The future of marriage

I remember reading that in the coffee shop earlier this week and I surmised no such thing. I think my first thought was of divorcees (since I meet a lot of them) and then the rest.I think you are exhibiting signs of paranoia as suggested in an earlier post.

So hoot you agree with me in:
Message 259Yes?

Hoot agreed upthread here (or another thread) with replacing the word "marriage" with "civil union" e v e r y w h e r e and extending CU to homosexual unions. He has agreed to give equality to all on this issue.He has agreed to allow anyone to define marriage in anyway they want.I think that is reasonably open minded. It means that:1) Same sex unions are treated under law identically to all unions.2) Same sex couples can get married and call their union marriage just as much as anyone else.Of course, most of the anti-same-sex marriage crowd will NOT agree with this. They would go ballistic since it also utterly removes any over all meaning to the term "marriage". Pretty much any 7 person organization could decide to define "marriage" as they see fit and issue certificates of marriage. These certificates of marriage would have exactly the same meaning and strength as all certificates of marriage issued by any current church; large and small; that is not much.

Why aren't anti-gay-marriage putting forward this idea in droves?Do you really think more than a tiny fraction of anti-same-sex-marriage people would support this for a second?

I thought you liked my proposal which would utterly change the meaning of marriage and, while doing that, also strip it of any content that laws give it now?????

But I thought you'd already agreed to change the meaning of marriage? And allow same-sexes to get "married" in the bargin.Could you explain your position again?

Now that there is a bit of agreement by some representatives of both sides of the argument maybe we can consider the next step.That is implementation. In the real world to do what seems simple; change or override all laws so "marriage" really means "civil union" in all legal contexts and then remove some restrictions on CUs isn't so simple.One can bet that it would take the passage of individual bills by at least each state or at least a long process of getting the issue to the supreme court.In the meantime, the anti's would be going beserk. The other choice we were discussing preserves the old meanings of marriage and adds a bit too it. The word "marriage" is still protected by legal definitions; just not as tightly as some want it to be.Now we have decided to remove any over all meaning to the word marriage. Couples wanting to "civil unite" would do that for legal protection of each other and children. Then they would, if they choose, go for a xxxxx-marriage. You would always have to add a hypenated modifier in front. It might be a roman catholic-marriage, a pentacostal-marriage, an anglican-reform-marriage or an anglican-oldstyle-marriage (those last after the schism is complete in the Anglican church). It might also be a church of san francisco-marriage (which only allows same-sex marriages) or any number of other xxxxx-marriages.This would, I'm guessing, NOT be acceptable to the anti-same-sexers who are not as open minded as Hoot Mon is and represent somewhere just over 99.3% of all of them I would think.Here in Canada, we just changed some federal law (it seems the definition of marriage is federal here) and that was it. It was done. No changing of wording in any statues of the provinces which do control some aspects of the process of getting married.We've had, we think, the last look at the issue last fall and our most conservative party seems to have done enough to look like they kept a promise to the more right wing voters and has now declared the issue settled. There is, I'm pretty sure, zero chance of changing it back.My guess is that what the US would call the "religious right" is, in Canada becoming more noisy and less influential as time goes on. It appears that some fraction of the noise is generated by US religious groups injecting their noses into our business. In this way they do generate a bit of noise and attention and also generate more backlash against their ideas by the moderate majority of Canadians.(excuse me if I'm feeling a big smug here and, dare I say? "holier" than thou )