{"id":276,"date":"2009-05-12T12:43:30","date_gmt":"2009-05-12T16:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/000af36.netsolhost.com\/wordpress1\/2009\/05\/12\/what-is-a-marriage\/"},"modified":"2009-05-12T12:43:30","modified_gmt":"2009-05-12T16:43:30","slug":"what-is-a-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/2009\/05\/12\/what-is-a-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is a Marriage?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Fisher has a column this morning<\/a> asking why Marion Berry and Barack Obama seem to be dragging their feet on gay marriage.  The problem I see is the definition of gay marriage.<\/p>\n

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In 1996, Barack Obama responded to a Chicago newspaper’s questions about the issue with these words: "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages." <\/p>\n

Yet during his presidential campaign and on to today, the president has said his religious faith leads him to oppose same-sex marriage (he favors civil unions for homosexual couples). <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t know what the difference is between a gay marriage and a gay civil union.  If you argue that marriage is a religious sacrament, I don\u2019t think anyone is arguing that churches must<\/em> marry whoever asks.  Pastors are always free to say no and often do to straight couples for a variety of reasons.<\/p>\n

(When I was planning to be married for the second time and wanted to ensure that our future children could be baptized in the Catholic Church, my wife and I met with a nun of a church.  When we both told her we were married before, she gave a grave \u201cHmmmm,\u201d and when my wife told her that her previous husband was a Jew, the nun gave a louder \u201cHmmmm\u201d with a wrinkle brow thrown in.  But the church relented.)<\/p>\n

I asked a leader in the gay rights movement in Virginia about this, and he seemed to agree that this debate is obfuscated by terminology.<\/p>\n

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This question would be less confusing if we had not yoked civil marriage to the religious sacrament of marriage: We empower ministers, etc. to simultaneously perform the duties of religious officiant and agent of the state, and then refer to both institutions by the same word. In fact, a civil marriage is a civil union. A religious marriage is whatever a given religious community wants it to be, regardless of whether it’s civilly recognized. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, my second wife and I were married by a judge.  Therefore, I guess we\u2019re not married, but \u201ccivil unioned.\u201d  And I\u2019ll bet that union would not prevent us from exercising our full rights as a \u201cmarried\u201d couple.<\/p>\n

It seems this semantic dance we\u2019re doing is silly, unless there is something I don\u2019t understand about the difference between a civil union and a marriage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc Fisher has a column this morning asking why Marion Berry and Barack Obama seem to be dragging their feet on gay marriage.  The problem I see is the definition of gay marriage. In 1996, Barack Obama responded to a Chicago newspaper’s questions about the issue with these words: "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[88],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}