“Think of the monestaries in the dark ages. Those monks weren’t giving up the fight, just because their realm of influence was reduced to the space immediately around them. They were preserving wisdom until individual hearts and minds were again looking for it.”

I think of the “Marriage to the churches (spirit)/Civil Unions through the government” equation as a way of drawing a conceptual protective barrier around the word “Marriage” to preserve it as the monks did other large concepts in the Dark Ages. We could then preserve the idea that a Marriage truly is a spiritual rather than a casual commitment. That idea is what is really being diluted by the constant push and pull of competing tsunamis, and what the voters in Maine chose to try to retain.

But as long as there isn’t strong clarity in the electorate (in Maine it was a close thing), then preservation of the larger idea of Marriage would be better served, in my mind, by acknowleging the already separated legal (governmental) definition from the spiritual reality.

Through humbly and genuinely conceding the ground of legal rights through Civil Unions, and giving Marriage jurisdiction to churches, then we’ve actually defanged the argument over the word itself, and ultimately the concept of spiritual Marriage survives. The way it’s going, the entire idea may end up getting lost in the war.

Anyway… I’ve hijacked the thread enough. Laundry wants doing.

Yes, I see where you’re coming from, and historically, I do see that my last line can be seen as flawed. I’m not sure how that flaw can be remedied as of yet, with today’s cultural reality being what it is.

How does one get that horse back in the barn except incrementally, through individual hearts and minds deciding that they themselves will tame, through love and a firm conviction, the image of the horse in their own homes and families?

Government will never be able to work again as a moral instructor or curator. This is just part of reaping what generations before now have sown. And so, I guess what the flaw really amounts to, in my mind, is a strategic retreat. And acknowledgement that current reality is what it is. Sun Tzu – like, I guess you could say. The attempt to convince a completely unreceptive half of the public from a pulpit frought with corruption and rent-seeking (ie: from the governmental or political or party perspective) is doomed to failure.

Success, I believe, lies in the conviction within individual hearts and minds, and changing the culture bit by bit. The governmental role needs to be minimized on all fronts, to hold back the oncoming disaster, but the cultural understanding and deep change needs to happen on a person-to-person level.

I guess, for me, the process of change comes down to the difference between termites and tsunamis. Both can take down an edifice. One is subtle and easily missed. The other is pretty obvious.

Our culture, in my view, isn’t going to be returned to health by a tsunami of governmental effort, unless that effort is specifically geared toward removing power from the governmental realm.

It won’t be through counter-tsunamis from each side trying to get control of the whole. A tsunami is great for clearing the beach, but you can’t have a culture survive with one coming from one direction, followed immediately by another coming from the opposite direction. We need our next wave to be one that eats itself rather than everyone else. Turn it back on itself to keep the rest of us out of the disaster zone.

Real change in our culture though, in my opinion, will be through the individual termites who, each doing their own thing, together serve to take down the whole structure of governmental control of any of the definitions of our lives (not just the marriage definition, but also educational definitions, definitions of correct thinking, definitions of correct environmental behavior, etc.). That will take individual spiritual and/or philosophical conviction.

It doesn’t have to be through churches, but churches make good repositories for the wisdom of the ages. Think of the monestaries in the dark ages. Those monks weren’t giving up the fight, just because their realm of influence was reduced to the space immediately around them. They were preserving wisdom until individual hearts and minds were again looking for it.

For what it’s worth, I think the Democrats and Obama are being particularly tsunami-like in their efforts to change this country, which is not too smart of them, in my opinion, since it makes them extremely visible. When they were being the cultural termites they were pretty much getting everything they wanted. Now it’s pretty clear that we can point to the oncoming tsunami and say to folks “look… is *that* what you really want?”

Meanwhile, the counter to their tsunami isn’t a return one of rent-seeking and control from another group of crooks. (Not that you were advocating such… I’m just trying to anticipate counter-points from several possible directions, and not doing a great job of it. But, to try to clarify: I do see we need a tsunami to clear out the DC crooks there now, but when the new batch is in place, their job needs to be to basically put most of Washington DC out of work. Crooks won’t want to do that.)

Anyway… back to the culture… the true lasting cultural change, in my view, is going to be subtle, working outside government’s corrupt channels… like the termites the left once were.

So the focus, in today’s reality, should be on building a high levee, at first, to guard us from the government’s current tsunami… then when the waters from that over-reach have been contained, to find real and effective ways to drain the swamp. To get this beast back into its cage and free up the society that it is killing.

It’ll take some trust in individual Americans to run their own lives and come to their own moral conclusions, including the one about what a marriage is, but I think we can all agree that most individual Americans are a lot smarter and more moral than the insane lot in Washington.

Excellent, excellent comment. However, I don’t think the horse has disappeared over the horizon, though, you are correct, it has left the barn. Anyway, to argue that since marriage is already broken (through divorce and the calamity in family courts) we should just deep-six it is like arguing that the way to fix a flat is to slash the other tires. Just because the state (and society) has (hopefully temporarily) forgotten the reason for marriage doesn’t mean we shouldn’t argue for a restoration. I agree that for individual marriage it “has to do with the spirit of those entering it.” However, when the state decides to start recognizing any and every conceivable relationship and treating them as if they are equivalent (morally and functionally) as marriages or marriage-like, fewer people will enter these unions and more who do will enter them not in the “spirit” by which society generally and children particularly benefit. I say with great sincerity that you are obviously a brilliant woman, but may I suggest that your last line demonstrates a flaw that spoils your analysis and solution? Marriage has NEVER, EVER, in the history of this country or any other successful civilization “privately defined.” Yes, marriage is ALSO relgiously defined (in the same exact way by all for most of the history of Western Civilization), but that doesn’t mean that it cannot be defined publicly as well. Marriage has always been and must always be a public institution, so your suggestion that marriage be “returned…to the juridiction of the churches” is to suggest that we return to something that has never been. Yes, churches have historically performed marriage ceremonies, but the marriage contract has ALWAYS been recognized by the state. Illegal marriage entered into in religious settings (think Mormons and polygamy)have never been recognized by the state. (As a matter of fact, Utah’s statehood was conditioned upon that state aligning its marriage laws with the rest of America — one man, one woman) Legal marriages entered into in a non-church setting were always treated exactly the same as those entered into in relgious settings. I think you see what I’m getting at here.

Yes, that was once the case, but sadly government (and society in general) long ago gave up the notion that protection of the children was worth anything when it inconvienced adults. I am a Gen-Xer… a member of the first generation whose home life, security, and needs were considered entirely secondary to the adults’ desire for instant gratification and freedom. I understand from watching the destruction around me, the impact of the state’s abdication of the principles behind marriage.

But, realistically speaking, that horse has left the barn, and it wasn’t the gay community that opened the gate. I don’t see how it can be brought back in, except through individuals (particularly women these days) choosing to personally define marriage as a thing they can’t easily just dump. In other words, except through individuals defining their own marriages as a Covenant… as something beyond their own personal whims. And individuals also noting the pain and destruction that a casual definition of marriage brings to their own children.

For me, recognizing reality, especially when it sucks, keeps me from tilting at windmills too often. And observing reality tells me that the state is no longer in the “marriage” business anyway (in terms of encouraging a state of affairs that most benefits chilren), and has no interest (or mandate from a perpetually selfish electorate) to get back into it. Family courts are clearly not about benefitting children.

So, since the state has already decided that it will just act as if all things are allowed and treat every marriage as a Civil Union (a non-binding contract) anyway, why not just make it official. Let marriage go back to what it was meant to be… a Covenant supported and nurtured by a family and/or a church. People who view marriage as a greater commitment than the one implied by governmental rules will continue to do so. Those who don’t… will end up getting a Civil Divorce, as they already do.

And yeah, if we allow Civil Unions, then any grouping of people could claim one, I suppose, but how really would that be different from the wrangling that goes on in family courts when Kid A has Birth Mother A and Birth Father A as well as Step-parents (or Shack-ups) B,C,D & E, all looking for someone else to take financial responsibility for the kid while they themselves get the control or fun stuff, or avoid responsibility altogether? The way things are going right now, no one in government really gives a flip how it all impacts the kids.

Addressing the special hell that is the Family Court system would be a whole other discussion though.

Vincent: “You can’t argue FOR CU/DP and AGAINST same-sex “marriage” with any real coherence.”

If you’re talking about governmentally defined “same-sex marriage” then I disagree. You can argue for one but against the other. If you view that marriage is a three party agreement with God being the third party, then of course marriage shouldn’t be redefined to leave out God. Which is why I advocate returning Marriage, as a spiritual commitment, to the jurisdiction of the churches, or to privately spiritual recognition in families (for those of no particular faith, but with spiritual commitment).

In other words… the state of Marriage has to do with the spirit of those entering it. And each person’s definition is not going to be a universally accepted thing. Hopefully, it will be a mutually accepted thing within their own Marriage though.

So… Marriage is privately (and/or religiously) defined, in my pov, while a Civil Union is publicly (meaning “legally”) defined.

His fight seems to me, on the existential level, to be really about getting his father and the Catholic Church to consider his relationship to be the equivalent of his parents’ marriage. He fights for governmental recognition because he thinks that is the battle he can actually win, but what he doesn’t seem to realize is that even if he wins, he loses.

His father is never going to be happy that his son is gay. He accepts that it is so, he loves his son, but he is not going to like that he is gay, and no legal framework is going to change that. His father has profound fears for his son’s life (my uncle is a retired cop, in Baltimore, and my cousin lives in a fairly unsafe area there), and not the least fear is the fear of Aids. He sees my cousin’s gayness as being one additional thing that puts him at risk, and as a parent he is afraid that that one other thing might be the thing that causes him to lose his son.

My cousin though, is blithely unconcerned with his father’s fear. He treats those fears as illegitimate and instead uses them as a justification for his own feelings of victimization.

The blinders that he wears with respect to his own father, combined with the blinders that he wears to his own unconscious realization that the Catholic Church is not going to change its mind about marrying gays, lead my cousin to think that his world would be fine if he could just get the government to sanction, and better yet, *force others* to sanction his relationship as a marriage.

He doesn’t realize that we all really do want him to be happy. We want him to be able to have a contract with his partner to enable them to enjoy the same governmental rights that we do. We just also are realistic enough to realize that demanding a religion change to suit one’s preferences isn’t going to work. Demanding a father not fear for his son’s life isn’t going to work.

At some point, he needs to grow up and realize that he has choices to make too. He could become Unitarian or Episcopalian. He could acknowledge his father’s fears and address them in a mature and loving way… treat the threat seriously and let his father see that he is doing so, rather than setting himself up for another mugging and severe beating, complete with a 3 a.m. phone call from the hospital to call his parents to his bedside. (As happened before due, in small part, to his own naivte and assumption that it *shouldn’t* happen. Opportunistic criminals are clearly the ones to blame, but my cousin wasn’t exactly using any common sense.)

Anyway. I know anecdote does not equal data, but from my own observations of some in the activist gay community, I do tend to believe that some are trying to avoid addressing much deeper issues through taking the most visible and vocal route. It’s much easier to be loud and victimized than to deal with the messy feelings of difficult relationships and rejection from the church you think you should love.

I do think having all governmentally sanctioned relationships legally referred to as “civil unions” and subject to that sort of contract, while returning the word “marriage” to the churches to sanction relationships within their congregations as convental commitments, would be the most humane thing to do for all parties.