Alto Wrote:Thanks for clarifying that because I must have said I dont support their rights to equal protection under the law..
Bruce has backtracked on those remarks (because Ellen critised her) and now supports gay marriage...
Perhaps I have misunderstood you. I hip didn't mean to suggest that you didn't support equality under the law; from reading your post, I got that you believed that the Supream Court Ruling that made Same-Sex Marriage legal nation wide here in the U.S. Had something to do with making churches accept and prefor Same-Sex Marriage. If that isn't what you meant, I apologize.
However, the U.S. was founded on a separation of Church and State. We do not have a "National Religon". Thought not often enforced (shamefully), churches here that openly attempt to influence their congregants in political matters are *supposed* to lose their tax-exempt status as places of worship.
Unfortunately, the majority of our media leans to the political right, which leads low information voters to blindly accept the implications made by our religous leaders. Specifically, the common lies:
1) "LGBT Advocacy groups are trying to suppress "Religous Liberty"
--- We don't care what other people believe religous-wise! If you thing the way we live is wrong, then don't live that way. HOWEVER, as a nation where each person's religous belief system is of equal value to another person's religous beliefs, we cannot give credence to one person's beliefs orpver the beliefs of another person. I.E. Your religous liberty ends where mine begins, and you cannot make laws that demand other people follow your religon's rules.
2) "Gay people are are trying to use the courts to force churches to acknowledge and preform their marriages."
----This is nothing more than a scare tactic. Due to the facts listed in my previous post, religous marriage is in no way a benefit (legally) to anyone. We wanted, and were granted, Civil Marriage. That is not to say that there are not churches that welcome us and welcome performing our wedding, it just means we don't need to be in a church to get legally married, nor do we require the services of a priest or preacher. So no one is "forcing" ANYONE to marry us, nor do we want to.
3) Being able to see our spouses on their death bead, being able to inherit the property we worked for over the course of our lives together (instead or having it all taken by our spouses relatives) being able to be buried beside our spouse in the Arlington cemetery if he or she was a veteran, and ~1300 other benefits of marriage enjoyed by our heterosexual peers but denied to us ARE equal protection under the law. We fought for those things under the heading of "Marriage", and we won. We aren't fighting for anything more on the marriage-front. NOW we are fighting for protection from housing discrimination and work place discrimination because we lack those protection in the vast majority of states. We can be fired if our employer discovers we are LGBT and we can be evicted for being LGBT.
What I though you wrote, was that you don't agree with marriage equality because you don't believe we (LGBT) persons have the right to ask the religous to change their view of marriage. However, we aren't asking them to change their beliefs. If they believe that the only "real" marriage is a religous one, I have no problem with that, nor am I asking them to change their beliefs. All we wanted (and all we got) was our relationships to be treated equally in the eyes of the law to those relationships enjoyed between heterosexuals.
-NOW-
I realize that the United Kingdom doesn't have the same degree of separation of church and state that we do, so it may be different there (idk about your marriage laws), but in the U.S. when someone says they don't support marriage equality, they mean that they believe that the government should reserve the ~1300+ rights associated with marriage to only include heterosexuals...then that is exactly what you are saying----that you don't support equal protection under the law.
~Beaux