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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Why is Evangelicalism associated with homophobia?
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
If you expect me to throw up my hands in horror and say "oh no, we must find some principle that allows us to exclude polygamous relationships", you are going to continue to be disappointed.
I'm not expecting any such thing, but given your moral position on plural marriages, I find your argument suggesting that we shouldn't be legislating to allow them because there are no policy reasons for doing so rather thin.
That's not actually what I said. What I said was that the law is about drawing lines, and that there might be policy reasons for drawing a line that bars polygamy. It's not a question I've considered in any great depth.
My point was twofold: that there wasn't a policy reason for barring same-sex marriage (as outlined, in great detail, in many court decisions in recent years), and that your suggestion that somehow it therefore becomes an opening of the floodgates with no other barriers is wrong. Saying that there might be reasons to draw a line elsewhere was merely leaving the possibility open, not attempting to decide the question.
I was certainly not asserting that positive policy reasons are required to legislate in favour of polygamy. It is far more likely that any debate will be about whether there are sound policy reasons for prohibiting it. In Western democracies we tend to allow people to do what they want unless there's a reason to interfere (and in fact, the right-wing conservative arguments in favour of same-sex marriage are some of the best there are, which makes it such a pity that only a small number of right-wing conservatives adhere to them).
My drafter's eye simply sees that polygamy would create practical problems because relationship-based law would have to become a great deal more complex: entitlement to benefits, decision-making powers in case of incapacity, distribution of assets when a marriage breaks up are a few areas off the top of my head.
I'm actually drafting a matter at the moment, in a completely different area of law, where a group concept has been introduced and I am having to point out to my client that the question "what happens when this group partly breaks up" raises all sorts of issues they just haven't thought of, because they never arose when everything was dealt with singly.
I'm not asserting that such difficulties are insurmountable. I'm merely making the point (as others have) that polygamy raises these sorts of questions in a way that same-sex marriage doesn't. Same-sex marriage is dead easy. The existing concepts of "married" and "spouse" are, in fact, totally capable of being applied in gender-neutral fashion, there being almost no part of 21st century law where the male partner in a marriage is treated differently from the female partner. It is in fact the very development of male-female equality within marriage that makes it illogical (from a secular legal point of view) to continue to require that a pairing be male-female. Moving from a 'pairing' to a 'grouping' raises entirely different policy questions.
[ 01. July 2014, 14:03: Message edited by: orfeo ]
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
OK, I get all that, but I have to say that these were not the loudest arguments from the SSM lobby over here. The loudest arguments revoloved around the sense of moral outrage at being discriminated against irrespective of the magnitude (or otherwise) of the changes involved, not "it's far easier to legislate for us than for polygamists".
[ 01. July 2014, 14:17: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
OK, I get all that, but I have to say that these were not the loudest arguments from the SSM lobby over here. The loudest arguments revoloved around the sense of moral outrage at being discriminated against irrespective of the magnitude (or otherwise) of the changes involved, not "it's far easier to legislate for us than for polygamists".
Eutychus, it's discrimination precisely BECAUSE there is no rational basis for the distinction. That's what discrimination, in legal terms, means.
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
You mean to say you can't envisage polygamists emitting howls of protest about discrimination simply because it would be more complicated to make provision for them?
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
You mean to say you can't envisage polygamists emitting howls of protest about discrimination simply because it would be more complicated to make provision for them?
Yet another relevant post from the last plural marriage discussion:
quote:
This [assertion that allowing same-sex marriage necessarily means plural marriage must also be allowed] seems to come from the questionable assumption that all restrictions on the marital franchise are justified by the same argument, so that if any change is possible, then every change must therefore be possible.
In short, same-sex couples are requesting the right to participate in the same kind of legal arrangement available to other mentally competent members of society. Those who desire legal recognition of plural marriages are requesting a type of legal arrangement that's structurally very different from anything existing under current law in most Western nations. In other words, the former is a question of franchise (who can participate?) while the latter is a question of structure (what are they participating in?).
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651
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Posted
I recall hearing, as a child, that when people with multiple wives emigrated to my country, they were forced to declare only one of their wives to be their legal wife here because we did not recognize polygamous marriage. I thought at the time that it was silly our legal system failed to deal with the truth that these people had multiple wives, and thought that this must make the people involved sad. So I can see a potential case for recognizing the pre-existing polygamous marriages of immigrants regardless of whether we allow such marriages ourselves.
My primary moral concern with polygamous marriage is that the institution has a strong history of harming the women involved. In Islamic and Mormon settings in which such marriages have typically occurred (and continue to occur today in many Islamic nations), they have been closely associated with disenfranchisement of the women involved. Usually the women get no veto power over additional wives their husbands take, and often the newer (younger) wives are poorly treated by the more senior wives who become jealous of the husband's affections.
I do appreciate that in modern western secular society we are talking about quite a different social entity when we consider formalizing polyamorous relationships, one that is fully consensual and not demeaning. I therefore have zero moral objection to the concept of polyamorous relationships being formalized. I however worry that allowing relationships of the consensual non-demeaning type might open the door to relationships of the non-consensual demeaning type. I can't imagine Western societies easily or successfully ensuring full consent and equality in the polygamous marriages that Muslim immigrants would likely want to subsequently undertake.
I do however question whether there is a serious level of demand for such things in the Western world. I haven't personally ever seen any polyamorous groups of people actually requesting such rights. (I could be ignorant of their existence of course) I would theoretically be happy to grant such rights, but I'm scratching my head slightly as to understand what purpose they would really serve. Mathematically, polyamorous relationships seem likely to be an order of magnitude less stable than two-person relationships because each person in the relationship has a relationship with each other person and so the total number of relationships involved (and hence which can be subject to failure) scales multiplicitively with each additional person. I'm not making any moral complaint about this, simply noting that this probably partially explains why I don't see polygamous groups of people queuing up for marriage rights. If the legal complexities orfeo has outlined make working out what to do when one party wants to leave (or partially leave!) the relationship complex in the extreme, and if such events happen with reasonable frequency, then a marriage might be vastly more trouble than its worth in terms of shear practicality and complexity of paperwork. Again this may explain what I perceive to be a relative lack of demand for polygamous marriage.
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
Croesos: I can see that distinction (between SSM claims to marriage and plural marriages) from a legal point of view.
However, I can imagine a scenario where from an emotional point of view, a threesome that is (or believes it is) mutually loving, committed, able to raise children, and so on, should have just as much right to do so as a twosome. Western society is expected to adjust to SSM claims because (you argue) this is simply a question of franchise, but not to plural marriage claims because, well, that's a structural change. Too bad for the emotional suffering of the plural marriage proponents?
If evangelicals (to return to the subject line) were to accept SSM and refuse plural marriage, would that exonerate them from being homophobes but still leave them plural-marriage-phobes? Or not?
[ 01. July 2014, 15:02: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
I do however question whether there is a serious level of demand for such things in the Western world. I haven't personally ever seen any polyamorous groups of people actually requesting such rights.
As near as I can tell, the only ones who seem concerned about the legal status of plural marriage in a Western context are those who use it as a stalking horse to argue against same-sex marriage. It's not something anyone ever seems to agitate about except in the context of the legalization of same-sex marriages.
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
However, I can imagine a scenario where from an emotional point of view, a threesome that is (or believes it is) mutually loving, committed, able to raise children, and so on, should have just as much right to do so as a twosome. Western society is expected to adjust to SSM claims because (you argue) this is simply a question of franchise, but not to plural marriage claims because, well, that's a structural change. Too bad for the emotional suffering of the plural marriage proponents?
I'm not taking a position on the advisability of legalizing plural marriage other than to assert that it would require restructuring family law in most Western countries to such an extent that the resulting institution's resemblance to what we now refer to as "marriage" would be purely superficial. Whatever the arguments in favor or against revising family law to allow plural marriages, those arguments are separate and distinct from the arguments for legalizing same-sex marriage (or inter-racial marriage or marriage to a dead wife's sister or revising the minimum legal age of marriage or . . . ) I've always taken slippery slope arguments (if you allow this one change then you have to allow every other possible change imaginable!) to be a tacit admission that there are no good arguments against whatever it is that's being opposed, so the ground has to be shifted to argue against something else.
[ 01. July 2014, 15:25: Message edited by: Crœsos ]
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
You mean to say you can't envisage polygamists emitting howls of protest about discrimination simply because it would be more complicated to make provision for them?
No, because people howl about discrimination whether it exists in a legal sense or not. People tend to use the word 'discrimination' to mean 'you won't let me do the same thing as another person'. What discrimination actually means in a legal sense is 'you won't let me do the same thing as another person, and I and that other person are the same in all relevant respects'.
I mean to say that (again, partly from my drafter's perspective), clear cases of discrimination are easy to spot precisely because they are pretty easy to fix. If two categories of people are identical in almost every respect apart from the label slapped on them - a label that has no actual significance - the easiest way to fix it is to collapse the two categories into one.
Most sex discrimination in the law was fixed simply by replacing "man" with "person" - because in fact most of the actual policies didn't make use of a man's maleness.
Most discrimination against homosexual couples is pretty easily fixed by using gender-neutral terminology as well, because again, almost no policies that relate to couples actually make use of the gender of the 2 people. Providing for same-sex marriage makes it even easier, because then you don't have to keep creating different versions of rules for de facto couples (gender neutral) as compared to married couples (gendered).
The treatment of polygamy is entirely different precisely because the law actually DOES make use of the fact that a couple consists of 2 members quite often. Having 2 people means that "you" and "your spouse" (or partner or whatever) are clear and unambiguous. Having more than 2 people means that "your spouse" is no longer unambiguous. That's where the policy questions are going to arise: which spouse? any of them? each of them? all of them collectively? does it matter when the number of them changes? Policies that work on the basis of there being one "you" and one "not you" cannot work sensibly without revision.
As I've said, I'm sure it's quite possible to answer those questions in the long term, but the very fact those questions arise shows that the number of spouses is a relevant consideration in a way that the gender of a person or the gender of a person's spouse almost never is in modern law. Discrimination, in a legal sense, is about taking considerations into account when they are irrelevant. Having labels for 2 categories of people when all the relevant characteristics of the people are the same is discriminatory (and also fundamentally bad drafting). Having labels for 2 categories of people when there are relevant differences between the 2 categories - differences that actually provide a basis for different treatment - is not discriminatory.
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
To see an example of what I'm talking about, take a look at Australia's Marriage Act.
http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2014C00201
Try doing a search for "woman" and see how many hits you get, and what they relate to.
There are couple of ones that have to do with birth of children - okay, clearly there the gender is relevant.
The other hits you'll find are the bits that were specifically inserted to say "marriage is only between a man and a woman". These bits were inserted in 2004 when it was suddenly realised that the Marriage Act didn't already say that. Because it didn't need to for the rules on marriage to operate.
If you look at the actual rules, you will find that a 'person' can marry once they are 18, but a 'person' who is 16 (a 'minor') can also marry in certain circumstances. You will find talk about the 'parties' to a marriage. You will find rules about who cannot marry each other which, apart from a reference to brother and sister, are not gendered.
You will, in short, find precious little that demonstrates that the gender of a person getting married has practical significance. That's exactly why it was necessary to insert specific sections saying "no sex marriage" - because there was nothing already inherent in the way marriage was dealt with that would make it impossible to have a same sex marriage. There was nothing in the EXISTING law that a same sex couple would be unable to achieve.
I can tell you right away something in the EXISTING law that poses a problem for polygamy. It's the check that neither person is already married. That may be the only one in the Marriage Act itself. All the other issues will arise from other laws that refer to the status of being married and to the notion of a spouse.
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
PS "no sex marriage" was supposed to say "no same sex marriage". Boy was that a Freudian typo.
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
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Steve Langton
Shipmate
# 17601
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Posted
by ;
quote:
Kissing is a normal general human activity not distinctive to homosexuals. So what's your point?
EDIT: There are people out there who object, sometimes quite loudly, to homosexual displays of affection - whether it's kissing or holding hands or even talking about 'my boyfriend/girlfriend'. Such people manage to ignore that none of these things are remotely unique to homosexuals. Heterosexuals constantly do the exact same things without much comment.
My point was that as with driving being in itself non-racial, two men kissing is - or should be - regarded as normal behaviour and was so in biblical times. There is quite a bit of evidence that public displays of male affection were much more common in the past irrespective of modern ideas about sexuality. Things seem to have changed a bit in the UK and US after the Oscar Wilde scandal and similar events in the late 19th C, when there was a considerable concern to not appear homosexual and to suppress/discourage activity that might be so interpreted. That change occurred less in Europe - Frenchmen kissing was a source of innuendos well into last century.
In a situation of changing sexual mores people probably would find overtly sexual displays of affection shocking/uncomfortable where previously even just displays of affection had, as pointed out above, become unusual - I'd expect this will change over time.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
One more thought before finally heading off to bed. See what happens when people cause me to exercise my analytical brain (Starlight, we are terribly similar in some ways).
The biggest single issue with polygamous marriage will be: is it regarded as one marriage between several people, or several marriages, each between 2 people, that share a common person?
The implications of that one question are huge!
TEST QUESTION: If man A marries woman B, A then marries woman C, and woman C then marries man D, are B and D in a polygamous marriage?
HINT: If you think that C can't marry D because she's already married to A, you are massively sexist. ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
I've always taken slippery slope arguments (if you allow this one change then you have to allow every other possible change imaginable!) to be a tacit admission that there are no good arguments against whatever it is that's being opposed, so the ground has to be shifted to argue against something else.
Well, I protest that's not my tactic. I'm trying to think the arguments through, and that was one on my list, is all.
As far as the legal side goes, I think I'm pretty much convinced. One solution to the SSM issue with regard to dissenting christians would be to disestablish marriage altogether, ie use solely the term "civil union" (with all the same rights etc.) in law instead of "marriage". I actually have a friend, an evangelical christian to boot, who is lucky (?) enough to be in a position to get legislation along these lines drafted and probably passed in his jurisdiction. That way christians can redefine "marriage" however they like, separately from the legal issues.
In France that is not an option on the table right now, because "marriage" is right there in the secular text.
So in summary, for me the legal arugments are quite persuasive. Now that we have the mariage pour tous in France, I'm not protesting against it (and indeed didn't protest before either, even though I'm still far from convinced it's been a good thing for several reasons).
This brings me back to the problem of how to, um marry (or dissassociate) whatever we decide to celebrate in church with/from what is done at the Town Hall. Which in turn leads back to the question of what Genesis might or might not mean about difference, whether defining "marriage" other than in whatever sense the law defines it makes christians homophobic, and whether there is room within the Church to set forth a "typical" practice, plus allow "exceptions".
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
TEST QUESTION: If man A marries woman B, A then marries woman C, and woman C then marries man D, are B and D in a polygamous marriage?
HINT: If you think that C can't marry D because she's already married to A, you are massively sexist.
Long version here, with additional complications here.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
As far as the legal side goes, I think I'm pretty much convinced. One solution to the SSM issue with regard to dissenting christians would be to disestablish marriage altogether, ie use solely the term "civil union" (with all the same rights etc.) in law instead of "marriage".
Let me offer a counter-proposal. Civil law will continue to define "marriage", as it's done for the past century or so, while dissenting Christians can celebrate "religious unions".
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
This brings me back to the problem of how to, um marry (or dissassociate) whatever we decide to celebrate in church with/from what is done at the Town Hall.
It's almost as if you've never heard of the Roman Catholic Church's position on remarriage after divorce. Let me sum it up for you. The Roman Catholic Church does not believe divorce is valid, ergo a divorced person with a still-living spouse cannot marry someone else because, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, he/she is already married. Despite this, the civil government does not consider the Catholic Church's objections a sufficient reason to deny anyone a marriage license, even if they're Catholic. So we end up with a situation where the state considers a marriage valid but a church does not. Even though you regard this as an insoluble conundrum, most societies seem to be able to make it work.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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leo
Shipmate
# 1458
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
quote:
Originally posted by leo:
quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
Or why children are born with an endless list of horrible diseases, deformities and disabilities………
Perhaps being born gay is a 'disability'?
Normally, we help disabled people to live as 'normal' a life as possible.
We give them wheelchairs.
We don't say that it is OK to be disabled but sinful to use a wheelchair.
Disabled =/= wheelchair user. And disabled lives are normal lives.
Comparing homosexuality to disability and then talking about disability in those terms is incredibly homophobic and incredibly ableist.
I hope you realise that I was stating the logical conclusion to what Kaplan Corday posted, not expressing my own view.
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My Jewish-positive lectionary blog is at http://recognisingjewishrootsinthelectionary.wordpress.com/
My reviews at http://layreadersbookreviews.wordpress.com
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Even though you regard this as an insoluble conundrum, most societies seem to be able to make it work.
I don't think the Catholic church's solution to this conundrum is satisfactory from a Christian point of view, because it effectively puts some people beyond the pale.
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Even though you regard this as an insoluble conundrum, most societies seem to be able to make it work.
I don't think the Catholic church's solution to this conundrum is satisfactory from a Christian point of view, because it effectively puts some people beyond the pale.
Isn't putting some people beyond the pale the Christian way? I thought that was the whole point of objections to same-sex marriage; that such couples were beyond the pale.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
Right now, I can't improve on the way I addressed that here.
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
I however worry that allowing relationships of the consensual non-demeaning type might open the door to relationships of the non-consensual demeaning type.
Though, you don't need to worry about polyamorous relationships for that to be a concern. It's hardly as though marriage, in any form, has always managed to avoid inequalities within the relationship.
I've been travelling and have just caught up. But, allow me to go back to the Genesis archetype. God made Eve from Adams rib as a suitable companion. (Merging the two narratives in Genesis 1 & 2), humanity had been made to rule over the animals etc, the subservient creatures were not suitable companions for Adam. Which of the early Church theologians said something along the lines of "Eve was not taken from his head to rule over him, or from his feet to be ruled over, but from his side to be an equal"? Therefore, I conclude, one of the characteristics of the Adam-Eve archetype is that it is a relationship of equals. The same would be true of the Trinity archetype.
Humanity in general has managed to get that completely screwed up, usually considering the husband to somehow be superior to his wife. Evangelicals (just 'cos this is a thread about evangelicals) have been no better in this regard. In fact, in some cases worse. Is there a relationship between the sexist attitude that the husband is the "head" of the family, ruling over his wife, and homophobic views in relation to SSM? I would suggest that there probably is.
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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
One solution to the SSM issue with regard to dissenting christians would be to disestablish marriage altogether, ie use solely the term "civil union" (with all the same rights etc.) in law instead of "marriage".
Let me offer a counter-proposal. Civil law will continue to define "marriage", as it's done for the past century or so, while dissenting Christians can celebrate "religious unions".
Seconded!
When it comes down to it, the English word "marriage" (or its French equivalent) is just a word like any other in our languages. It did not originate from the bible, which was written in Hebrew and Greek! The general concept of marriage is also found worldwide and is not something that is specifically Christian. The idea that Christians have some sort of monopoly on the word "marriage" and its use is a laughably arrogant power-grab by them.
I have no problem at all with the concept of religious people wanting to distinguish secular unions from their own religious concepts about unions. That is totally fine. They can talk about their "Holy Roman Catholic matrimony" or whatever they feel like calling it, until the cows come home, and I'd be fine with it. Nothing at all is stopping them from doing this, and indeed "holy matrimony" is a historically common phrase in religious circles which they might conceivably want to revive the usage of, but that is up to them.
What I totally object to is the idea that Christians own the word "marriage" and that they need to or should "take it back" out of the public domain by removing it from secular law, and only applying it themselves. Just no. That is all kinds of epic fail.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
It was especially startling to see the Catholic church becoming so involved in the same-sex marriage debate in France, because unlike English-speaking countries, France (and much of continental Europe, but especially France) rigorously separates civil marriage from religious weddings. There's absolutely no question in France that a church might be forced into performing a civil same-sex wedding, because a church cannot perform a civil wedding, full stop. I would have thought in those circumstances that it was patently obvious there was no need for the civil rules and the church ones to be the same.
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Steve Langton:
two men kissing is - or should be - regarded as normal behaviour and was so in biblical times. There is quite a bit of evidence that public displays of male affection were much more common in the past irrespective of modern ideas about sexuality. Things seem to have changed a bit in the UK and US after the Oscar Wilde scandal and similar events in the late 19th C, when there was a considerable concern to not appear homosexual and to suppress/discourage activity that might be so interpreted. That change occurred less in Europe - Frenchmen kissing was a source of innuendos well into last century.
When we worked in India in the eighties, it was very common to see two men walking along hand in hand as an expression of companionship, and my wife used to walk hand in hand with her female Indian friends.
On the other hand, my wife and I never held hands in public in India, where any sort of public display of affection between sexes was culturally unacceptable.
Of course, many things in Indian society have changed since then.
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
I have no problem at all with the concept of religious people wanting to distinguish secular unions from their own religious concepts about unions. That is totally fine. They can talk about their "Holy Roman Catholic matrimony" or whatever they feel like calling it, until the cows come home, and I'd be fine with it. Nothing at all is stopping them from doing this, and indeed "holy matrimony" is a historically common phrase in religious circles which they might conceivably want to revive the usage of, but that is up to them.
What I totally object to is the idea that Christians own the word "marriage" and that they need to or should "take it back" out of the public domain by removing it from secular law, and only applying it themselves. Just no. That is all kinds of epic fail.
There's also the global problem. Marriages in one country are usually respected in other countries. Civil Unions may not, in part because the laws in many countries don't cover civil unions. So it would be much simpler to let the various churches roll their own ceremony with a distinctive name.
Secondly, the time for such a proposal was in the last century. Now that Gay people have won the right to marry in many parts of the United States and Europe they're not about to give it up because some church has decided it has a better idea after losing the battle to allow same sex civil marriage.
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
No one doubts there are places where men kissing men or holding hands is culturally fine these days. I've even seen pictures of Obama holding hands with another world leader whose culture finds it a mark of friendship. However there are many places in the United States where if two men kiss they will be disparaged, preached at or assaulted on the inference the two are homosexuals..
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Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
TEST QUESTION: If man A marries woman B, A then marries woman C, and woman C then marries man D, are B and D in a polygamous marriage?
Actually, I think it's quite straightforward. A polyamorous marriage is a set of N adult members. Adding a member to an existing set requires unanimous consent of all the existing members. No person may be a member of more than one marriage set. All existing marriages then become a special case of polymarriage with N=2.
It's the rules for divorce which are more complicated - you begin with a set of N members, and assume that m wish to leave the marriage, and N-m wish to remain. Division of property might not be to bad, but provision for children (because naturally all children of the marriage would have N parents) would be complicated. The financial part is just math - that's easy enough - it's custody and residency that will get interesting.
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Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
If I come across any black people in future wearing their hair in any other style, I will now know hey are not "really" black.
I might almost suspect you of misunderstanding deliberately for some kind of comic effect.
If you exclude a significant fraction of reasonable black hairstyles, but no reasonable white hairstyles, because your cultural conditioning leads you to associate white hairstyles with smartness, you're being racist.
It's a fairly mild racist sin, and more often than not springs from ignorance or unthinkingness rather than active animus, but it's still racist.
quote:
but never in my wildest dreams did I anticipate being endowed with omnipotence.
The obvious inference from my comment was that I was talking about gay Christians who are attempting to be faithful to the word of God.
I naturally assume that you, as a faithful Christian, are preaching the word of God as you understand it. Your understanding of the word of God is that homosexual people are called to a lifetime of celibacy, and you would tell anyone who inquired that this was what God expected of them.
The argument about to what extent Christians get to determine how gay non-Christians live their lives has moved on. That ship has sailed - secular gay marriage is a reality in the UK, in a rapidly increasing number of states in the US, and in an increasing number of Western democracies.
The discussion that remains is about how we treat gay Christians.
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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
The Trinity is a gay three-way.
![[Devil]](graemlins/devil.gif) ![[Angel]](graemlins/angel.gif)
What makes you think all three members are the same sex, or that the number of genders involved is only two for that matter?
I think God transcends gender (CS Lewis referred to this idea as being "trans-sexual", but that was back in the day...), and that humankind being both male and female is a - partial - indicator of that fact.
To me the nature of the Trinity points precisely to similarity and difference. If there's a parallel to be drawn with marriage, it's that God is by nature relational, that's all. No kinky sex need be involved.
Just to be clear, as humorously as I phrased this, I was actually being very serious. In 20 years of attending many evangelical groups and churches and many weddings, I have never heard the archetype of Adam and Eve preached on as a model for married relationships, but I've heard the Trinity used a dozen times or more. So any appeal to the idea of Adam and Eve being archetypically male and female seems to fail pretty badly against the fact that far more commonly appealed to archetype of the Trinity is not a male-female relationship. Now you've gone the obvious route of trying to walk-back the church's usual claims about the genderedness of the Trinity. So let me discuss for a minute what I see as being the standard Evangelical views on these topics:
I grant that at a deep theological level, some theologians have taken the view that there is no inherent gender within the godhead. But, on the other hand, many theologians have argued that the godhead is gendered, going so far as to insist that the Holy Spirit is gendered and masculine - a theology that nearly all modern English bible translations follow in using the pronoun "he" in John 16:13.
The Holy Spirit is overall a somewhat contentious case, and a view that the Holy Spirit is transgendered or non-gendered in nature would probably fall within the bounds of conservative evangelicalism. This is not the case for the Father and Jesus however. Evangelicals typically take a rather dismissive attitude toward feminist attempts to use the pronoun "she" to refer to the Father, arguing that the bible consistently uses masculine pronouns and masculine language such as "Father". They thus tend to infer that though the Father does not have a physical body, and hence cannot literally have masculine sexual characteristics, there is still something fundamental about the Father himself that makes it better and more accurate to refer to him in masculine terms than in feminine terms, since this is what the bible does. And Jesus, well, was literally a man, and we have no particular reason to assume his male body was any different to usual in its sexual and gendered natures. Furthermore many creeds and council declarations have made it an absolute statement of Christian faith that Jesus was fully man and possessed all the attributes that men, as men, posses.
Now probably no evangelical would assert that the members of the Trinity literally have sex with each other, especially since the Father and Spirit are not usually conceived of as having sufficient physical form to perform any such act. However, what is commonly asserted is that the depth of the love and relationship between them is something that is exceptionally deep and meaningful and is something which human love between a man and his wife approximates. Evangelical preachers who are commonly nowadays keen to sanctify and endorse sexual acts between married couples (fearing that they be otherwise seen as ascetic and against-sex) will often go so far as to literally and explicitly add that it is during the deepest sexual intimacy between married couples that human love most and best approximates the unfathomable depth of the connection between the members of the Trinity.
That's how I'd describe standard Evangelical teaching on these issues - I don't think anything I've said above is particularly controversial insofar as I think it's an accurate summary of what Evangelicals typically teach.
But the result of this is that the Trinity, who Evangelicals typically insist is truly masculine gendered in some spiritual way in (at least 2 of) its members, is being used by Evangelicals as an archetype for the ideals of marriage and sex. Their go-to analogy for marriage is an analogy that, by their own theology, involves 3 males in a deep committed relationship. An obvious corollary of this, which Evangelicals stunning fail to draw but which seems entirely inescapable to me, is that at a spiritual level there is nothing at all wrong with two masculine gendered entities being in a deeply loving and committed relationship with one another of the marriage type. Either the dozens of Evangelical preachers talking about human marriage approximating and reflecting the inter-Trinitarian love were just talking complete and utter bullshit, or their analogy really is valid and that two masculine gendered beings can legitimately be in the absolute deepest of spiritual/emotional/psychological/sexual relationships with one another.
This does not, of course, preclude a physical reason existing that might make same-sex relationships off limits, since the Trinity is not incarnate. So it might be entirely legitimate at the spiritual and psychological level to have a same-sex relationship as the Trinity do, but due to some random physical limitations it might be impossible or unreasonable for us humans to emulate their example. So I could entirely understand if Evangelicals took the view that spiritually gay marriage is totally fine and a reflection of the love of the Trinity for one another, and that far from being a sin, such same-sex marriages to be extolled as virtuous imitation of the Godhead, but that for some practical physical reason such relationships happened to be impossible in the flesh but not because of anything wrong with the spiritual ideal of such relationships.
Now, of course, in practice, there is nothing stopping physical same sex relationships in the flesh, as multiple people on these boards alone can personally attest! But far from applauding the spiritually sound nature of same-sex relationships as coming closest to reflecting the Trinitarian ideal, Evangelicals instead typically condemn such relationships, and particularly do so at a spiritual and psychological level, which is precisely what their Trinitarian analogy for marriage precludes them from doing!
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Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
going so far as to insist that the Holy Spirit is gendered and masculine - a theology that nearly all modern English bible translations follow in using the pronoun "he" in John 16:13.
It's a bit of a side issue, but in traditional English, "he" is the appropriate pronoun to use for a person whose sex you don't know. "She" always implies female, and "it" denies personhood.
Yes, the language is gendered. Yes, male is the linguistic default. No, many feminists don't like this, and there is a modern trend to use the third person plural if you're not specifying a sex.
Nevertheless, I think this means that you can't safely draw any conclusion from the use of the masculine pronoun in in John 16:13.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
TEST QUESTION: If man A marries woman B, A then marries woman C, and woman C then marries man D, are B and D in a polygamous marriage?
Actually, I think it's quite straightforward. A polyamorous marriage is a set of N adult members. Adding a member to an existing set requires unanimous consent of all the existing members. No person may be a member of more than one marriage set. All existing marriages then become a special case of polymarriage with N=2.
It's the rules for divorce which are more complicated - you begin with a set of N members, and assume that m wish to leave the marriage, and N-m wish to remain. Division of property might not be to bad, but provision for children (because naturally all children of the marriage would have N parents) would be complicated. The financial part is just math - that's easy enough - it's custody and residency that will get interesting.
Straightforward? You've just said that a man with 2 wives has to have the consent of those wives before taking a third. That is not, AFAIK, how it actually works in parts of the world. Nor as I understand it would 2 wives of a Muslim man usually say they were married to each other. They would say they were each married to the same man. If the wives were married to each other that would be a same-sex marriage.
[ 02. July 2014, 04:28: Message edited by: orfeo ]
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
Random thought: business partnership law would probably provide the most useful clues as to how polygamous marriage could be handled. *makes notes*
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
I'm not intending to contribute much more at this point, but I'd like to comment on two posts: quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
It was especially startling to see the Catholic church becoming so involved in the same-sex marriage debate in France
It came as no surprise to anyone here. The fact is that the Catholic church in France still behaves as if it's a state church or at least runs a parallel national organisation to the state.
quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
In 20 years of attending many evangelical groups and churches and many weddings, I have never heard the archetype of Adam and Eve preached on as a model for married relationships, but I've heard the Trinity used a dozen times or more.
In some 25 years of preaching at weddings, I have never to my recollection made allusion to the Trinity, except possibly to make the point I made just now about God being intrinsically relational, and at the last wedding I preached on, I spoke on Adam and Eve.
I've been to a lot of evo weddings too, and while I've heard some toe-curling things (mostly directed at people "living in sin"), I've never heard the Trinity alluded to in the way you suggest. I find many of your other comments similiarly foreign or exceptional when considering the evangelicals I hang out with.
At the least, this suggests more diversity amongst evangelicals than is present in your post. (As a final aside, I also think that there is probably a lot more acceptance of gays amongst evo congregations than one might suspect from the pronouncements of evo leadership).
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
Posts: 17944 | From: 528491 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
I've been to a lot of evo weddings too, and while I've heard some toe-curling things (mostly directed at people "living in sin"), I've never heard the Trinity alluded to in the way you suggest. I find many of your other comments similiarly foreign or exceptional when considering the evangelicals I hang out with.
Okay. I am only familiar with the English-speaking evangelicalism of NZ / USA / England which does not tend to interact overly much with non-English thinkers and writers. However googling 'marriage trinity' is enough to give pages of results drawing this analogy, which seem to include both Evangelicals and Catholics alike.
[ 02. July 2014, 05:31: Message edited by: Starlight ]
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
......this suggests more diversity amongst evangelicals than is present in your post. (As a final aside, I also think that there is probably a lot more acceptance of gays amongst evo congregations than one might suspect from the pronouncements of evo leadership).
True in Catholicism as well. What has happened and what is ongoing is a simple but profound ethical shift about what is fair and just. I am convinced it is irreversible. People 'get' that. The traditional position and the traditional defences sound increasingly hollow in the face of this paradigm shift over what is fair.
To quote Desmond Tutu in a famous incident in which he addressed the powerful representatives of apartheid. "You have already lost".
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
I might almost suspect you of misunderstanding deliberately for some kind of comic effect.
I might almost suspect you of misunderstanding deliberately that I was having a shot at not only your implication that generalisations can be made about black people that go beyond their common skin colour, but also your parochialism which assumes that blacks means United States blacks, ignoring the black people of every continent.
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Justinian
Shipmate
# 5357
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
As a final aside, I also think that there is probably a lot more acceptance of gays amongst evo congregations than one might suspect from the pronouncements of evo leadership
Of this I have absolutely no doubt. On the other hand the evo leadership is what it is. And those are the people the evo congregations are happy to have speaking for them. And when evo leaders show up who aren't homophobic they end up getting kicked out.
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My real name consists of just four letters, but in billions of combinations.
Eudaimonaic Laughter - my blog.
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
Being evangelicals, the leaders who get kicked out are perfectly placed to start new churches or to lead breakaway congregations. They should be quite successful with this if evangelicalism is on the cusp of change.
[ 02. July 2014, 10:51: Message edited by: SvitlanaV2 ]
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
And when evo leaders show up who aren't homophobic they end up getting kicked out.
They may get kicked out, but it's not a certain outcome. We all know Steve Chalke wasn't, he's still in the same leadership in the Oasis Trust and Oasis Church as he's held for 10 years. I linked earlier to a senior paster of a Vineyard church in the US who has also retained his position. There will be others. In fact, it would probably not surprise me if the majority of evangelical church leaders who have publicly affirmed homosexual rights have done so without losing their positions of leadership within the church. Has anyone ever done any research on that?
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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
It occurred to me that outside of the Anglican Communion, most evangelical clergy working in an evangelical environment seem to be employed within a congregationalist framework. This surely means that for them, keeping on the same page as their congregations is more important than it would be for ministers who are centrally appointed. Would an evangelical Baptist minister suddenly pronounce in favour of SSM without first exploring it with his/her congregation or team of elders?
[ 02. July 2014, 12:03: Message edited by: SvitlanaV2 ]
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Justinian
Shipmate
# 5357
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:
Being evangelicals, the leaders who get kicked out are perfectly placed to start new churches or to lead breakaway congregations. They should be quite successful with this if evangelicalism is on the cusp of change.
I hope this happens. I'm not holding my breath.
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My real name consists of just four letters, but in billions of combinations.
Eudaimonaic Laughter - my blog.
Posts: 3926 | From: The Sea Coast of Bohemia | Registered: Dec 2003
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
Perhaps it's all about demographics. There seems to be an assumption that Anglo-Catholic churches are particularly appealing to gay men. Historical MOTR congregations are generally very skewed towards (straight) women. But (middle class, white) evangelical churches have a higher than average proportion of (straight) men - men who are perhaps more 'traditional' in some of their values than might be the case at other churches. So it could be that most evangelical churches simply don't attract enough male gay members to be led towards a complete turnaround on matters of sexual morality.
OTOH, evangelical churches tend to be larger than others, and large churches are attractive, so they probably DO have more gay members in absolute terms. It's just that they have even more of everyone else as well.
Sometimes I wonder whether the easiest thing for gay-affirming evangelicals to do would be to find the most liberal (but also fairly theologically orthodox) mainstream churches, and then make them look more evangelical. Perhaps this would be far less trouble than trying to make the Baptists and Pentecostals more liberal on matters of sexuality! Or maybe not. The done thing is for strict churches to grow more liberal, rather than the other way round, although there are exceptions.
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Pomona
Shipmate
# 17175
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Posted
I have heard the Trinity used as an example of headship by con evos (cessationist Reformed Calvinist types) at CU events - basically that wives should obey husbands because Jesus obeyed God the Father.
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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
(sneaking back to answer Jade)
Yes indeed. The last time I heard that was from Wayne Grudem at an NFI conference: "you can't mess with the doctrine of headship because you are impugning the Trinity"*, oh noes. It's tantamount to accusing people of the sin against the Holy Spirit.
Ever since I have seen appeals to the Trinity to back up arguments as a sort of theological nuclear option.
==
*Great counter-argument here. But that's another DH.
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
Posts: 17944 | From: 528491 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Albertus
Shipmate
# 13356
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
I have heard the Trinity used as an example of headship by con evos (cessationist Reformed Calvinist types) at CU events - basically that wives should obey husbands because Jesus obeyed God the Father.
What a ghastly bunch of fuckers our faith sometimes throws up.
Posts: 6498 | From: Y Sowth | Registered: Jan 2008
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
Wow. Does no-one ever point out that while the gender of God is open to debate, Jesus wasn't a woman?
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
Posts: 18173 | From: Under | Registered: Jul 2008
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Pomona
Shipmate
# 17175
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Posted
I think the argument is some kind of mangling of the marriage = Christ and the Church analogy, but then given that at the same event we were taught that we're all individual Brides of Christ rather than the Church being the Bride of Christ, I don't think logic is really a part of the argument.
I did however respond by saying that I thought God was calling me to the priesthood, which apparently caused some amazing facial reactions!
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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Sorry if it's been said above: as some of you know, I've been on a journey from flatland for nearly 50 years. Flatland where the Bible is read flat, level, like a cookbook (thanks to Greg Boyd, open theist Catholic-Pentecostal for this) where any recipe is right, where every part is equally authoritative and there is no progressive revelation and no transcendence, no trajectory which can be followed beyond it.
ALL who have this approach, and I've had it for most of 50 years and kicked and screamed against it being challenged all the way, are hypocrites, compromisers, backsliders.
The arc (of the moral universe - MLK), the trajectory goes beyond the OT and even the NT, beyond the transcendent human pre-resurrection Jesus. Just as His theology now goes beyond His theology then in PSA.
It's all about putting limits on grace.
And we all do that.
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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