The Federal Prop. 8 Trial / Gay Marriage Catch-All

momgamer wrote:

I'll Nth the Milkman's post. At our church, not only do you have to be a member, you and your spouse have to attend a series of marriage counseling sessions with some trained counselors as part of the package before they'll allow you to be married there.

Is this a celibate priest offering relationship advice type counseling session? I never could quite wrap my brain around that.

Either way, our churches in the area are all pretty big on the same thing (being a member of the church, counselling sessions). There's a reason me and my wife just got married in the backyard instead.

Demosthenes wrote:
momgamer wrote:

I'll Nth the Milkman's post. At our church, not only do you have to be a member, you and your spouse have to attend a series of marriage counseling sessions with some trained counselors as part of the package before they'll allow you to be married there.

Is this a celibate priest offering relationship advice type counseling session? I never could quite wrap my brain around that.

Either way, our churches in the area are all pretty big on the same thing (being a member of the church, counselling sessions). There's a reason me and my wife just got married in the backyard instead. :)

Nope, he's not celibate. And in fact, he's been married twice. That's why he's so into making sure people have the tools to negotiate their new life together before they leap the broom.

momgamer wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
momgamer wrote:

I'll Nth the Milkman's post. At our church, not only do you have to be a member, you and your spouse have to attend a series of marriage counseling sessions with some trained counselors as part of the package before they'll allow you to be married there.

Is this a celibate priest offering relationship advice type counseling session? I never could quite wrap my brain around that.

Either way, our churches in the area are all pretty big on the same thing (being a member of the church, counselling sessions). There's a reason me and my wife just got married in the backyard instead. :)

Nope, he's not celibate. And in fact, he's been married twice. That's why he's so into making sure people have the tools to negotiate their new life together before they leap the broom.

The preacher at the Presbyterian place made us fill out questionaires and sit around talking with him for half an hour. He read what we wrote and said "Yeah, you two seem pretty well screwed together" (he was a former Army chaplain) and used up most of the half hour telling us not to stress about all the crap we were already stressing about.

I told him that if he served booze in the pews, he could count on me every Sunday. He laughed and said "We ain't Catholic".

AND MY AXE

Jayhawker wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

I wouldn't mind if a church I was considering allowed gay marriage, but if free beer was served before passing the collection plate, you could probably count me in every Sunday.

I think I speak for most of America.

I think I will move to Colorado and start a Church of Weed.

During the Middle Ages, beer used to be the safest way of keeping potable water. As such, the job of the European brewmaster was not a frivolous profession. It was a necessary part of a healthy functioning society. It didn't take long for the Church to recognize the utility in this, well, utility and thus started the tradition of doling out beer after services to ensure proper godly attendance.

With modern sanitation, this practice gradually declined.

So did Christianity.

If I recall my beer history, the Church was also largely responsible for the shift in brewing away from a female dominated activity and into a male dominated activity. Prior to the European monks, the brewing of beer was done by the same people who made bread, which was typically a woman's responsibility.

Seth wrote:

If I recall my beer history, the Church was also largely responsible for the shift in brewing away from a female dominated activity and into a male dominated activity. Prior to the European monks, the brewing of beer was done by the same people who made bread, which was typically a woman's responsibility.

Hmm. Entirely possible.

Add women to the list of things I want in my beer church.

Seth wrote:
KingGorilla wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

I think I will move to Colorado and start a Church of Weed.

You have my sword.

AND MY AXE

You carry the fate of us all, stoned one. If it is indeed the will of the Goodjers, then Farscry will see it done.

Farscry wrote:
Seth wrote:
KingGorilla wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

I think I will move to Colorado and start a Church of Weed.

You have my sword.

AND MY AXE

You carry the fate of us all, stoned one. If it is indeed the will of the Goodjers, then Farscry will see it done.

I wish this bong had never come to the Shire.

This is the last of the Longbottom Leaf. Keep it secret, keep it SAFE!

Oh right, gay marriage and after wedding party buses.

Sorry we went down a hobbit hole there.

Jayhawker wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

It wouldn't mind if a church I was considering allowed gay marriage, but if free beer was served before passing the collection plate, you could probably count me in every Sunday.

I think I speak for most of America.

I think I will move to Colorado and start a Church of Weed.

You all need to join the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church.

Hooray!!! Bigoted public servants in a county in Maryland to get a pass for not doing their jobs!

When same-sex marriage becomes legal in Maryland next week, some employees in the St. Mary's County Circuit Court will stop performing marriages, passing the duty on to other employees.

"There are some [deputy clerks] that have voiced some opposition to doing it -- [they have] religious feelings about it ... so it's basically my idea that they won't do any marriage at all," said Joan Williams, clerk of the St. Mary's County Circuit Court. "Some people are just very against same-sex marriages, and I have to respect their reasons and their decisions."

These so-called "public servants" need to be told either to do their damn jobs or be fired. If they refuse and are fired, they should also be barred from any public service again.

It is outrageous that the clerk is even entertaining this idea. Good grief. She would be fired if she had said, "Some people are just very against performing weddings for Jews, and I have to respect their reasons and their decisions."

No, they made their decision, and that is that they no longer are public servants. They are servants that will serve the members of the public they wish, not all members of the public.

Let's hope the state government of Maryland steps in and tells these twits to either do their job or pack up their desks and leave. Immediately.

Phoenix Rev wrote:

Hooray!!! Bigoted public servants in a county in Maryland to get a pass for not doing their jobs!

When same-sex marriage becomes legal in Maryland next week, some employees in the St. Mary's County Circuit Court will stop performing marriages, passing the duty on to other employees.

"There are some [deputy clerks] that have voiced some opposition to doing it -- [they have] religious feelings about it ... so it's basically my idea that they won't do any marriage at all," said Joan Williams, clerk of the St. Mary's County Circuit Court. "Some people are just very against same-sex marriages, and I have to respect their reasons and their decisions."

These so-called "public servants" need to be told either to do their damn jobs or be fired. If they refuse and are fired, they should also be barred from any public service again.

It is outrageous that the clerk is even entertaining this idea. Good grief. She would be fired if she had said, "Some people are just very against performing weddings for Jews, and I have to respect their reasons and their decisions."

No, they made their decision, and that is that they no longer are public servants. They are servants that will serve the members of the public they wish, not all members of the public.

Let's hope the state government of Maryland steps in and tells these twits to either do their job or pack up their desks and leave. Immediately.

*brain ragequits* For realsies, Rev. Fired or made to do their job. Those are the options for the higher authorities above that court now. Ridiculous. Grrrrrr... gotta stop reading that, making me mad.

St. Mary's County is the home of the Patuxent River Naval Air Base and pretty much where all of experimental NAVAIR went after the latest BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) was implemented. As a result, you have a ton of military folks from different parts of the country descending upon an already pretty conservative county.

It is not at all representative of the rest of Maryland.

Paleocon wrote:

St. Mary's County is the home of the Patuxent River Naval Air Base and pretty much where all of experimental NAVAIR went after the latest BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) was implemented. As a result, you have a ton of military folks from different parts of the country descending upon an already pretty conservative county.

It is not at all representative of the rest of Maryland.

Clearly, given that the law passed, that doesn't give public servants the right to ignore their duties though. Yes, they have the right to free expression, religious beliefs, etc... except when their public servants on the job, in which case they need to be following their state's laws, and if they really have such problems with this, they need to be quitting, because this isn't going away.

Demosthenes wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

St. Mary's County is the home of the Patuxent River Naval Air Base and pretty much where all of experimental NAVAIR went after the latest BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) was implemented. As a result, you have a ton of military folks from different parts of the country descending upon an already pretty conservative county.

It is not at all representative of the rest of Maryland.

Clearly, given that the law passed, that doesn't give public servants the right to ignore their duties though. Yes, they have the right to free expression, religious beliefs, etc... except when their public servants on the job, in which case they need to be following their state's laws, and if they really have such problems with this, they need to be quitting, because this isn't going away.

I don't disagree. I am just saying that Lexington Park is about as bass-ackward as one gets in Maryland without being from Garrett County where the only employer is the Federal Prison.

Two great news items to share...

First, the Chair of the Illinois Republican Party has thrown his full support behind the effort to legalize gay marriage in Illinois:

"More and more Americans understand that if two people want to make a lifelong commitment to each other, government should not stand in their way," Brady said. "Giving gay and lesbian couples the freedom to get married honors the best conservative principles. It strengthens families and reinforces a key Republican value - that the law should treat all citizens equally."

"Importantly, the pending legislation would protect the freedom of religion," Brady added. "No church or religious organization would ever be required to perform a union with which it disagrees."

The acceptance of marriage equality is progressing at a rapid pace, and more and more Republicans are realizing they can join the bandwagon or be left in the dust.

Second, this story out of Columbus, OH is just wonderful.

In essence, two gay men are in line for pizza at a food truck and it is cold. They decide to hold hands to keep warm and are talking about what fun they were having that night when the patron in front of them told them to stop their "gay sh*t" out. Little did that patron know that he would face a crowd hostile to his bigotry and the people running the food truck would refuse to serve him because of his anti-gay tirade.

Columbus is hardly a liberal bastion, but it is heartwarming to know that people are pushing back against anti-gay statements and sentiments.

Kudos to the crowd and the pizza truck.

Saw the Columbus story over on reddit. The neighborhood, the Short North, is THE gay neighborhood of Columbus, and while Ohio isn't all that liberal, Columbus is pretty damned friendly to gays. IIRC, it's one of the best cities for gays. Columbus Pride this year was impressively supported by local employers, and the number of churches that marched in the Pride parade was surprising. Not to mention the tiny size of the protesters' "crowd" that followed it.

And that pizza place has a huge truck they send to Columbus Pride, and the line was REALLY long. Good pizza, too.

NSMike wrote:

Saw the Columbus story over on reddit. The neighborhood, the Short North, is THE gay neighborhood of Columbus, and while Ohio isn't all that liberal, Columbus is pretty damned friendly to gays. IIRC, it's one of the best cities for gays. Columbus Pride this year was impressively supported by local employers, and the number of churches that marched in the Pride parade was surprising. Not to mention the tiny size of the protesters' "crowd" that followed it.

And that pizza place has a huge truck they send to Columbus Pride, and the line was REALLY long. Good pizza, too.

Cinci tends to be pretty good to, at least from what I've seen. Pretty decent Pride parade down here too, sponsored by the company I work for which made me feel pretty good about working here.

Mike this is the same pizza place that had the line all day long. They have a "semi permanent" place in the short north where they have picnic tables and show old movies on the wall of a building.

They also have an amazing sauce named "F*ck Vampire Sauce" that is AMAZING!

So glad to see this and live in this city.

*Edit*

Just realized you said it was the place.... I will go back to my hole now

Well, good riddance to bad rubbish.

In what can only be described as me trying with every ounce of energy in my body to muster a tear, I simply cannot find any sadness in seeing the end to Maggie Gallagher's op-ed pieces running in a newspaper near you. (Gallagher is the founder and past president of the National Organization for Marriage, the lead anti-gay political organization in the U.S.). Starting on Wednesday, Gallagher's prattle will cease to be distributed by her syndicate and she will be moving on to "other projects."

Good riddance.

Of course, she couldn't leave without getting her last digs in and completely skewing a basic understanding of sex, marriage, and just about everything else.

She writes,

Every life is precious. It is better to care for your children than to kill them. Divorce hurts children; it also breaks apart life's most precious commitment -- a family.

How she ever became an expert on relationships is beyond me. What claptrap. In all my year's of pastoral counseling, the numbers were pretty even on the number of children who were hurt by divorce and those children who were liberated by divorce because they grew tired of hearing Mommie and Daddy scream at each other. And her flair for the obvious is vile. Of course divorce breaks apart a family. So does a fake relationship where the only thing holding two people together is a marriage license from a state.

Sex makes babies. Society needs babies. Babies need their mother and their father. Men and women need each other. We all need a strong marriage culture, whether we choose to marry or not.

Sex also forms bonds and provides communion between two people like no other. Sex is also for pleasure. Babies need a loving environment. Study after study after study has shown no discernible difference in the quality of upbringing if the parent are gay or straight. And while it is true that men and women need each other, men also need other men and women also need other women. In essence, we need each other! As for a strong marriage culture, that sounds all well and good, but we can't even define how we want marriage to look like.

On every key measure, marriage is weaker. The consequences are more obviously unsustainable, yet culturally powerful voices are less willing to engage, and the power of porn and Hollywood to create our norms for family life is more triumphant than ever.

No, on ever key measure, marriage is actually stronger. We now have committed gay couples solidifying their relationships with government-sanctioned contracts that build and create families and solid homes and nurturing couples. I don't even know where to start with the "power of porn" comment, and Hollywood is a little late to the game with shows like "Modern Family" since families like that have existed for some time. But Maggie never misses a chance to bring up the same scapegoats. You know, America would be so much better off if we just got rid of porn and Hollywood and returned to the days of coverture and when husbands could rape their wives with impunity.

Without a powerful ideal of masculinity that points men toward marriage and fatherhood, more and more young men are deciding the hard work of becoming marriageable is not worth it: Porn, beer, video games with the guys, freedom and fleeting sexual encounters are good enough.

This is absurd. Masculinity has never been defined in terms of marriage or fatherhood, and no one, not a single person on this planet, is obligated to enter into marriage for the sake of society. This woman is nuts.

Why should young men work hard to become protectors and defenders of women and children when American culture -- and women -- tells them they are not needed in either role?

Those poor, weak, cowering women who need men, Men, MEN to protect and defend them. Perhaps Maggie's next business card should read, "Maggie Gallagher - Sexist Pig."

The future belongs to those of us with enough hope to rebuild on the ashes of optimism, a new American civilization -- uniting sex, love, babies, mothers and fathers in this thing called marriage.

And with her last pen stroke, Maggie Gallagher proves once and for all that she is nothing more than a bigot, a woman who can't see beyond her own limitations and understand that the new American civilization includes gay people in "this thing called marriage."

Goodbye, Maggie.

You won't be missed.

Whatever happened to love your enemies PR?

Reminds me of Monty Python's the Meaning of Life: "Everytime they have sex, they must have a baby!"

Nomad wrote:

Whatever happened to love your enemies PR? ;)

Yeah, PR, how dare you speak ill of your enemies! Jesus certainly never would call someone a hypocrite, he would love his enemies! (Please ignore Matthew 21:13-36 here, where Jesus even calls the Pharisees - an arguable stand-in for the likes of Gallagher - snakes and vipers! That's some harsh indictment there, and I'm not being sarcastic about that)

I wonder if this attitude towards sex is something that is becoming more prevalent as a matter of acceptance of such cultural extremes represented by shows like the Duggars' show... what is it 19 Kids and Counting? Have they broke 20 yet? I would argue that seeing a couple that certainly seems to view sex as something to do every 9-10 months to get a new bun in the oven after the last one just popped out makes that view more acceptable to others.

What's amusing to this extreme is the lack of emphasis on Mrs. Duggar's health complications that are arising, at least by the family themselves. Based on what I've heard, any future Duggars run a pretty high risk of having the same complications and medical assistance as their last child did, hasn't stopped them from saying they are going to have more and more and more kids. Its ridiculous. Other species on the planet have been studied and found to use sex as a recreational activity (dolphins I remember, were one, but I can't remember what some of the others were) as well, and yet certain groups continue to go on and on about how there is only one purpose to it.

How can you forget bonobos!
IMAGE(http://www.popcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/bonobo.jpg)

Nomad wrote:

Whatever happened to love your enemies PR? ;)

I am more than happy to entertain some citations where the invocation of love requires the expulsion of criticism.

Several sources are now reporting that the SCOTUS will take up the Prop. 8 and DOMA cases on March 25-26.

How can you forget bonobos!

I knew there were more species, I just couldn't really do a Google search for that at work.