When your ritual has become integrated by US law, the act ceases to be spiritual, with respect to how US law views it.
You go ahead and tell Americans their marriage is no more significant than a commerical contract (something utterly non-spiritual.) I guarantee you even secular persons will take offense. Marriage is not some mundane act like buying a soda or entering into a cell-phone contract.
Secular marriage law exists in the US, it’s a fact.
Holy Matrimony exists in the U.S too. That’s also a fact. There’s also laws against incest and polygamy, also facts. Your facts mean nothing if they are pointless.
We have a secular government with secular laws about marriage, hence this discussion.
If you define secular as a de facto expulsion and exclusion of all things religious, then you disenfranchise an enormous portion of the U.S population, and most legislators (who still at least render some homage or lip-service to God and religion).
You are correct in asserting that the Masons who established the United States wished to exlude Christianity and the Christian religion from its animus ; however, even very early on the short-sightendness of this, and the ultimate realization of the need of religion in maintaining order, harmony, unity and tranquility of the state was realized. It was realized by the very first President of your “secular” country, who admonished and praised religion and its neceseccity for the well-being of the state.
When a secular government seeks to impose law/regulation on a government practice it should seek to be secular, so as best to represent the whole of society, not just the religious.
Marriage is a government practice ? Seeing as without religion marriage’s actual definition is, as you have so shamefully demonstrated, a matter of doubt and opinion, it would also tend to prove that marriage is not secular, as the moment it is re-constructed as such it means anything to anyone, and consequently means nothing, which is what we are fighting against.
Not all law is moral or just. Perhaps you would feel different if we were talking about abortion rights.
Every law must be moral or just otherwise we have no reason to obey it and the authorities have no right to impose it.
Law is based around societal necessity.
Which is exactly why marriage is protected by the State by excluding those who have no part in its establishment. Marriage is the natural and normal means of transmitting a society’s culture and traditions from one generation to the next. The family serves as a catch all that, when missing, must be supplied by the state which is utlimately itself dependent upon families for its sustenance. I make you a bet : my sincere apologies and withdrawal from this debate if it turns out that families (i.e., wed persons) do not provide the lions’ share of revenues for the government, which then doles that out to defend the state from existential threats on one hand, and on the other provides welfare and financial props to those most in need, who more often than not have very different or totally absent traditional family conditions.
There can be parallels to Christian dogma but it is not necessary.
I submit the very fact that we are having to have a debate about why two men can’t be married is proof of the fallacy of this statement.
Homosexuals as people are not adequately represented or covered in this law,
No, they are outright excluded. Just as the law doesn’t permit a stranger to impose himself upon your family and usurp yours or your parents rights and roles. Homosexuals have no participation in the marriage establishment. Their exclusion is purposeful ; their inclusion, dangerous, perverse, and ultimately destroys marriage as it is known, for it re-defines marriage to mean and be something it is not. Very shortly you will see people having to distinguish between real marriages and what the state falsely labels as marriage. Nature will not permit such a convolusion of so essential a difference in establishment, and language will have to change to express the essential difference in idea. Homosexuals may well wish to be included in the marriage establishment, but their exlusion is of nature in the first place (to say nothing of God’s institution of marriage) - not human law - and human law but only recognizes this. You can make human law recognize whales as humans and give them rights before the courts, but the law can’t actually make whales humans. The distinction is in nature, not law or subsequent rights.
Why? Who cares what happens in nature?
You should. It’s the means by which you are here and able to have this discussion in the first place.
Pax Christi,
Tim
