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It's windy today, 12m/s from the southwest with a nice variety of clouds.
I looked at the political program for the Coast Party today. Some of their thoughts aren't too bad, but their family politics are too conservative for my tastes.
I stopped skimming when I reached the sentence 'Marriage is an ancient Christian institution', which was their reason for wanting to change the current gender neutral marriage law back to what it was, with marriages for straight people and partnerships for gay people.
So, I suppose the pre-1000 AD Viking kings never got married, Abraham never got married; heck, Mary and Joseph clearly could not have embarked upon a Christian institution, could they? And let's not mention all the pre-Christian savage cultures like Mesopotamia - clearly they were imagining things when they made marriage laws two thousand years before Christianity started.
I can accept churches balking at blessing a homosexual marriage for religious purposes, I suppose. But calling the concept of a legal bond between two individuals 'an ancient Christian institution'? Please.
Times change, and society changes. Marriage is no longer a mechanism for family names to be passed on, or for a woman to get someone to provide for her while she pops out offspring. It gives two people who (hopefully) love each other the means to be counted as one unit for a number of legal purposes. The scope of marriage has changed, and so should its definition.
And a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so you might as well call it a rose and not a partnership.
I looked at the political program for the Coast Party today. Some of their thoughts aren't too bad, but their family politics are too conservative for my tastes.
I stopped skimming when I reached the sentence 'Marriage is an ancient Christian institution', which was their reason for wanting to change the current gender neutral marriage law back to what it was, with marriages for straight people and partnerships for gay people.
So, I suppose the pre-1000 AD Viking kings never got married, Abraham never got married; heck, Mary and Joseph clearly could not have embarked upon a Christian institution, could they? And let's not mention all the pre-Christian savage cultures like Mesopotamia - clearly they were imagining things when they made marriage laws two thousand years before Christianity started.
I can accept churches balking at blessing a homosexual marriage for religious purposes, I suppose. But calling the concept of a legal bond between two individuals 'an ancient Christian institution'? Please.
Times change, and society changes. Marriage is no longer a mechanism for family names to be passed on, or for a woman to get someone to provide for her while she pops out offspring. It gives two people who (hopefully) love each other the means to be counted as one unit for a number of legal purposes. The scope of marriage has changed, and so should its definition.
And a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so you might as well call it a rose and not a partnership.
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Exactly. A little off topic, but there's quite a lot of times when I feel like I'm being *penalised* for being married -- for having a stable, loving family home for a child -- in this country, financially for sure, because while our government will do all they can to help anyone who has had to become a parent alone, they tend to overlook us; the people who don't earn a lot of money, who work hard, who stay together, and who aren't eligible for any kind of assistance.
But meh -- I know what I'd rather have, and it's not the extra benefits :)