tondebrigade
~Brigade Bar~ => General Discussion => Headline News => Topic started by: Genichiro on May 09, 2012, 18:52
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WASHINGTON -- In a nod to a dramatic shift in public opinion, Barack Obama on Wednesday became the first sitting president to announce his support for same-sex marriage.
In a sit-down interview with ABC's Robin Roberts, Obama completed what has been a markedly long and oft-mocked evolution on the matter.
Full article here (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/09/obama-gay-marriage_n_1503245.html?1336589752&icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk1%26pLid%3D159286#s=958532)
I'm glad to see the president finally coming out in full support for gay marriage. Everyone should have the right to marry; it doesn't matter if it's with same sex couples or not. Not to mention the shades of gray. What of rights for people who are physically born outside the gender binary? Are they not allowed to marry at all, because they weren't born into a gender allowed to marry? Not everything is black and white; I fully support the president in this decision, and hope that those who brought forth that terrible amendment in NC will quickly see the error of their ways and overturn it as quickly as possible.
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This shouldn't even be an issue... The pope has too much power.
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If only it could be that way. Unfortunately, as much as there are pulls for separation of church and state, a lot of laws in place were written with respect to the religious views of the few in power over the views of the many who elected them.
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Alright, Mr. President! For this, I salute you!
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A response from of sorts from the Romney camp. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/10/romney-bully-gay-bullying_n_1506382.html?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl30|sec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D159571)
WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney made a surprise appearance on Fox host Brian Kilmeade's radio show Thursday morning to respond to a lengthy Washington Post story on his time as a prep-school prankster and occasional bully of closeted gay students.
Something about this seems off to me. I don't think it would be an issue if he didn't know his victims were gay. I'm pretty sure he knew, even back then, the sexual orientations of his victims. It wouldn't be as much an issue for him otherwise, not to mention he's still running on an anti-LGBT marriage platform. Amazing how a couple dumb things we do in our youth can come back to bite us in the rear, isn't it?
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Tldr
How in the world did this even get outed? People dont even care about the presidency, they just want as much dirt on people as they can get...
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Yes, everyone has "youthful indiscressions" in their past. However, they generally say quite a bit about the person...
Think about it, most of the "really nice guys" you knew way back when still qualify for the tag today.
The real jackasses? The same can be said about them!
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I look at it like this: if Romney wanted to issue a real apology for his past, he go against the ideology of his party and support gay marriage, and not just by saying he will, but by actually pushing for policies to back that up. Now, if he drops the bigotry and does that, I'll believe him.
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Wow, Romney is a bigot and a jerk. The scary part is that there are people out there who want him to be president...
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That is rather scary, isn't it? Well, people will be people. If there are those out there who fear LGBT individuals, then we'll just have to keep fighting for our rights. :serious business:
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This surprised me.
Well, I'm a Christian and I know it's not in the bible about the lesbian/gay marriage but this is something I can't really imagine about.
These past few days, men and women's marriage percentage are decreasing. It seems like they are more preferred with "live in" and having kids and just break up when they want. lol
And then, I'll hear a news about gay/lesbian marriage which has more people who wants to do it x.x
Besides, how things would be? If they want to get marry, I don't want them to do it in Church. I'm against it. No way. Do it in other religion marriage but not in Church. If they want, they can marry in City Hall by a mayor or an aty, with that, there will be no issues in any religion about it.
If Pre. Obama allowed it how about the religions? XD
Besides, I'm afraid if these things would encourage, influence teenaged boys and girls to be a gay and lesbian than being just the way they are. No way! Most of gays are hand some. I'm afraid handsome guy generations will disappear soon :/
I know it's a good idea for some. Well, as long as there's no religion would be affected :D
Yeah, human rights.
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The freedom to marry doesn't mean it has to be done in a church. I'm sure there are many churches that would never allow a gay couple to wed in their halls. On the other hand, I'm sure there are some out there that would allow it. It depends on who is running the particular church, but I believe that's something that should be decided by those running the church, not the government.
As far as people being encouraged to be gay, I doubt that's going to be an issue. People are going to be who they are; it's a matter of feeling comfortable enough to come out, rather than try to hide one's identity for fear of backlash from others, an ordeal I understand all too well.
I still haven't told my mother I'm bigender; she's not the tolerant type when it comes to LGBT individuals.
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I'm sure they can get court weddings, if local churches won't accept them. I don't think anyone is forcing religious institutions to accept it.
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I know I wouldn't want to force churches to change. Church and state are supposed to be kept separate, after all. Just as the church is not supposed to push their ideology through government, government can't push their ideology through church.
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A really easy fix for this is to actually do the separation of church and state thing right! Why is it that ministers, priests, rabbis, etc... are able to perform legal marriages in the first place? Why do the religious/personal vows have to be confounded with the legal agreement to combine the households of two individuals? The government should be concerned with the contract between two people. The church should be concerned with the spiritual/religious implications of those individuals choosing to marry according to the rules set forth by their religion. The two are different things.
So, to solve the problem of who can marry whom, why not make marriage a purely religious thing. If you want to get married, make vows to love, honor, and, depending on the backwardness of the religion, obey, that is your personal business with that church. If you want to have your lands and properties legally combined in the eyes of the government, sign a contract giving you the rights a privileges that marriage imparts, such as inheritance, joint property, joint income tax filing, hospital visitation, making decisions about medical care if one of the couple is disabled, etc... Call it a Civil Union or a Domestic Partnership Contract, or whatever, but just don't call it marriage! That will satisfy the "keep marriage between a man and a woman" crowd. Marriage would be a religious term, used to indicate the acceptance by the couple of the marriage rites of that particular sect, while, according to the government, all that matters is that you have a legal domestic partnership contract. If you don't want a church wedding, you could just have a big party with your friends and a person you know and trust, like a family friend or favorite uncle or something, presenting the couple and letting them make their nonreligious vows to each other, but that would be window dressing, not part of the legal process, and so would a church wedding.
Keep the religious and legal separate! The County Clerk doesn't preach in church on Sundays, so why does a Minister sign binding legal documents combining two households under the laws of the United States of America?
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Actually, I don't think the current system is really all that different from what you propose. A church wedding does come with the legal implications, but those are all filed separately. The church handles the religious aspects, while the legal aspects are handled by legal experts. Having a church ceremony is optional, since you can just as easily get a court wedding, free of any religious groups. The right wings extremists don't want gays and lesbians to even have a court wedding, because they wish to force their views on others, believing they are right, and everyone else is wrong, as freedom to marry is apparently a violation of their religious texts. All we do is make sure the bigots keep their views out of politics, and wait for them to die off; the hardliners just aren't going to change their views, no matter what the law says.
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Yes, by law the church ceremony is optional, but in a sense it is also sufficient, since the minister is the one that signs the marriage license officially making the marriage legal (assuming the correct fees are included when the signed document is submitted.) What I am suggesting is partially about separating that power from a church official, making all of the legal aspects of a marriage seperate from the ceremony itself and the religious official that performs the ceremony. The other aspect is semantic. If you stop calling the legal contract between two people marriage, and call it something else like a domestic partnership or civil union, then eventually, people will stop confusing the legal aspects of it with the religious aspects. (Kind of like in Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" - in that story, the moon on the planet the story takes place on is inhabited by a utopian collective of anarchists, who left their home planet long ago. When they started the colony, they removed all terms about "posession" from their language. The idea being that language changes how you perceive the world, and if you never uter the phrase, "That's mine!" it will change your way of thinking a well.
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Hm, fascinating. Well, even then, the problem with the bigots out there is that they are so pressed for their ideas to be law that even if you change the name, they don't want gays and lesbians to have any of the rights they have, either. I believe the law they just passed in North Carolina even bans Civil Unions between gays and lesbians.
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With people as stubborn as they are, I get the feeling that even if you completely separate the religious and legal aspects of marriage, and give it a different name for gays and lesbians, people will still try to pass laws to make it so it can't happen. Some people are just... foolish like that.
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Hm, fascinating. Well, even then, the problem with the bigots out there is that they are so pressed for their ideas to be law that even if you change the name, they don't want gays and lesbians to have any of the rights they have, either. I believe the law they just passed in North Carolina even bans Civil Unions between gays and lesbians.
Yes, bigots will be bigots. However, if we set the table by disentangling the religious and civil aspects of marriage, then in a generation or two, people will no longer think of them together. When you think about it, even if you get a justice of the peace to marry you, you still have to have a stupid ceremony! Most people want to, but why? It is a legal agreement. Why do you have to go into the court and do the whole "Do you"/"I do" bit? Why not just submit your paperwork and be officially recognized by the state as married? As long as you have a notarized document signed by both parties, that should be sufficient. (Yes, it would still need to be notarized, since forgery is still an option and you wouldn't want people to be able to bamboozle someone into being officially united with them without their knowledge because the other person forged the document. Not that it wouldn't be a crime to do so...)
If we did that, separated the ceremonial from the legal, then I believe that it would eventually lead to a world that had different views on the whole topic.
Oh, and the NC law does more than ban civil unions between gays and lesbians, it bans all civil unions, including heterosexual ones! So people who used to be considered married by common law (most states have common law marriage, where two people who live together in a marriage-like state for a long enough time have the majority of the legal rights of married couples.)
With people as stubborn as they are, I get the feeling that even if you completely separate the religious and legal aspects of marriage, and give it a different name for gays and lesbians, people will still try to pass laws to make it so it can't happen. Some people are just... foolish like that.
Yes, but I am thinking long term. If we change the system, the mindset will follow, eventually...
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I think that just making all unions legal would be enough to change the mindset of the people in a few years. Actually, last I heard, polls show the majority of Americans favor marriage equality, it's just the few extremists that are left that are the problem. As for why they are the problem: they have the majority of the wealth in this country.
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It sucks that those with money can put it to use to force others under their influence.
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It's an unfortunate reality that those who are corrupted with power only look out to attain more of it, at the expense of anyone who stands in their way. If one way for them to gain money is to exploit people who share their personal opinions, then that's what they'll do. They'll do anything asked of those willing to throw money at them, just to get more money.