...and I'm sure it was quite unintentional.
I check in on my former hometown's news-site from time to time. Today there was a headline about a federal judge acting to move the decision about California's Proposition 8 - which attempts to legally prevent persons of the same gender from forming a social/legal/financial unit - to the US Supreme Court. In November 2008, a statewide ballot prohibiting same-sex marriage passed. A group of people sued to challenge this. In May, the state supreme court said that it could not arbtrarily overrule what the voters approved, and the ban was upheld. Now the fight is being taken to the US Supreme Court.
The news-site has had random rotating ads on its articles for quite some time. The placement is completely random...so the ad I was served, as I viewed the article, was completely serendipidous...and absolutely perfect.
I think that disallowing marriage - the formation of a social, legal, and economic unit - for persons of the same gender is senseless. There are many people who claim that marriage is a religious institution and that since many religions preach against homosexuality, then the only people who can experience the sacrament of marriage are two persons of opposite genders. There's a flaw in this logic, though. What additional secular legal rights or responsibilities does a 13-year-old Jewish child get when they go through a bar/bat mitzvah? None. And what additional secular legal rights or responsibilities does a Roman Catholic child get when they go through the rite of first communion? None. There are plenty of religious ceremonies that do not grant any changed legal status outside the religion in question. The barrier should work both ways: because, hey folks, the social concept of "marriage" was in place long before the thirteen tribes were wandering the desert. Marriage has a religious component for some, but hardly for all. Marriage is a matter of property rights, inheritance, and mutual legal/fiscal/social responsibility...which, no matter how much the church might like to control that, it doesn't, and hasn't directly for quite some time. The whole idea of excluding people from anything just because they're not exactly the same as the majority of the population is, in my mind, extremely anti-Christian. It's petty, it's meanspirited, it's elitist, it's "I want to be special so I don't want *them* to be able to have the same rights as me, even if they're not causing anyone any material harm, because they're different", and it's very much against the inclusive school of thought preached by the individual, or group of individuals, whom history calls "Jesus of Nazareth".
So the placement of this ad, on this article, made me smile:
And really, what would Jesus do? He'd wish the couple well, is what. He'd attend the wedding if invited, is what. And he'd look with confusion, if not mild exasperation, upon anyone who said, "But they can't get married!! That's not Christian!!"
