Pope weighs into gay marriage row

[Bevois]

Why is the opinion of the head of the worlds largest paedophile organisation important?

In the USA where there has been the worst scandals, a young person is far more likely to be sexually abused by a state school teacher than a Catholic priest. You don't hear about this because special laws were passed to prevent abused pupils from suing the education authorities whereas the Catholic Church has no such privileges. All that is happening is that the Catholic Church is becoming more and more like every other secular institution instead of being a beacon of light to the world.

[Higher]

You are pronounced married <--Married in the traditional sense.
You sign the certificate in front of witnesses <--legal contract
Sex <--Traditional.
Certificate is filed <--legal (officially married).

Wrong! You are pronounced "man and wife" but the marriage is not consummated until the "marital act" has been completed. Until that time the marriage can be annulled, which means that it was never brought to completion and in fact was never marriage. That is why you can divorce your partner and marry another without the crime of bigamy if the marriage was not consummated. I speak here in traditional terms, obviously the state can and has redefined marriage but the question was with regard specifically to consummation in church, which implies a traditional theological understanding. The Church of England was formed to get round that anyway for King Henry, so you would have to ask Canterbury himself what his opinion is. Anglicans fudge the issue and allow priests to either agree to marry divorcees or refuse to, according to their own personal conviction.

[Rebirth]

the state can and has redefined marriage

Which means I am not wrong.

[Higher]

Which means I am not wrong.

OK fine, just dont try to consummate the marriage in the church.

[goldberry]

The National Secular Society responds


Confrontation over gay marriage could change the relationship between religion and the state

Posted: Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:26 by Terry Sanderson
It's happening all around the world. An increasingly politicised Catholic Church is manufacturing confrontations with governments in an effort to increase its influence and revitalise its dwindling flocks.
It is clear from what the Pope has been saying over the past five years that he intends to return Catholicism to what he sees as its rightful place in the heart of Government.
In America, a confrontation with the Obama administration over contraception coincided with the Republican presidential candidate race. Two of the presidential candidates are Catholic and they made full use of the opportunity to present the Obama health insurance policy as "a war on religion". They were playing to the religious right's gallery, making it one hell of a bruising battle.
In Britain, a similar tactic is being played out over gay marriage. The Catholic Church has alighted on this issue as its means of challenging the Government, flexing its muscles and attempting to pressurise a change of direction.
If Mr Cameron yields to this agitation, it will be seen as a demonstration of the Church's power and it will lead to many other regressive demands that politicians will be reluctant to resist. Abortion is the next issue waiting in the wings.
If the Prime Minister stands firm against this present battering, it is the Church that will be badly damaged.
The Catholic hierarchy has tried this tactic before over gay couples accessing Catholic adoption agencies. When the previous government ruled that equality laws really were equality laws and there was no let-out for the Catholic Church, the clerical hierarchy geared up for a major face off with parliament.
But it was to no avail. Despite an unpleasant, sometimes brutish campaign, it lost that battle. Now it is coming back with a challenge over gay marriage.
The language that is being employed, the angry rhetoric that is flying from cardinal's palaces and archbishops lairs, is overblown, bordering on the hysterical. People – Catholics included - are repelled by the nastiness of it, the unnecessary vehemence that is directed at people who, perhaps, they know and love.
Cardinal O'Brien's stupid comparisons with slavery and his incoherent attempts to suggest that heterosexual marriage will be destroyed if gay people have the same rights, do him no favours. The backlash against his utterances has been immediate and almost unanimous. This kind of bigotry is seen by most people as crude and like something from a different era.
Now we have Archbishop Vincent Nichols issuing a letter to all Catholics, to be read out at Mass this Sunday that asks them to support the Church in its campaign to thwart the right of gay people to enjoy civil marriage (that's civil marriage, nothing to do with churches).
It is difficult to know how this will be received, but if opinion polls are anything to go by, the average Catholic in the pew does not share the Vatican's antipathy towards rights for gay people. Few of them will want to take active steps to deny their fellow citizens the right that they enjoy (or not, of course, depending on the state of their marriage).
They know that the answer is: If you don't like gay marriage, don't enter into one. Just as they would say: If you don't like strawberry ice cream, choose vanilla.
But the Church has another agenda. It wants its doctrines written into law so that everyone must observe them. The Catholic Church has failed in its attempts to evangelise the nation, so it will try to force it into Catholicism through legislation.
In many ways there is more at stake here than gay marriage. This is the Catholic Church trying to bully its way into political power through lobbying by intimidation and emotional blackmail. It has many allies on the Conservative back benches.
And now we have a rapidly organising religious right emerging in Britain that will be giving all the support it can to overturn the plans for gay marriage, providing another echo of what is happening in the United States.
Religion is trying to be resurgent in this country. We've been able to laugh at it up until now. But the time has come for us to take it seriously and put up a resistance.
If we don't we will soon feel the impact in our day to day lives.

http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/20...-and-the-state

This is interesting because "secular" cancels out "religious" and so the secular society and opinion actually has no business telling the religious sector what to do and shouldn't have any jurisdiction over Church law, unless the Church is committing crimes against the law of the land. The Christian religion is against homosexuality and so is Islam and Judaism. I don't know what other religions believe about it but the three religions that influence massive numbers of people on earth are all doctrinally against it and see it as a sin and an abomination of God's will.

I would argue that if the Church doesn't wish to marry gay people in its marriage ceremony then the Church should have the right to refuse to allow this. If gay marriage is a civil ceremony and therefore legal then a religious view is irrelevant and so is the approval of a priesthood that basically doesn't approve. The gay couple can be married in a civil ceremony as increasing numbers of heterosexual people are today. I think the secular argument for interference in religious matters is simply an opportunity on the part of the former to further reduce the significance of the latter, understandably, as they are rivals. But in terms of a just way of dealing with this, one should allow civil ceremonies and make gay marriages legal and leave the religious matters and ceremonies to the Church. There are sometimes breakaway sects who agree to rewrite some church canons and marry gay people in the eyes of God. That, too, would be their affair as independent bodies of the religion as such. It does flout the authority of the main branch to be the ultimate theocratic opinion but this will happen and the mainstream churches of all denominations will find this occurring as more people begin to create systems that reflect the needs of their evolving world views.

Ultimately, it depends on the individuals concerned. Are they more interested in being married in a Church than they are in just being married per se? God and religion are a personal matter and so they can always dedicate themselves to one another in the eyes of any God they choose privately. The idea that this has to be forced on society as a whole and made law so that to transgress it is a crime is fascist. It also entrenches the issue instead of solving it. People don't realise that they are often being asked to exchange one kind of authorial control for another and that actual freedom is not part of the deal. Even though it is said to be the objective. Invariably the objective is control by another power.

[longjohn]

What a shock, Gaz finds another conspiracy.

At least the Pope is still singing from the same hymn sheet as the rest of us.

[Bevois]

But in terms of a just way of dealing with this, one should allow civil ceremonies and make gay marriages legal and leave the religious matters and ceremonies to the Church.

If the state was neutral about marriage (and for the common good of society, I do not believe it should be) and confined itself to an enabling role, it would not only have to recognise the rights of gays to marry, but also permit Muslims to have four wives at any one time and more crucially, it would also have to uphold the Catholic Church's views on marriage and not allow divorce for those who marry in a Catholic Church.

As it has no intention of doing the latter, one must conclude that the true motives of the gay lobby are not to uphold marriage but to bring into ridicule in order to destroy the institution of marriage.

[Bevois]

... but I dont like it when the church tries to tell us what our laws should be. We had a Reformation to put a stop to all that. Its none of the pope's business.

I thought the Reformation was about an obese, ginger Welshman telling us what our laws should be - if the English people had been given a vote on the issue England would have remained a Catholic country.

[goldberry]

If the state was neutral about marriage (and for the common good of society, I do not believe it should be) and confined itself to an enabling role, it would not only have to recognise the rights of gays to marry, but also permit Muslims to have four wives at any one time and more crucially, it would also have to uphold the Catholic Church's views on marriage and not allow divorce for those who marry in a Catholic Church.

As it has no intention of doing the latter, one must conclude that the true motives of the gay lobby are not to uphold marriage but to bring into ridicule in order to destroy the institution of marriage.

Marriage isn't an institution it is merely a contract betgween two people who claim they will stay together till one of them dies. People can do this without God or the State but need protection for any children born to both partners or adopted by them and for various other shared material interests in the alliance. Marriage has a great deal of mythology attached to it. It is in effect a decision on the part of two entities to do certain things in their mutual interest and in the interests of their children or dependents. How this is dressed up culturally makes a difference to how people react emotionally to it but in essence it is a declaration under law to become a special sort of unit and to gain privileges or protection thereby for specific reasons and purposes. Because marriage was institutionalised divorce became demonised. The future of secular humanity will no doubt witness far less stigmatised situations and therefore more just unions and dissolutions. Religious attitudes will by their very nature always remain rather bigoted on issues claimed to pertain to "God". Animals don't have these problems because they have no institutions. Humans have institutionalised themselves and used deity as the progenitor of all this unhappiness and injustice in order to effect control over individuals and groups.

[Bevois]

Humans have institutionalised themselves and used deity as the progenitor of all this unhappiness and injustice in order to effect control over individuals and groups.

If people followed Catholic teaching there would be far less unhappiness and injustice in the world. There are loads of statistics/surveys showing that divorce has huge negative consequences not just for the children but for the divorcing couple as well. And I keep saying the government policies are far from being neutral but are deliberately anti-Christian.
Most divorces are initiated by women but they only do so because they know the government will give them the children, give them a free meal ticket for life - either at the husbands or the taxpayers expenses. If a woman wanting a divorce knew that she would not be able to take the children, that she would have to fend for herself, then 90% of divorces would never happen.

Heres another example of the anti-Christianity of the government. The British Airlines woman who got sacked for wearing a cross to work, the government is actively opposing her case in the European Court of Human Rights. If it was neutral it would accept whatever verdict the law courts reached without trying to influence the outcome.