Re: Anti-gay-marriage amendment

Rob Perkins wrote:
David Bowie wrote:

Now, if the Massachusetts et al. experiment turns out to be rather
horrific in its results, then there's evidence that a radical change
needs to be made, and the experiment needs to be shut down, and even
reversed. But why shut down the experiment before the evidence is in?

By precisely the same token, David, why expand the experiment before the
evidence is in?

I'm surprised the clarification is necessary, given my description of my
POV, but such an expansion is not what *i*'m in support of. (As a
perhaps necessary clarification, i think there's danger in allowing
regulatory patchworks to go on for too long--and i'm not putting a time
limit on that, so don't ask--but i think regulatory patchworks are not
necessarily a Bad Thing.)

<snip mild strawman>

Now, if the church and its allies started to bring out *theological*
arguments against allowing gay marriage, that's another thing entirely.

I wonder aloud here why you wouldn't think the Proclamation on the
Family was not a theological argument, where being in favor of hetero
marriage under strictures much more constraining than currently
permitted, doesn't at least imply theological opposition to gay marriage.

I'll admit i wasn't clear in what i wrote earlier. I quite understand
why the church would refuse to recognize same-sex marriages, and i'm
cool with that. However, i don't see what the theological grounds would
be for wanting the church's self-restriction[1] expanded to the wider
group. I'm not nearly as radical on this as Absalom (no, not even *that*
close), but it *is* the case that i get just as worried when religions
start to try to restrict secular governments as i do when secular
governments start to try to restrict religions.

Further, in my own positioning on the issue I can't imagine not
supposing that prophets, seers, and revelators, having pointed the whole
Church in this particular direction, don't have perhaps a prophetic or
sight-based perspective on the matter which I don't...

I see it as parallel to the end of prohibition, myself. There, the
church took a political position that was in line with its settled
doctrine and practice, but being on the losing end of that fight did
absolutely nothing to restrict the church's practice. Were they right,
as prophets? Almost certainly. Was it an end of the world sort of thing?
Certainly not.

...Perhaps the
position is entirely pragmatic on their part, in seeing that the
legalization of gay marriage really would mean the loss of privilege for
the Church, under interpreted law?

If this is the case, i certainly wish they'd say so--then, at least,
we'd know *why* we're arguing about all this!

Rob, who thinks he knows what might happen if the Church lost the legal
right to solemnize marriages

We wouldn't have a difference between sealing practices in the US and in
Germany?

(Yeah, i know, i replied to a tagline. Bad David, no biscuit, and all that.)

FWIW, to offer my personal leanings here, i'm a (relativeely
far-)left-wing libertarian--an endangered species in the US, but not all
that terribly uncommon in other western democracies. That may help
clarify the lens i'm viewing this through.

[1] For those definitions of "self" which include God, but that'd be too
hard to put into a single hyphenated noun.

David, <place something here that people will just *have* to reply to>
--
David Bowie http://pmpkn.net/lx
Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

.

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