Reply #41: The problem is that "marriage" isn't a religious word [View All]

[nichomachus]

It's a secular word -- and the breakdown in the separation of church and state allowed clergy to participate in marriage. Then, they thought the word was theirs.

People can go to the city hall and get "married" without a clergyman in sight. And, it's not that the civil officials have co-opted the word marriage. It's the other way around.

My biggest concern is that we get into a mode of appeasement. These people can never be appeased. In places where marriage was banned, then they went after civil unions and domestic partnerships. In Arkansas they went after heterosexual people who weren't "married."

This is a much bigger fights and we need to realize that.

You're right that they use the word "marriage" to motivate people, but that's just a temporary thing. They will find something else to motivate them with.

We need to really be looking at the core of the problem, which is the drive of these churches to establish a theocracy -- a Taliban-like rule. That's what we need to be motivating our side with, instead of thinking we can win this thing with a slight semantic change.

For the record, I used to believe the idea that I didn't care what they called it as long as I had the same rights, and was willing to give up on the word "marriage," but I've moved away from that thinking. This is a much more fundamental (pardon the expression) battle. We need to dig in somewhere. Appeasement isn't going to do it.