Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Switchboard >

Can gay marriage be outlawed by an amendment to the US constitution without endangering the separation of church and state?

23:09 / 19.04.04

I read something somewhere, but would love confirmation, does the US constitution forbid religious opinions from coming into policies? If so, how can Bush justify wanting Gay marriages being made illegal, if, as far as I can see, this is a religious/political mater?

00:44 / 20.04.04

as long as congress votes on it and the president doesn't veto it and the supreme court doesn't declare it unconstitutional, you can put ANYTHING into law.

on the topic of gay marraige: whether churches marry gays is up to them (they're private institutions, they have the right to accept or deny it) but whether the state marries gays is not a religious issue, but a civil rights one. married couple have certain rights that unmarried ones don't - that makes barring gays from marrying essentially unconstitutional.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

11:00 / 20.04.04

The way they get around it usually have a study that 'shows' it's a social problem rather than a religious one, i.e; "Here are ten studies from people who aren't acknowledged as experts in the field or are known to be extremely rabid supporters of my party and these reports show that there is a direct correlation between gay marriages and earthquakes. Therefore we must make it part of the constitution to ban gay marriages for ever, so as to save Los Angeles."

However, when it's become political necessity for a President or any political figure to plead at the end of every speech God bless America, as no-one else is likely to, and a big part of his character is based on how religious he is (apparently John Kerry is unsuitable for the job because a couple of weeks ago he went to a church for a different denomination, I think the Republican blogger was trying to suggest that if Kerry changed his strand of Christianity he might therefore try to change America into a Communist state or something).

I don't know if this was exacerbated by the USA being in opposition to the Godless atheistic communists during the Cold War.

11:19 / 20.04.04

on the topic of gay marraige: whether churches marry gays is up to them (they're private institutions, they have the right to accept or deny it) but whether the state marries gays is not a religious issue, but a civil rights one. married couple have certain rights that unmarried ones don't - that makes barring gays from marrying essentially unconstitutional.

Ten raises an interesting point - is marriage itself religious institution or simply a legal one - on a strict dictionary definition basis it would seem that marriage, not the weasel term civil union, is legally defines as existing outside the exclusive domain of religious structures. Of course, the willingness of America's religious lobby will be to agree with this is perhaps unlikely