{"id":5767,"date":"2012-05-10T11:35:08","date_gmt":"2012-05-10T18:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=5767"},"modified":"2012-05-10T09:31:27","modified_gmt":"2012-05-10T16:31:27","slug":"thoughts-on-gay-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=5767","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Gay Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-4951\" title=\"userpic=characture\" src=\"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/userpiccharacture.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"97\" height=\"98\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"10\" vspace=\"10\" \/>With President Obama&#8217;s announcement yesterday and the North Carolina vote the day before, the subject of gay marriage has been in the news. You can find <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/politics\/topoftheticket\/la-na-tt-obama-gay-marriage-20120509,0,5472740.story\">a good analysis of it here<\/a>. My thoughts, essentially, are &#8220;it&#8217;s about time&#8221; and &#8220;what&#8217;s the fuss about, anyway&#8221;. I thought I would take a few minutes during lunch to elaborate on this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The government, in general, has no business dictating what are legal marriages. That goes for &#8220;traditional&#8221; as well as whatever &#8220;non-traditional&#8221; groupings you can think of. Essentially, that is the government intruding into religious space. However&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Given that the government does recognize such &#8220;personal corporate entities&#8221; (for lack of a better term) for the purposes of visitation, inheritance, etc., that recognition must reflect the attitude of &#8220;equal under the law&#8221;. That means interracial, interreligious, and samesex must be accepted. If a group files to be recognized by the state, it should be recognized (and yes, I do think there are some groups that should be prohibited, primarily those involving &#8220;below the age of legal consent&#8221; or &#8220;incapable of legal consent&#8221;&#8211;that is, children and animals).<\/li>\n<li>Government recognition does not mandate religious recognition, or what is taught in religious schools. The government can&#8217;t tell religious leaders they must participate in any ceremony, or that they have to&#8211;from the point of view of what a church accepts&#8211;accept a particular view. The government can only have a say for those areas where the government provides funds: thus if a church provides a community service funded by the government, that community service must be &#8220;equal under the law&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>[Caveat 1: Now, this might open the can of worms of whether IRS exemptions for churches are government funding. They might be, and arguably, if a church wants to have that exemption, they must recognize same-sex marriages. You might argue that this would make churches suffer. Well, churches have always suffered for the sake of what is &#8220;morally right&#8221;. But I&#8217;ll agree that this is a muddy water, and I&#8217;d be equally happy with looking the other way on this.]<\/li>\n<li>[Caveat 2: Yes, this extends to abortion as well. The right to abortion should be legal&#8211;to do anything else is to have the government impose one religious view on those with a different religious view. Don&#8217;t want to offer abortions? Fine. You don&#8217;t have to take government funds.]<\/li>\n<li>However, the linked article is correct when this is called a cultural war. There are two clear camps: those who believe that the government should not be dictating morals based on a specific religious creed, and those that believe that they have to impose their religious beliefs on those they view as non- or lax-believers so that they will have a better share in the world-to-come. I think the outcome of this &#8220;war&#8221; will truly dictate the future of this great nation, and determine whether it will hold true to its founding ideals as a place where minority religions and groups are free.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those are my thoughts. What are yours?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With President Obama&#8217;s announcement yesterday and the North Carolina vote the day before, the subject of gay marriage has been in the news. You can find a good analysis of it here. My thoughts, essentially, are &#8220;it&#8217;s about time&#8221; and &#8220;what&#8217;s the fuss about, anyway&#8221;. I thought I would take a few minutes during lunch <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=5767\">Read More &#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,36],"tags":[217],"class_list":["post-5767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-chum","category-rant","tag-religious-right-are-wrong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5767"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5769,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5767\/revisions\/5769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}