A Stitch in Haste

(Why aren't you reading this at the new website?)

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Professional bigot Maggie Gallagher continues to weave her web of anti-gay lies and illogic:

She said the government regulates such religious authorities' ability to perform marriages because the state didn't create marriage and doesn't create marriages. Rather, legal authorities merely recognize and regulate an institution that already exists and is rooted deeply in the society's history and traditions.

Of course, the ancient Romans and other heathens got married and understood marriage to be a legal status long before there was even such as thing as "Christian" marriage (or Christians, for that matter). In fact, it was the ancient Romans who invented the metallic wedding ring.

Government is in the marriage business because encouraging the best environment for raising and protecting children is a benefit to society at large, Gallagher noted. That's why the institution has special legal privileges and responsibilities attached to it that aren't given to other intimate adult relationships.

"There's a reason the government has always been involved in marriage but not in baptism or my priest's vow of celibacy," Gallagher, who describes herself as an "orthodox Catholic," said. "Marriage is not a sacrament that has only religious implications, like baptism."

Put aside Gallagher's unethical and anti-intellectual regurgitation of the malicious "kid's do best" lie. Note instead the precedent lie, the deliberate (and laughable) suggestion that it was the church that invented "marriage" in the first place. That marriage was originally and always conceived strictly as a religious sacrament. And that it was only after the "social" benefits (including, apparently, coverture and spousal rape) of church-crafted "traditional" marriage were realized that the government then decided — "for the children" — to get in on the act.

A facially absurd thesis contradicted by both ancient and modern history. A purported model that is the exact opposite of current practice. All neatly packaged and peddled to redneck illiterates for the sake of rationalizing their backward beliefs.

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Oh, sorry, I still owe you a "comment left elsewhere," don't I?

Well, I found Gallagher's screeches via Box Turtle Bulletin:

Oddly, I could be persuaded to support this idea. If the government were to allow churches to define marriage and then recognized and enforced those religiously distinctive marriage contracts, gay people could marry in every state of the union and in any nearly every city that had a Unitarian Universalist fellowship, a Quaker meeting, or a United Church of Christ congregation.

To which I commented:

Of course, one could just as easily turn around and say that the government will issue marriage licenses to all, but let the religious groups craft a new, additional and exclusive status just for themselves.

Call it "holy matrimony," "covenant wedding," "sacramental union" or "zoop-de-do." Whatever you like. And they can have it all to themselves. But marriage stays a government institution subject to constitutional standards of equal protection and due process.

Think Gallagher would go for that?

Me neither.

Because when they say it's "all about marriage," they lie. When they say it's "all about the children," they lie. Whenever they insist it's about anything other than un-Christian hatred of others, they lie.