The Atheist Blogger

A simple philosophy that is so mindbogglingly easy to follow, yet the religious seem to be up in arms about gay marriage, and they get worse every year. Somehow the religious seem to think that they came up with this great idea called “marriage” and that is has been violated by homosexuals. The truth, as it so often is in these cases, is completely the opposite.

Marriage predates verifiable recorded history, essentially a social extension of the mating procedure for reproduction. The Greeks and Romans had marriages, both opposite sex and same sex. There were no civil ceremonies, only an “agreement” for husband and wife, or husband and husband, wife and wife accordingly.

So what violated this traditional standard of marriage? Oh that’s right…it was the Christians.^[1] In 342, the Christian emperors Constantius II and Constans banned same-sex marriage. In 390, three other Christian emperors, Valentinian II, Theodoisus, and Arcadius, made homosexual sex a crime punishable by death (burned alive because Christians are so merciful).

As I write this, religious fundamentalists across several different religions are rallying together to support a California proposal that effectively bans homosexual marriage. Marriage, they reckon, should be up to the religions, not the state. I ask, why can’t you have it both ways?

It would be simple. Define a state marriage that has all the perks of “regular” marriage, allowing anyone to marry anyone. Let the religions decide what they want to do about marriage within religion. There would be no difference in opinion either way. Religions would still reckon that state marriages weren’t governed by God, whilst the religious homosexuals forced to take a state marriage as their only option would argue that they were.

It has worked in the UK for the last few years, and there is no reason why it couldn’t work anywhere else. Secularisation is the only sufficient train of thought that respects the wishes of all groups. It calls for a separation of church and state. The state cannot control the church and the church cannot control the state. A very simple relationship that allows people to either align with one or both, depending on what they want to do.

So yes, let’s be traditionalists. Let’s take marriage back to its original status: An agreement between two people to be loyal and faithful to each other for the rest of their lives.