this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Marriage is a religious act. It should be banned from all government documents. Domestic partnership should replace all mentions of marriage in government documents and licenses can exist if they are giving tax incentives to have partnerships. If you want to get married and have a wedding and what not that's between the people and their beliefs, not our government. So have a wedding and file for a domestic partnership
The government should not care who you have feelings for, nor should they monitor it. If it is religious prerogative to dictate who should be allowed to be happy with who, then all religious ties must be striped from governing bodies as it is inherently anti the happiness of the people. Which for the U.S., is a direct violation of ones right to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness.
Marriage predates all modern religions. I see no reason to cede it to tyrannical puritans.
Right because marriage isn't about religion, it's about property. It's about who owns what and who gets what when someone dies. One could point out the historical aspect of men literally owning their wives, and some people (assholes) certainly still want that, but these days it's all about money. Marriage is a way for rich people to make sure they get to hold onto their partners wealth, even in the event of a divorce or death. It's a tool of capitol, forced on the rest of us by the leaching class. We certainly don't need it to love each other. No war but class war.
Marriage is also about allocating resources for taking care of children.
Then why do I have a will?
A lot of people don't
I get where you are coming from but this just feels like a semantics argument. Just because it’s called marriage in both venues doesn’t mean it isn’t already functionally exactly the way you put it. My spouse and I got married legally a year before our (non-religious) wedding because of the pandemic, the two don’t have to happen at the same time.
It's a semantics argument that's worked in the past, to some extent. Before the supreme court made same-sex marriage legal nationally, some states introduced "civil unions" as an alternative to marriage for same sex couples. They were often functionally identical to marriage, but since they weren't called marriages you could get some conservatives to approve them. Not enough to get them passed in red states, but enough to tip the balance in swing states.
My parents had a civil union before they got married. It was very much not the same including not being able to file taxes together and only being recognized in one state.
They are separate, but the term marriage is often what people fight over.
For example the Catholic Church, the largest sect of Christianity, leader believed that domestic partnerships should be allowed and protected. But the term marriage held a "sanctity" to the church and thus they did not believe in marrying them within the religion.
So if you took the term marriage out of the documents, the issue becomes "I don't believe others should have rights that I have" and even their religion doesnt agree with them. Thus the bullshit of hiding behind freedom of religion to hate/persecute others starts to dissolve.
It feels like a semantics argument because to a large extent it's a fight about semantics. Most of the people opposed to gay marriage aren't fighting the idea that gay folks should be able to see each other in the hospital, or be covered by each other's insurance, etc - they're fighting the idea that their religious ritual from their homophobic religion should be required to accept gay people and/or that they should be required to accept gay people as being in the same spiritual state as them as a consequence of their ritual. It's why arguments against gay marriage are only extremely rarely about the legal rights and privileges granted by marriage but nearly always about things like "sanctity."
Fully separating the legal and cultural/religious concepts of marriage, including in the language is meant to resolve that by ceding the semantic ground without having to cede any actual rights. You qualify and fill out the paperwork? You're in a civil partnership. Do whatever rituals you want, argue whether or not each other's rituals "count" all you want, everyone gets the same rights legally and the government is not in any way saying your rituals are or are not equivalent to anyone else's.
👏Separation 👏of 👏Church 👏and 👏state
Yeah. I said for decades the solution wasn't to recognize gay marriage, but to stop recognizing all marriages.
I'm fine with recognizing partnerships in manners that could be beneficial to society, 2+ people residing in a residence can reduce resource consumption for buildings as well as reducing travel distance which ultimately makes for healthier living situations and less fuel consumption. So even if we get to renewable locally cultivated energy, the amount we need to use is reduced. That doesn't mean people can't live by themselves, or live in the middle nowhere on a 5-17 acre farm if they choose, but maintain infrastructure in small areas is just easier.
Half the US could not possibly care less about others’ lives, liberties, or pursuits of happiness. Nor could most of their leadership.
I'm sorry, but you are wrong.
Marriage isn't (just) a religius act. It's a civil one.
Marriage didn't start as religious. Rather, it was appropriated by religion. That's mostly a product of the fact that for a large part of recent(ish) history states had official religions which served to keep the population docile. We seem to have returned to that ideal as of recently as well.
The difference between "marriage" and "domestic partnership" when domestic partherships as such were introduced was the fact that for marriage you had to get married (i.e. go to the wedding registrar and get yourselves on the list), as opposed to domestic partnerships which were meant as a "marriage without marriage". In ages long past, bastard children had no rights of inheritance. That changed and they were treated equal. Domestic partherships likewise allowed spouses the "benefits" of marriage such as tax breaks, divorces, domestic violence protection/suits, etc.
Today, for some odd reason, you have to file for domestic partnership. That's like requiring children file for citizenship. Sure, you do have to report the child as born, but if someone finds out they should have citizenship according to the rules, after a bit of bureaucracy they should have it. It's an automatic process. You don't enter a civil partnership by filing for one. When a spouse sues the other the courts decide whether their relationship constitutes a partnership. So it's a status aforded automatically, not unlike citizenship (until Trump trumps that, at least).
Again, religions don't own a monopoly on marriage. States have been marrying people quite literally since time immemorial. They've been conflated with religion because then there used to be a state-enforced official religion, which the US (and many other places) seem to have returned to.
What we should do is treat marriages as secular. Religions have their visions of marriage. Why shouldn't the state have its own?
Treat marriage as what it is: a registered domestic partnership with the appropriate name of "marriage".
If you want to legally get married, go to the registrar and register.
If you want to get married in your religion of choice, great! Go to their version of priests. Civil recognition of the marriage may or may not be automatic, and there are a few ways how that might be done.
TLDR: Religion has no monopoly on the word or concept of "marriage", as it predates all of them. Just look at roman marriages - done before Christianity was even a thing.
Everything you said here I replied to elsewhere. But tldr; Romans didn't get married, the term was Conubium, or Coniugium.
And if you were talking about the institution of marriage it was Matrimonium, which surrounded the aspect of women as mothers.
The term marriage did not exist yet showing that the term marriage does not matter. Choosing a word over the health/safety and happiness of the common person is pointless.
Terms change, and if it's for a good reason we should change them. The oldest current governing body is only ~250 years old. Christians have been claiming the term marriage for far longer than that.
Why would you care that they called it a civil union or anything else if the rights were the same? Why should people be persecuted to uphold such, it's all frivolous. Change the term in government documents, and let people have whatever ceremonies they want and exclude who they want from their ceremonies.
Conserving "Tradition" is an inability to grow.
who the fuck downvotes this
i hope their heart is doing okay. i heard its been going out recently
Technically "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" isn't part of US law. It's in the Declaration of Independence which is not a legal document in the sense that most people mean when they quote those lines. Maybe the person downvoting is attempting to draw attention to that distinction, or maybe they're just a dick. Who knows.
"It's only the foundational principle of our supposed democracy. Don't you know we only pay lip service to it, it's not actually in force."
Yes, there is an enormous contradiction between the declared ideology and actual policy in practice, I'm unironically glad you pointed that out. On the same hand, the constitution makes slavery legal, so maybe we should stop giving that fucking document so much god damned credit. None of our supposed rights are actually in force unless they are enforced. If nobody else is enforcing your rights for you, who does that leave to enforce the rights if you think you want them? I think it's time we remember that the law is made up and it does whatever whoever is in charge of enforcing says it does.
Maybe you've noticed, but the single guy who has decided he is currently in charge of deciding what rights we are supposed to have is just making whatever bullshit rights up for himself off the top of his head, whatever is convenient to his purpose, without bothering to refer to legal precedent or the constitution, very frequently in direct contradiction of those. It's working for him. Fantastically well. Let's stop asking permission for these rights as if we weren't supposed to be the ones from which the consent for government is supposed to be derived in the first place.
"Of the people, by the people, for the people;" I think that's not an unreasonable (and constitutionally precedented if that's important to you) right to substitute for the supposed right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness they teach us about in our state-mandated public education.
Also, I've heard this bit before about not a legal document not an actual right, has anyone ever actually tried to argue, in court, that eg we don't have the right to be alive? Isn't that already covered by like, murder law? what about labour/penal law for liberty and the rights to eg free assembly, free expression, freedom of religion for happiness? Don't we have this right to life, liberty, and happiness de facto, or didn't most of us have a reasonable facsimile up until relatively recently? Aren't those laws/rights precisely the specific enumeration of the various ways we have our life, liberty, and happiness enshrined (or restricted, as in the notorious case of labour rights in america) as rights in the law?
christ there's so many fucking contradictions. the whole system is held together with load bearing institutional loyalty and good faith it's a wonder it took this long to collaps.
This was essentially the point that I was going to make. I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that a right to "the pursuit of happiness" is one of the foundational principles of our nation but that means so many different things to different groups of people, many of which are mutually exclusive to one another. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter what most people believe that phrase to mean. It only matters what is explicitly defined in law and, by extension, what can successfully be defended in court.
The people who know it's an obvious false statement.
Only reason to marry is for financial options.
Marriage confers a number of rights and benefits beyond the financial. Next of kin status. Immigration benefits. Presumption of parentage. Medical decision making. Hospital visitation. Funeral and burial decisions. Right to spousal support. Spousal testimonial privilege...
Excellent points, thank you
It's not. Marriage is a way to organize your population and more easily handle shared property and decision making in legal matters.
Religions tried to co-opt control over the institution that predates it
And since they have co-opted control over the institution for at least 10x longer than any countrys institution has existed it is an entirely moot point as religion has "earned" guarantees of different freedoms within our institution. So anyone claiming their marriage is actually for a tradition predating religion would also recognize they clearly were not doing so to swear the allegiance to the United States of America's judicial system that didn't come about until the late 1700s. They were creating a unity between themselves and their partner in the eyes of those who they ask to bore witness with the expectation that unity existed whether or not a piece of lands government rose or fell. By all means there would be no difference if they replaced the term marriage in our government documents are replaced it with one not "co-opted" by region. A word is meaningless until you put power into it.
No. Institution as in "the practice of", not a specific organization.
The practice predates all the currently practiced religions. They didn't get to claim ownership of it. Pairing up in mostly lifelong bonds predates society as a whole, and isn't even a human exclusive practice.
Religions trying to act as if they're arbiters over it is laughable in how petulant it is.
I asked the penguins and they stated they use domestic partnership, not marriage. They said it's foolish to get people hurt fighting for something like a word.
The term marriage didn't even exist back then, just the union going by other terms, maybe find one of those terms if you think the tradition of a word matters more than the happiness and safety of the population. Looking it up, It appears most people just called them unions. So we can put domestic union into the documents instead of marriage. That should solve your issue.
Yeah this was the same "separate but equal" bullshit the Christians tried to pull a decade ago. I don't have an issue.
The only ones with an issue are the asshole bigots trying to claim ownership of a practice they didn't create. Listening to the stupid solutions presented by the ones find offense with sharing, to things no one else has a problem with...is pointless.
Freedom of religion violates the paradox of tolerance
It doesn't have too. It is only a violation of said paradox if the religion does not tolerate the existence of people outside of their religion.
Amen!