Gay Marriage: Our Mutual Joy

[Mark]

For me, homosexual marriage is a civil rights issue, and therefore it is one that admits no compromise. It is just the same with polygamy, polyandry and various other imaginable principles of household constitution. Persons should be free to join in whatever familial associations they desire, and the laws should be sufficiently flexible to support inheritance, shared property, medical visitation and the like, irrespective of mode of household constitution. If God exists and has strong preferences in this regard, the state can do nothing supplant his divine law. But the state can establish practical and legal institutions, whether God likes it or not, and according to republican principles, it should. It is not for the state to be the guarantor, still less the enforcer, of anyone's supposedly God-inspired notions of how people should behave. Their strong effort to establish the contrary is one of the principal evils of the Roman Church and in America, of the Conference of Catholic Bishops.

@chatpilot: "Judeo-Christian" is a conservative political construction and does not describe anything objective in American society. Nobody worships Judeo-Christ, so far as I am aware. Judaism and Christianity are two different religions, and "Judeo-Christian" is merely an attempt to create a reactionary consensus that includes members of both. When it comes to that, Islam is also strongly a religion of "the Book," in many ways more consistent and broadly inclusive than either of the others, and the only reason we do not see "Judeo-Christian-Islamic" is that Jews and conservative Christians revile Islam.