When you say liberal, do you mean liberal but still will not do gay marriages?
The beautiful thing about the Church of England is that it includes a wide spectrum of opinion and tradition, from high church (smells'n'bells) to scruffy low church, from liberal to conservative, left and right).
I don't agree with everything, but it's a great space for people with different backgrounds and opinion to mix and learn from each other. It can be very radical in a quiet, British, socks-and-sandals sort of way.
Ha! Didn't think I'd be writing about the CofE on HN!
I do know that [family member], who is gay and married, has said that she feels welcomed in our church and that she wishes she'd had one like it to support her when she came out.
It's one of the only institutions I can think of that seems to be allowed to openly discriminate against homosexuals and until more recently women in some regards as well.
I hope you didn't take my comment as me jumping on you, I'm just curious because I don't think I could call any church in the CoE liberal when the leadership are so conservative.
And in any case there is simply no real value for gays to become 'married' other than getting a sticker.
The "sticker" was a visa in my husband's case. Although the UK does not require you to be married to your partner in order for them to get a visa, you have to provide all kinds of ridiculous documentation in the absence of a marriage certificate. In other countries (e.g. the US), being married is an absolute requirement.
Gay marriage is now legal in the UK. Are you suggesting that it would make "more sense" now to abolish gay marriage and try to adjust 100s of other laws and regulations to prevent any disadvantage to gay people? Surely this must be a disingenuous suggestion.
Changing all the specific legal benefits, privileges, and obligations of marriage to be "marriage or partnership" makes less sense than changing the admission criteria for marriage.
I mean, this is a tech forum, right, think about it from DRY perspective.
Legally, there is obvious value. Stating such an opinion leads me to believe you are being willfully dishonest in your argument.
In every country in the world? There are a large number of countries that allow marriages that does not meet your definition. Both polygamy and gay marriages.
Reminder that this poll exists[0].
[0] http://qz.com/262645/people-without-kids-live-better-than-pa...
It'd be inaccurate to call those gay marriages as some of the cultures they are practised in at the same time have been very oppressive when it comes to homosexuality (though presumably such marriages have been used as a means to hide lesbian relationships), but the fact remains women have been able to marry women with the explicit intent of having shared children for hundreds of years... [1]. And they're not few:
" Kevane (2004) estimates that approximately 5–10 percent of the women in Africa are involved in woman-to-woman marriages. "
[1] http://www.osisa.org/buwa/regional/female-husbands-without-m...
The UK does better than most countries for supporting LGBT rights, but it took a long time. The UK discriminated against homosexuals for many years, and we still have some way to go to fully recognising rights of LGBT people.
This is true, of course, but potentially a little misleading for people not familiar with the UK, since civil partnerships have been available since 2004.
The function and intention of marriage has changed through time and locality.
To pick a singular aspect of a complex social construct and use that to base its purpose and definition on is myopic.
Who is making it hard to believe you're arguing in good faith here? You've consistently harped on a reductionist definition of marriage in this thread.
>If I get together with an AI in the future you'll call it marriage too?
Personally, I truly do not care what you call it. If they're able to give consent and you can find a place to have wedding, good for you. If the law wants to respect it, congratulations.
And in fact some cultures has "weird" forms of marriage that deviates from the man + woman norm explicitly over things like fertility.
E.g. in some parts of Africa, two women marrying (but not, at least in principle, lesbian marriages, though I'm sure this institution have been conveniently used to obscure lesbian relationships) have centuries of history as a means for infertile women to gain heirs by taking a fertile wife who will find a man to get her pregnant, who will have no rights to any children. In these cultures, one of the women will generally be considered a husband, and take on many traditionally male roles (to the extent that in some places such a "female husband" gain access to e.g. take political offices not available to women etc.) [1]
African cultures are full of still extant examples where marriage is treated as a pragmatic means to secure economy, social stability and inheritance to the point where bending gender norms too is seen as a perfectly sensible hack if it furthers those goals.
Given the long history of such varied forms of marriage (including e.g. polygamy too), it would be much more reasonable to claim that marriage historically is about securing a family units financial situation and inheritance, and furthering social stability than having anything to do with "a man and a woman procreating"...
[1] http://www.osisa.org/buwa/regional/female-husbands-without-m...
You need to review your history on marriage including, but by no means limited to, what the bible has to say on such matters.
The biblical view of marriage is vastly different to simply "a man and a woman wanting to procreate", itself took on and in places redefined millennia of tradition that pre-dated it, and given how much of that definition the church now ignores (allowing divorce, no longer requiring the stoning non-virgins, to cite two of many examples) I don't think ignoring something that isn't actually stated in the text anyway should be a significant problem.
E.g. many African tribes have traditions for polygamy that are either explicitly intended to deal with men being likely to die earlier (as fighters or hunters) to safeguard the viability of the house-hold and/or to deal with inheritance in societies where women were often not allowed to inherit (a typical case being a social obligation in some tribes for a man to marry his deceased brothers wives in order to ensure she still has somewhere to live).
For property purpose more generally: controlling inheritance was part of that, but a related part (and perhaps a more significant part in early societies where inheritances were small) was economic support the other direction, up the family tree rather than down. Where children (and grandchildren, and lateral relatives) care for their parents (and grandparents, etc.) in their old age instead of their existing nonfamily social support networks, establishing broader family bonds through formal unions is important to that.
This is wrong in so many ways; "marriage" is a concept that exists in many cultures with many different different understandings, and those understandings have historically been fluid over time even within the same culture. Its most consistently a property arrangement between the parties; in the West its been separated from an essential intent for procreation for quite some time, though there are religious subcultures within Western societies for whom that may remain more important than it is in the broader society.
But adoptions to secure an inheritance chain is historically certainly not that unusual either.
So are you saying that when people marry in old age, it's not really marriage?
Whether officiated by a religious order, the state, or the word of those involved, 'marriage' is just a word, a concept, and has many permutations.
The new Marriage is unbounded by anyone else's beliefs.
The old Marriage is concerned with law, religion, and society. And sometimes we need to drop down a gear and consider these things, but law, religion, and society do not a marriage make.
It is the combination or mixture of elements that gives rise to something new, something neither of the elements alone is capable of, that is a 'marriage'.
And it is good that way.
Married and marriage have plenty of meanings in English...