Civil Unions
Over the weekend, two of my friends got married… I mean Civil Unioned. This was the second Civil Union I’ve attended. While everyone had a great time and I am very happy for my friends, I can stop thinking about the fact that technically they are not actually married.
While they have most of the same rights as married couples, society treats them separate and not quite equal. Unfortunately, the main group of people responsible for the fact that they can’t get married in New Jersey is the religious. In fact if the religious right had their way, gay people won’t even be allowed to have Civil Unions. They might not even be allowed to live.
Again, I am forced to realize that if the large number of religious fundamentalists had their way; America would be much more like Islamic countries and many issues. On gay issues especially, the religious right stand in solidarity with their Islamic competitors. But it isn’t just the extreme fundamentalists that prevent gays from getting married. We like in a society of vocal religious wackos and spineless mainstream religious believers who allow the wackos to run the show. The mainstream religious believers tend to support gay marriage in most polls, but they are afraid to go against the fundamentalists.
Worse yet is that whenever secularists and atheists criticize religious fundamentalists on this issue and many others, the mainstream religious believers jump to the defense of the fundamentalists. It annoys me that my friends have to be treated differently because some ancient book says that gay people should be put to death.
Related articles
- All Of Connecticut’s Civil Unions Become Marriages On Friday (queerty.com)
- Connecticut Civil Unions became Civil Marriages Today! (pinkbananaworld.com)
- Trib Poll: Chicagoland Supports Civil Unions, Divided On Gay Marriage (chicagoist.com)
- Andrew Levine: Of Mosques and Marriage (huffingtonpost.com)
Filed under: church/state, culture war, Gay Issues, Mainstream Christians, Religion