Gay marriage a ‘Parody Marriage’. I’d be fine with that if these lawmakers would rebrand themselves as ‘Grand Old Joke’.
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She’s not particularly attached to any given definition? Like it’s all illusory or something? Weird…
(ok, I’ll show myself out)
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It might have been a governor who took nude pics of his mistress without her consent while his wife was pregnant and then used the pics to blackmail the mistress into silence about the affair. Dunno.
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Exactly. And I feel the same way about both: they work, in that they have achieved goals in the world that religion, for all the sincerity of most believers, does not.
“It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.” - Asimov
If science is based on ‘faith’, then science is of the same kind as religion—directly comparable. If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars. It would make sense to say, “The priests of science can blatantly, publicly, verifiably walk on the Moon as a faith-based miracle, and your priests’ faith can’t do the same.” - Yudkowsky
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I’m still not entirely sure why topics like abortion and gay marriage dominate US politics. Why do people care so much about these issues which really do not affect them? I am still not 100% in my understanding of homosexual attraction, but I recognize that it is not my struggle to understand. It is obvious that it’s a matter of personal preference that shouldn’t be a struggle to begin with(!), the result of which has no impact on anyones’ lives except theirs. Why do we still hope to hold peoples’ happiness hostage? Silly and malicious. If people devoted as much energy and political clout to actual issues, imagine what we could accomplish! Gay people will get married, get over it!
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Given that some 32 states have Republican-controlled legislatures, I’m not certain it’s the right who would be doing the seceding.
While I’m pretty certain that most Americans aren’t signing on to the childish antics of these politicians, they don’t seem to be in any hurry to vote them out of office.
And that (along with political acceptance of gun violence) says something about the sensibilities of a significant portion of the American electorate.
Which implies that my “you should just recognize the superiority of my cultural beliefs” technique isn’t working as well as I hoped, and if I really care, I may have to go with the icky “engage with people out of my bubble who definitely don’t think like I do and slowly persuade them” option.
Nah, too much work.
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Theirs is a Parody Party, for sure.
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That’s exactly how it works in the UK. Only the state can register a marriage. The religious ceremony that you choose to have, or not, is all fluff. The marriage bit happens when the registrar supervises the certificate being signed and witnessed.
Church of England priests are allowed to stand in for the registrar due to being representatives of the state’s established religion, other religions and non religious marriages require the actual registrar to be present
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With abortion, it was deliberately picked as an uniting issue by Evangelical leaders back in the '70s, when the naked racism that Southern Baptists had been based on was becoming unacceptable.
Gay marriage, and homosexuality (and recently, trans people) are so prominent because they provide the religious right a convenient sin to fulminate against. If you start talking about lust or greed or pride, that hits uncomfortably close to home for both the preachers and their audiences. But since most of them are straight cis people, it’s something they are never really tempted or conflicted about, so everyone can feel safely superior and good Christians, without having to engage in any introspection or to face hard questions about what the Christ actually said about things like divorce, or treating the sick and the poor, and so on.
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While I like to believe a well-reasoned, well-presented argument could sway me to the Republican side, mostly what I’m hearing is “We got ours, screw anyone who doesn’t think like me.” And for the other side, there are fewer and fewer people open to persuasion; the rest prefer to either stick their fingers in their ears while you speak, or in extremis wave you off with a weapon.
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I’m pretty certain that’s also what I sound like to the right-wingers, and to be honest, they’re mostly correct. I’m not certain that I have what it takes to be sympathetic to the cultural preservationists, despite them possibly being up to 2/3 of the population.
Honestly, in their shoes I’m probably the bad guy - I’m willing to plunge much of the population into alienated landscape that fits only the cosmopolitan like me on the hope that their descendants will adjust and won’t be utterly miserable.
Which is why trying to persuade them is probably too much work for me. I want to change the future, but not that much.
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It already exists and is called ‘gerrymandering’
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These people are like “sovereign citizens” when it comes to issues of religion and the law. It’s not just tortured interpretations, it’s inventing nonsense, whole cloth, and pretending like it means something (even if they themselves aren’t sure what it’s supposed to mean).
The purpose of clowns is to have people laugh at them.
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I like the approach they took in Maryland. The law says that a marriage can be solemnized by either an officer of the court or clergy. After considering all the different approaches to religious weddings and clergy, they threw their hands up and said, “OK, the definition of ‘solemnize’ is ‘signs the form’ and ‘clergy’ is whoever the people getting married agree can cosign their form”.
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These are definitely parody politicians.
The bill didn’t make it out of committee - most GOP politicians understand that this stuff is ridiculous, even if they too are anti-LGBT.
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That’s pretty much how it works now in the US. I don’t know all states by many if not most permit a civil ceremony done by a Judge or other designated people. A religious ceremony is not required but any marriage has to be registered with the state to be a legal marriage.
Religion has done such a splendid job of co-opting marriage that a lot of people think you must be married in a religious ceremony.
The California office where my wife and I got our marriage license had a judge or someone with similar authority right there to do on the spot weddings that were as legal as anything done by some shaman or “m,an of the cloth”.
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There were successful supply airlifts to West Berlin…
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I insist, this seems to be the standard GOP operating procedure: distract the electorate while you pick their pockets.
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It’s parody all the way down from here.
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Nah, a parody of marriage must clearly be when every woman a long-suffering White House staffer has ever been in a relationship with, can produce pictures of themselves with black eyes.
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