Should 'Marriage' be re-defined

[handsomefortune]

What difference does it make to anyone not involved? erm, think of the florists?

while your name is top of the contributions, the thread title currently reads 'should marriage be anotherbob'? .... which i feel is about right.

what about civil partnerships for hetrosexuals ...? if they really have to unite officially at all?

i'm afraid i turned off michael buerke mid flow as he got over excited about the various distinctions on wednesday .... i certainly wouldn't listen to r4 'the moral maize' on this subject, i much prefer to keep my sanity instead. i bet buerke was in his element separating the wheat from the chaff ....or so he imagines. it's ingrained you know. (his show will repeat tonight, for those who enjoy constant conflation and confusion, and that sort of thing).

[Vile Consort]

Marriage is the word that has always been used to describe the official Church/State-sponsored union of a man and a woman. In the same way as the sun is the sun and the moon is the moon. It's not just an all-encompassing label, it's two gender relationship is its very meaning and purpose.

It immediately loses this meaning if we are now to include same-sex couples, as indeed it would if we had, say, a single marriage of three or four heterosexuals.

So yes, any personal morality apart, why change the meaning of the word when there are plenty of others from which to choose, if 'Civil Partnership' has suddenly and rather mysteriously become unacceptable?

So your objection is entirely on linguistic, not moral, grounds?

[Lateralthinking1]

You obviously still haven't realised that I currently reside in Leafy Cheshire, Lat ...

Not the area that went from Neil and Christine Hamilton to George Osborne via Martin Bell I hope.

[scottycelt]

So your objection is entirely on linguistic, not moral, grounds?

No, on both, as I thought my second sentence clearly indicated.

However, I can't dictate the morality of others and, in any case, wouldn't even dare, as I have enough trouble trying to take care of my own!

That is why I deliberately used the phrase 'with my secular hat on' as it would be pointless going down the alternative route on this forum, don't you agree ? A quick glance at the various posts on this thread, and many others, illustrate that any intolerance and 'bigotry' is not entirely confined to one side of the secular/religious argument.

Hope that's now crystal clear ...

Now something dreadful has happened at the Spurs/Bolton game, so that's it from me ...

[Flosshilde]

It was not I that organised the poll, which was no doubt hired by some 'liberal' politically-correct organisation/newspaper looking for its own favoured answers. I am simply and respectfully assuming that the poll's findings (the actual answers) are correct ..

Unless you agree with John Skelton that homosexual men are generally superior in their domestic habits to their heterosexual counterparts (which in itself explodes the 'liberal' myth of 'equality of sexual orientation') then both the second question (in the light of the poll and the subject of this thread) and the logical answer to that question, are indeed glaringly obvious.

I suspect it is more a case of some not wanting the second question even to be asked rather than myself desperately looking for the 'right' sort of answer to it ...

If it's the same survey that I saw reported it said that unmarried men did about 4 hours of housework (a week, I think), & unmarried women did about 7 hours. When they got married men's housework rate dropped to, I think, 40 minutes. Obviously, since gay men can't get married their housework rate would remain at 4 hours throughout their life, even if they were living with someone else. If they were, then the combined housework rate of that household would exceed the combined housework rate of the married heterosexuals' household. A gay male household is therefore obviously cleaner than a married heterosexual household.

As for Magnificat's hysterical first post, I find such statements of certainty about what a social institution is & what it isn't nonsensical. It's how society decides to define it - if society decides that it is appropriate to change the meaning then it will change.

[handsomefortune]

i think perhaps magnificat caught any 'hysteria' from michael buerke.

[handsomefortune]

progenitor 1 and progenitor 2

pro·gen·i·tor/prəˈjenətər/
Noun:

1. A person or thing from which a person, animal, or plant is descended or originates; an ancestor or parent.
2. A person who originates an artistic, political, or intellectual movement.


the second one sounds very encouraging to me....and what's more, you get two apparently ....

[scottycelt]

Not the area that went from Neil and Christine Hamilton to George Osborne via Martin Bell I hope.

The very one. Lat ... just how fortunate can such a grateful constituent possibly be ... ?

[Pianorak]

Nice one from Matt.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/?cartoon=9146990&cc=9114835

[Vile Consort]

No, on both, as I thought my second sentence clearly indicated.

Second sentence of which post?

[jayne lee wilson]

If The Ballad of Reading Gaol isn't a heroic response to a cruel and unjust "punishment", I don't know what is; you could even say that The Picture of Dorian Gray reveals a heroic kind of self-knowledge, a knowledge of the human capacity for self-deception, too. But his whole life was a heroic attempt to live as fully and honourably, as truthfully to himself, as possible... I guess I think of him as English because of his great contribution to English Literature.

Oscar Wilde, of course, was Irish. I don't see that he was a 'hero', either. A victim, certainly and tragically.




As for the "lovely old English word" that Magnificat speaks of, 'gay' had acquired sexual connotations by the mid-17th Century, when a 'gay woman', 'gay man" and 'gay house' were euphemisms for a prostitute, her dissolute client, and a brothel. No doubt this was a development of the 'carefree' meaning of gay. The present meaning is clearly an extension of this, and appears in print in the 1920s, though it was almost certainly in use colloquially before then. Noel Coward and Cole Porter both use it in songs in the usual 'modern' sense as does Cary Grant in Bringing up Baby (1938). So not exactly 'hijacking'.

[Sydney Grew]

Three points on this subject come to mind:

1) I would like to see all marriages henceforth being between no fewer than five persons, and preferably around twenty. I simply cannot imagine the horrors of being stuck with one person throughout one's life!

2) I will believe in the equal reality of "homo-sexualistic marriage" when our Monarch enters into such an one.

3) I find the concept of "gay marriage" quite similar to the idea behind the "drag queen" phenomenon of olden days. Both are born of a perverse desire to be like - to imitate - the hetero-sexualists. It is no more than the latest fad, like all those ugly little cloned moustaches in the '-seventies of the last century. It really has very little to do with homo-sexualism as such. Most undisguised homo-sexualists have no interest in "gay marriage." Their life-style and interests do not conduce to it; it is not and never could be their aspiration.

[Lateralthinking1]

1. The Mormon Church would be a good place to start for your investigations.

2. Unlikely. She believes in monogamy.

3. Wrong subject/object. Mainstream organisation is the subject. Its devices are the object.

Footnote - There is something to be said for the vertical structure of the Trinity. The problem is that it is turned by most very literally into personal projects. Hence so many swords are produced in what alas is now an extensive periphery. None of this is to reject any fundamental biological truths in many or to do anything other than support individuals' choices.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

As for the "lovely old English word" that Magnificat speaks of, 'gay' had acquired sexual connotations by the mid-17th Century, when a 'gay woman', 'gay man" and 'gay house' were euphemisms for a prostitute, her dissolute client, and a brothel. No doubt this was a development of the 'carefree' meaning of gay. The present meaning is clearly an extension of this, and appears in print in the 1920s, though it was almost certainly in use colloquially before then.

Arguably in Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr and Miss Skeen written around 1910, which uses the word 136 times. Some commentators question whether it is right to read the "modern" sense of the word into this poem/story, but that raises the question why else would Stein have witheld the work from publication?

To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay.

Noel Coward and Cole Porter both use it in songs in the usual 'modern' sense as does Cary Grant in Bringing up Baby (1938). So not exactly 'hijacking'.

Quite so. In fact, aren't the true "hijackers" those homophobic yobs who stole the word to use as a term of abuse against anyone whose "straightness" they regarded as insufficiently parallel with their own? (Or, perhaps more accurately, " ... with their own as they wished it to be considered by others".)

[David Underdown]

The current proposals do not allow any religious same-sex weddings even for those religious groups that would accept them. I think the Church of England has a point in saying that the distinction that the government is trying to make between civil and religious marriage doesn't really exist in law at the moment, and it seems to me that trying to introduce such a distinction actually creates more legal/constitutional issues than simply allowing same-sex marriages, and allowing religious groups to choose whether or not they will offer religious ceremonies (just as they can currently choose whether or not they marry divorcees)