Many Virginians Wish to Impose Their Personal Religious Beliefs Upon All
As Campaign Days Dwindle, Marriage Issue Heats Up in Va. – washingtonpost.com
The hundreds of Sunday congregants came to their feet as the Rev. Mark Becton, of Grove Avenue Baptist Church outside Richmond, finished his sermon. “Believing that God ordained marriage as the institution between one woman and one man . . . I’m voting ‘yes’ for the marriage amendment,” he exhorted, referring to the state constitutional amendment that will be on the Nov. 7 ballot. “I’m voting ‘yes’ to restate what I know God intended and what I believe our founding fathers understood: Marriage is the union of one man and one woman.”
As Reverend Becton makes so very clear, the belief that marriage is something ordained by God is a religious belief. Now me — I don’t think that’s what God is all about. Reverend Becton is entitled to his personal religious beliefs though and, in fact, I fully support the idea that he shouldn’t be required by law to perform wedding ceremonies for gay couples. However, that doesn’t mean that our government — which is supposed to protect the rights of all people, regardless of their religious beliefs — shouldn’t recognize gay marriages.
We’ve gone through this quite a few times already, folks, so I’ll summarize for those of you who are new here:
- The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Association of Social Workers have all concluded that homosexuality is not a chosen behavior. The best experts in the world have learned that sexual preference is established early in life and is, most likely, the result of genetic and environmental factors. (And by “environmental factors” they also mean the environment within the womb when a fetus is developing.)
- These three august professional organizations also agree that homosexuality is not an “illness” and that it is, rather, a “normal” (though relatively uncommon) variant of human sexuality.
- People fear what they don’t understand. They fear what is different. Just as ancient people once believed those suffering from convulsions were possessed by demons, so too they believed homosexuality was sinful. We’ve come a long way since then but some folks are taking a little longer to get up to speed.
Reverend Becton claims to know what God intended. Can you believe that? What an arrogant person. If God really was a big guy up in the sky, he’d reach down and smack Reverend Becton up side the head.
Keep religion out of government! Keep government out of religion! THAT is what the founding fathers wanted for our country.
Posted by RebeccaHartong on October 28, 2006 under Uncategorized
Yes!
I wish it was that simple or indeed, that likely. If I wasn’t in law school, I would be in grad school writing a thesis on impending American theocracy. I have done a fair crapload of research, just because it is fascinating.
These folks are rampant, and they are growing in strength. For an interesting example, do a google search for Bob Enyart, a “pastor” in Colorado. He proposes an Amercan monarchy, where such sins as homosexuality
adultery, and blasphemy are punishable by death. Lesser “sins” incur floggings of various severity.
Thanks, it seems so many people are obsessed with the “trees that that they don’t see the forest”. They obsess over a few ambiguous isolated apssages and fail to absord the overriding messgae of love, tolerance, and non-judgemnetal behaviour hat was illustrated by the life of Jesus.
If there is a moral issue here, I think it is the exploitation of societal ignorance about homosexuality, by Republicans to energize evangelical Christians to go out and vote Republican. This has been well documented in 20 states where this marriage amendment has been put to voters, and now is being hypocritically used in Virginia. We’ve had a long history of the devil masquerading as a preacher man – it’s time for Virginians to recognize the difference between fact based and fear based legislation.
I agree with you completely, Bill. This focus on the language of the proposed amendment is just pandering to people who are prejudiced against gay people but who might not be ready to actually admit it. Or, possibly, people who sense that the amendment is morally wrong but who don’t want their friends and neighbors to think they’re soft on queers.
I guess, at this point, I’ll take defeat of this terrible amendment anyway I can get it. Still, it’s discouraging when people won’t stand up and say right out loud: This is wrong. It’s immoral. And I’m voting against it because of that.
[...] While I’m on the topic of homosexuality, let me briefly talk about why people are gay or straight or bisexual or transgender or whatever. In previous posts I’ve described how homosexuality is apparently the result of both genetic and evironmental factors. Human sexuality is very complicated and the honest truth is that we may never know exactly why some people are gay. Opponents of equal rights for gay people will, however, tell you that homosexuality is entirely a chosen behavior. Okay. Just for the sake of argument, let’s say being gay IS “chosen”. So what? So what??? How would it being “chosen” be enough justification to deny gay people the right to marry? Obviously, what it all falls back to — and, of course, we already knew this — is that homosexuality offends some people’s religious sensibilities. It’s yet another example of government being informed by religion. That’s bad. [...]