It sounds like you’re arguing that marriage as a social, religious, or political institution has (since time immemorial) been a thing that applied to any two people, whether gay or straight, and that only recently have some people wanted to restrict it (make it smaller) to apply to only straight people.  Is that what you’re saying?

Because don’t get me wrong, I like your point about who has the right to change things and historical precedent and all that.  I just think it supports the exact opposite opinion as the one you’re getting at.

Quick example: Someone long ago invents the car. People can travel in any direction they want, and everyone is good, until one day a person comes along and says “These cars are very special, and should only be used to travel in this direction” when you want to go a different way. Why should I feel inclined to listen to that person, someone who had nothing to do with the inception of the car in the first place? Would you listen to that person? Is your name really Thaddeus?

I do agree with you on that last thing: Things don’t always happen the way you want them to. They weren’t meant to. It’s the purpose of life.

Thanks for visiting!

I misread your post regarding the atrocities of the 20th century. My understanding wasn’t that you were trying to show that there is no advantage to one philosophy over another. I believed you were stating that a philosophy uninformed by a belief in a higher power was a morally inferior philosophy. I was wrong in my understanding, and I apologize.

I stand by my other remarks, however, particularly regarding your skewed view of the historical statement in question. I believe that your conclusions, based on the sentence in question, are the result of a logical fallacy. This “truth” appears in a list of “truths”, albeit a list of only two truths, the other “truth” being that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Assuming A and B are true, A being a statement of philosophy that may or may not be a religious idea, B being a religious idea, it does not follow that A must be a religious idea, simply because B is. Your argument would have been better served by focusing on the second truth in this list of truths, rather than dragging us through this lengthy tangent discussion. (I accept blame for continuing the lengthy tangent discussion).

In the end, for the purposes of this discussion, the general populace’s philosophy can be as informed by religion as much as we may please. This does not change the foundation of this government (the constitution), which is decidedly NOT informed by the belief in a higher power (at the very least, you have failed to provide defendable evidence supporting your position that it is so informed). Precedent has, and will continue to be (if we want to maintain the stability of the state), that laws that lack secular purpose or justification are unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Therefore, we really have gone off on a useless tangent and I apologize for taking us there. If there are secular reasons why same-sex couples should not be granted state recognized marriages, there is where the debate lies. If there aren’t secular reasons why same-sex couples should not be married, there really is no debate. Having placed this issue firmly in the realm of secular discussion and reasoning (being a matter of constitutional law and public policy), I do not feel there really is any reason for me to continue the debate in a religious thread. If you or anyone else wants to discuss the secular reasoning for or against gay marriage, we can move the discussion elsewhere. Thaddeus knows my e-mail address.

I do, however, want to correct two faulty assumptions (or implications) of yours:

1) While I am advocating that we strip legislation that is based purely on religious thinking and lack justifiable secular purposes, I recognize that some laws exist that may have been religiously motivated originally but still have justifiable secular purposes. I support these laws.

2) I stand with Thaddeus in that government need not (and truly should not) be atheistic. I also take slight offense that you imply that my moral philosophy, as laid out in this thread, is atheistic in nature. Just because I’m trying to separate morality as is legislated by the state from morality as is taught by religion doesn’t mean that I, or the philosophy that I am advocating, deny the existence of God. A moral philosophy uninformed by a belief in God is not a philosophy that denies the existence of God, even if that philosophy does not match your particular understanding or belief of who God is or what He teaches.

The purpose of my bringing up the atrocities of the twentieth century was to illustrate my belief that atheistic moral philosophy doesn’t have any inherent advantage over morality that is informed by a belief in God.

Also, regardless of where the term “all men are created equal” came from, by the time the Declaration of Independence was penned, the idea seems pretty religious:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

I don’t want to join the debate over whether our country is explicitly Christian or not. I only provide it as an illustration of an apparently religious belief informing the political and moral ideals of this country. And I still hold that while it’s clear that our society is explicitly opposed to a state-sponsored religion, it would be hard to try to take our society’s morality and try to extract and discard the parts that are informed by any kind of belief in God. And, as I mentioned before, even if you could, I doubt that it would be any more moral than before.