on?
Marriage is a religious institution. One of the basic founding principles of our country is separation of church and state.
The government should get out of the marriage business. If they want to regulate something, they can regulate civil unions.
Churches get to regulate marriage and via that means, they can include or exclude whomever they want per moral doctrine.
Rights granted to citizens should not be predicated on marriage. They should be predicated on civil union. To do anything else results in some form of inequality and discrimination.
However, I seriously doubt that Obama will be able to keep his hands off the churches. He promised that religious institutions who had a moral objection to paying for abortion would not have to, and then he turned right around and sicced his AG and HHS Sec. on the Roman Catholic Church for not wanting to pay for insurance that included abortion coverage.
I absolutely predict that before his term is over, he will sic the IRS on any church which will not perform gay marriage. That's his track record, and he's given me no reason to doubt him.
"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Monsieur A. Coray, 1823
"[J]udges ... should be always men of learning and experience in the laws, of exemplary morals, great patience, calmness, coolness, and attention. Their minds should not be distracted with jarring interests; they should not be dependent upon any man, or body of men."
--John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776