Do you support imposing your belief system on non-believers?

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PetraG said:
Society may as well admit that secular marriage has evolved into a convenient way for adults to establish a legal relationship of mutual care and extend the institution to people who don’t even have a sexual relationship at all.
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Yes, I agree with that.

On another note and, ideally, government would be out of the marriage business altogether. Nobody should have to pay the government for a “marriage” license. People should simply get “married” within the private organization to which they belong and then they can proclaim to the world that they’re “married”, if they so choose. Others can recognize it and celebrate with them or totally ignore them. They’re free to be them and you’re free to be you. Everyone is free. That’s what I support.
 
PetraG said:
Take helmet laws, for instance. Motorcycle riders often complain that they ought to be able to choose whether or not to risk their brain cases while they’re riding. The problem is that if they crack their heads really badly on the pavement, there is no way most could ever afford to cover the cost of their care and disability. We aren’t going to let them just live with the consequences of their actions alone. That is what gives society the right to interfere, I’d say.
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Yes, that’s a fair point.

It can be argued that cigarettes should be outlawed because the costs associated with their use are often imposed on people who never smoked.
 
K9Buck said:
Yes, I agree with that.

On another note and, ideally, government would be out of the marriage business altogether. Nobody should have to pay the government for a “marriage” license. People should simply get “married” within the private organization to which they belong and then they can proclaim to the world that they’re “married”, if they so choose. Others can recognize it and celebrate with them or totally ignore them. They’re free to be them and you’re free to be you. Everyone is free. That’s what I support.
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Again: Adults who establish a permanent household together put themselves at risks that society gets to bear if things fall apart. They expect society to recognize the rights of mutual care they’re giving each other. They expect the courts to help them split their belongings fairly if things go south and to protect the property rights of the survivor if one of them dies. It is not unfair to expect people to legally register that kind of relationship and to pay a fee to do it. (It isn’t as if marriage licenses are a fraction of the cost of what setting up all those contractual expectations would be otherwise.)
 
PetraG said:
Again: Adults who establish a permanent household together put themselves at risks that society gets to bear if things fall apart. They expect society to recognize the rights of mutual care they’re giving each other. They expect the courts to help them split their belongings fairly if things go south and to protect the property rights of the survivor if one of them dies. It is not unfair to expect people to legally register that kind of relationship and to pay a fee to do it. (It isn’t as if marriage licenses are a fraction of the cost of what setting up all those contractual expectations would be otherwise.)
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I’m not arguing that courts should NOT recognize marriage, I’m simply saying that government should not be involved in the process of marriage.
 
TK421 said:
A person can very effectively (and should) argue for legal recognition and benefits of heterosexual marriages and nuclear families purely through reason.
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Sorry - I missed your edit.

Remember, too, that LGBTQ families can form without marriage. It would be next to impossible to criminalize such an arrangement, (although it’s happened unsuccessfully in the past). So you’d need to make a case as to why, by virtue of being gay, they aren’t deserving of insurance and tax, child custody, etc. benefits available to married heterosexuals.

On the pro-life issue, I agree. There’s very much a secular case against abortion.
 
K9Buck said:
Same-sex marriage affects no one else.
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It is a mistake to believe that our actions done in private do not have social ramifications. They do. We are social creatures and part of one human family.

Making “same-sex marriage” legal does impact society. It’s not just about what two guys or two girls do in the privacy of their own house. People have been doing such things behind closed doors for a long time. But then they got the courts to mandate that their relationships be publicly recognized as marriage. Not surprisingly, that has public ramifications.

Redefining marriage is going to have lasting negative effects on society as a whole. That’s because the majority of our country now has a false idea of what marriage is. They believe that marriage is just the government’s stamp of approval on a romantic relationship. But that’s not what marriage is. And marriage is something quite independent from what we want it to be.

Marriage is unitive and procreative. And as part of being procreative, it creates children. And these children have a right to be known, loved, and cared for by their mother and father—the ones who created them.

The government gets involved because it has an interest in protecting the social order. And the social order requires that these children’s rights are protected so that they might flourish.

Now, yes, there are mothers and fathers who die, who are abusive, who put their children up for adoption, etc., etc. But these exceptions only prove the rule. Children need a mother and a father to have the best chance of growing into mature adults.

So, no, it’s not about Christians weaseling their way into the bedrooms of same sex couples in order to arbitrarily impose their morality on them just because they think gay people are “icky”. Rather, the institution of marriage that has existed since the dawn of human history was completely redefined quite recently by a handful of judges and legislators and imposed upon the rest of society. If you want to be upset about a belief system being imposed on someone, that would be the better place to start.
 
K9Buck said:
I’m not arguing that courts should NOT recognize marriage, I’m simply saying that government should not be involved in the process of marriage.
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If the government ought to have to recognize it, then it isn’t a huge burden to expect people to pay a small fee to register the arrangement and to make their contract in the presence of someone who can verify for the government that no coercion was involved. This is a pretty low bar.

But yes, there are countries where the secular contract and the religious one are two entirely separate matters. I do not have a problem with that.
 
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K9Buck said:
Speak of the devil. Mississippi lawmaker wants public school students to engage in Christian prayer at school.
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Give them an opportunity? Fine. Have some Baptist tell a Catholic how to pray or have some Catholic tell a Baptist how to pray? That’s not likely to work even if we were all baptized.
 
“Secular law” strikes me as an oxymoron. From an entirely secular standpoint, there is no proven or unchanging moral foundation for the definition of what is a good, versus what is an evil.

Since man is by nature and vocation a religious being (CCC44), there is essentially no one on earth who has not been formed to some degree by one or more of various religious beliefs.
 
@blackforest

I suppose as a society becomes more secularized and hypersexualized, it becomes difficult in actual practice for the traditional recognition of marriage to have a lot of strength behind it. This is why the bishops don’t press this issue as strongly as they do abortion, because the erosion happened long before 2015. This was true even before the Supreme Court decreed like kings and queens that SSM was now legal everywhere.

But for parts of the world where divorce is less common and where there are far fewer same-sex couples that are public about it - i.e. the Philippines - the law has more weight behind in.

I do agree that laws can’t magically make a society a certain way, but they do help. Legal recognition or lack thereof means that more people will view a certain behavior positively or negatively.

edit: gosh this thread is moving fast.
 
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po18guy said:
“Secular law” strikes me as an oxymoron. From an entirely secular standpoint, there is no proven or unchanging moral foundation for the definition of what is a good, versus what is an evil.

Since man is by nature and vocation a religious being (CCC44), there is essentially no one on earth who has not been formed to some degree by one or more of various religious beliefs.
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The Catholic Church uses the word “secular” quite a lot. It simply means that it is under the domain of the civil authorities rather than ecclesial authorities. Rapidly rising economies like China and Vietnam - which are no friends of religion - are opposed to same-sex marriage because pragmatically, they realize the negative consequences of publicly endorsing it and they are aspiring to be the next leaders of the world.

Opposition to same-sex marriage isn’t (strictly speaking) a religious idea and you can form a broad coalition of people that are opposed to it, including non-religious people in some parts of the world. Pagan societies in the past might have been highly permissive of homosexuality, but they still treated a union between a man and a woman differently because they realized this was extremely important.
 
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PetraG said:
…it isn’t a huge burden to expect people to pay a small fee to register the arrangement and to make their contract in the presence of someone who can verify for the government that no coercion was involved
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I disagree that it’s necessary. Marriage is, fundamentally, a contract between two consenting adults and can be governed by the same laws that apply to contracts between people doing business. Presumably, those entering into marriage would use a notary as evidence of their agreement.
 
TK421 said:
Opposition to same-sex marriage isn’t (strictly speaking) a religious idea and you can form a broad coalition of people that are opposed to it, including non-religious people in some parts of the world.
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Likewise support of SSM isn’t a strictly secular idea and you can find support for it among many religious adherents of all faiths.
 
TK421 said:
Opposition to same-sex marriage isn’t (strictly speaking) a religious idea and you can form a broad coalition of people that are opposed to it, including non-religious people in some parts of the world.
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That’s true, of course. I posed it to Christians here who base their opposition on “moral” grounds as many cite that as the reason for their opposition.
 
Dan123 said:
Likewise support of SSM isn’t a strictly secular idea and you can find support for it among many religious adherents of all faiths.
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I am a Catholic but I am also a conservative libertarian and I don’t want our nation’s government and laws based on religious ideals. Would that describe you as well?
 
In the context of this discussion - and perhaps I was once again missing the point - essentially everyone on earth is influenced in some way by religious beliefs.
 
po18guy said:
“Secular law” strikes me as an oxymoron. From an entirely secular standpoint, there is no proven or unchanging moral foundation for the definition of what is a good, versus what is an evil.
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First not all laws deal with good and evil. The height a speed bump should be or a noise ordinance being 7pm or 8pm are irreligious but still need to be enforced even if there’s no divine guidance on the decibel limit in a subdivision after curfew. Second if you had a ‘proven’ moral foundation everyone would be Catholic. There’s a lot of subjective opinions about which objective morality is correct.
 
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