M
marymary1975
Guest
Do you seriously think that the Constitution would protect a church’s ban on mixed-race marriages, but not their ban on same-sex marriage?
Those aren’t churches. Churches, because of the First Amendment, are allowed to deny marriage to a mixed-race couple, while businesses, on the other hand, are subject to anti-discrimination laws.
Canada doesn’t have the 1st Amendment.
The military has a tendency to violate the rights of its members in general. The military tends to do the same with non-believers (either forcing them to attend a religious ceremony or do extra work, or force them to bow their heads in prayer).the few times these violations have made it to court, the courts have ruled against the military, so I don’t believe this is likely to spread outside the military.
Its a matter of being treated equally under the law, which has practical effects on people’s lives. What practical effects? Consider the following:
Your spouse is sick in a hospital for some time, becomes incapacitated while a medical decisions needs to be made on the spouse’s behalf, and eventually dies. In the process, you receive no more visitation rights than your spouse’s coworkers, you are not permitted to have any sort of (name removed by moderator)ut on the medical decision that needs to be made on your spouse’s behalf while your spouse in incapacitated, and after your spouse dies, you half to pay taxes on your spouse’s house being gifted to you (instead of it automatically being yours), and since you cannot afford to pay those taxes in part because your spouse’s employer will not give you pension benefits that are given to other couples in similar circumstances, you lose your home.
Let us suppose that all of the above happen because you live in a Muslim-majority country in which they don’t give civil marriage licenses to Catholic couples because their religion defines marriage as a union between Muslims. You would be rightly outraged at that. Additionally, you would be personally hurt that your friends would be in favor of you going through all of that if your spouse get sick and dies. However, a same-sex couple could experience the exact same thing in the United States even though most Catholics support giving such benefits to many other marriages that the Catholic Church doesn’t consider valid (for example, neither party is baptized). It is also noteworthy that on this site people have expressed joy that pension benefits be denied to gay couples under the above circumstances. Wouldn’t you be outraged if others were happy that you were denied such benefits that are given to all other couples and ended up losing your home?
So I recommend that you keep in mind that your support of banning civil same-sex marriage (if passed into law) will put someone in the situation described above.