Get the Government out of Marriage and Most Everything Else Too!
I was at dinner the other night and someone, knowing my penchant for history and religion, asked me about monogamy and why the Bible teaches only one man and one woman. They were shocked when I said that many in the Bible had multiple spouses and concubines. The New Testament, through Paul, encourages you to dedicate yourself to God and not take a mate, but to be married if you would be carried away by lust without a spouse. Better to have someone to mate with than to try to be celibate if you are unable. For most of human existence, marriage was ONLY a religious institution. I have tried in vain so far to see where it crossed over into a governmental regulation.
Getting government involved in anything we don’t have to always results in a loss of liberty. Marriage should remain a religious only ceremony. If your religion prohibits same sex marriage, so be it. If your religion, or lack thereof, allows it, so be it. That is real freedom. People like me that are right-wing Christian fundamentalists should avoid having the government get involved. If they can force a system of beliefs on some, they will do it to us as well. We need to let people live by their choices, that is why God gave us free will in the first place. Neither side should fun to Big Government to limit freedoms of others.
If government wants to pay for birth control, they should not force Catholics to pay for it. I personally disagree with Catholics, but I don’t want them to lose their freedoms. If same sex couples want to get married by a willing person with the proper paperwork to marry them, so be it. I don’t want them to lose their freedom either. I don’t want the government to take away our guns, tell us who we can marry, how we can worship, who we can hire, what we can pay them, what light bulbs we can buy, how much our toilet can flush, when we can use a fireplace, or a million other invasive things they do now.
We are the frogs in the pot, with the temperature slowly rising and we do not jump out before we are cooked. When will we stop fighting through government to limit others, and wake-up and fight together to limit government power? We need to return to a government OF the people, BY the people, FOR the people. I have faith in my fellow men and women that we can live our lives the way we wish without a nanny government deciding everything for us.
I am for freedom, personal liberty, and your ability to make your own choices, whether I agree with them or not. I want the same in return. Neither of us will get it if a nameless, faceless bureaucrat decides for us.
Michael Bradley - Time Traveler 
Seriously, a great post. I agree with everything you said, and although I am not religious, I believe people should be free to make their own choices and mistakes. I don’t want the government telling me what I can and can’t do. (Outside of not killing people, stealing, and those other important things to maintaining a large community of people.)
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Christians already have the freedom to not allow homosexuals to be married in their church, and no one is seriously threatening that freedom.
Homosexuals don’t have the freedom to be married in any capacity, because the law (the government) says so.
To my mind, allowing gay marriage IS getting the government out of marriage. It’s also getting religion out of the government, which I think is (generally) also a good thing. So I hope it happens some day in the not too distant future.
I’m not sure whether you were making this point or not, but there you go.
PS. I consider myself a Christian and I liked your post about “smart faith”.
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My point is that anyone should be able to follow their beliefs. If same sex people want to get married, up to them. I don’t want to use government to impose its codes on anyone. Once they start they never stop.
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Ok, I more or less agree with the sentiment, but I find it confusing or even contradictory that you say “Marriage should remain a religious only ceremony” as well as “If same sex couples want to get married by a willing person with the proper paperwork to marry them, so be it”.
If you’re talking about the government trying to force the church to recognise gay marriage then you have a point. But is that happening?
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There are plenty of churches right now that not only perform same sex marriages but have LGBTQ pastors. A justice of the peace, or anyone who does the “paperwork to be ordained” can marry someone, as well as the Captain of a Ship and others. Everyone, regardless of their beliefs, should be able to be joined if they wish, but no individual church should be told what to do, nor should the government be involved except to handle cohabitation contracts and care of offspring.
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Ok, fair enough.
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I am a liberty and freedom first person. Let people do what they want without government control, unless their actions will harm others directly. Who people live, love and have sex with does not harm me or anyone unless they are involving minors or doing things against another’s consent. Otherwise, whether I approve of them, or they of me, should be irrelevant.
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I don’t think we differ too far from one another in terms of ideology. Perhaps I was just a bit confused by your original post. Re-reading it I feel you were mostly just using marriage as starting point example to get to issue of over-zealous government regulations – rather than aiming to comment on the same sex marriage issue.
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“When will we stop fighting through government to limit others, and wake-up and fight together to limit government power?” Possibly the most intelligent thing I’ve read all day.
I am also a fundamentalist Christian right-winger, but it irritates me when I hear other Christians calling for the government to ban same-sex marriage in order to “preserve the family as God intended.” You are so right in saying it is a religious issue, not a political one. Banning same sex marriage will not suddenly improve family values, nor prevent them from crumbling, just as using the Bible to defend religious viewpoints will not make your argument valid to an atheist. You can’t force anyone to agree with your viewpoint by forcing it on them, especially when the basis used for the argument is not accepted by the intended recipient.
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