No, it's not fair to say that. I'd consider myself liberal and I see marriage as an agreement between two people who love each other to spend the rest of their lives together. Unless you consider "the traditional idea of marriage" to be something totally different from that.
If anything, liberals are less hung up on the details - like traditional marriage meaning 1 man and 1 woman, or that it must necessarily revolve around procreation (many couples get married who are infertile or who just don't desire children). But the basic idea behind it is love and a mutual desire for lifelong companionship either way. That's why we see same-sex marriage as such an important cause - it's allowing people who love each other and want to commit to each other the opportunity to have the same thing that different-sex couples have had forever.
Well said. The right to marry whom you choose is so fundamental to the pursuit of happiness that discrimination against this right needs to have much more justification than, say, prohibiting someone from buying a 20 ounce Coke.
The MN star newspaper had links to live coverage of the SS marriage debate in the MN senate. I was impressed how level headed and common sensed most of these politicians were. Naturally, most republicans were against passing SS marriage. The final tally listed each and their vote. Most all republicans listed, and next to their name "N". And for democrats "Y". Which made me wonder WTF is wrong with republicans anyway??
I know darn well most republicans could care less if the two guys next door hold a marriage license. For it is of absolutely no concern to anyone except the two married people involved.
Just the same as with YOUR, or anyone else's marriage. No one had to "approve" that most private part of your life, now did they?
And if others totally unknown to you were to stick their big nose in your private business, I truly doubt you would just sit there unconcerned.
But getting back to the MN senate, as to marriage and religion, one senator summed it up case closed.
What he said was, when two people wish to apply for a marriage license what is the first requirement? Visiting city hall for that application.
Not your church!
Not your religious organization!
Not your place of worship!
You visit a government institution for your marriage license.
And there you have it. In plane simple terms.
The separation between church and state.
And it is the state that hands out that marriage license. PERIOD!!! Case closed.
Two things come to mind. First, homosexuality is mainstream, out in the open. Whatever societal harm may lie in open homosexuality is already here; we're literally arguing against the aspects of a homosexual relationship that are without question beneficial to society. Homosexuals will be openly living together and/or raising children no matter whether they can legally marry because we as a society have decided this is acceptable. No matter how strenuously one may personally oppose homosexuality, opposing same sex marriage seems to me to be bizarre. It's literally an issue where losing (for conservatives) carries no negative effects beyond a sense of ickiness, and one can easily decide just to not find homosexual marriage icky. Or at the very least, one can avoid thinking about it. Homosexuals one counters will be the same people whether or not they can legally marry, and one's own marriage will be exactly the same either way. There is simply no significant societal or personal harm in gay marriage.
The second thought is equally bizarre. We're now in the situation where some fairly mainstream Christian and Jewish sects will marry homosexuals, yet government (which supposedly cannot take a side with any religion or religious sect) prohibits gay marriage largely because of our traditional Judea-Christian society. Christianity and Judaism are literally more tolerant of gay marriage than is our government.
As far as the Republican politicians, their most staunch supporters and contributors, including roughly half of their big money contributors, are rabidly anti-gay marriage. They do not wish to give them up, because the strictest social conservatives will absolutely stay home if they are displeased. This is the equivalent of the Democrats and bills mandating treatment for babies born from botched abortions - while the individual Democrat politician probably finds the idea of a baby left to die as heinous as to most of us, the rabid pro-abortion wing of the Democrat party requires that he or she oppose such bills. Being a politician inherently requires taking stupid positions from time to time whether one believes in them or not.