by Buddy Netter

Created on: May 12, 2009

The Current Issues Surrounding Gay Marriage

Although I am a Christian, I'm not going to give you any scriptural reasons against same sex marriage. That's already been done, and the truth is that I don't always approve of the way other Christian's explain it or the fact that they usually bring the Old Testament into it. I am only going to express my own reasons for having qualms about changing the definition of marriage. And before I go any further, I want to clarify that I am not against equal rights for gays and lesbians, only against redefining marriage. I believe that we should have been working toward making civil partnership unions carry all the same rights and privileges as a marriage license. We haven't done that, and now I don't think most gays and lesbians are willing to accept anything less than marriage, as they view the civil union idea like being made to sit in the back of the bus.

I have heard it expressed that there is no such thing as traditional marriage, and that the word has meant different things in different times and cultures. I won't argue that point. However, if gays and their supporters were honest about this, all they need do is look at their own family heritage and see all the men and women who make up their own genealogy, all the grandfathers and grandmothers, going back through all the great-greats, and it is marriage between a man and a woman that defines even their own lineage, unless you have ancestry that includes Fundamental Mormons, which could complicate things a little. For the most part, however, we all trace our own personal history starting with our parents, then our grandparents, etc., going back as far as we can, based on marriage (or in more recent history, at least a relationship) between a man and a woman.

I admit, and I know this is purely on a personal level, that over a hundred years of romantic movie making, the romantic novels I grew up reading, not to mention my own loving and long lasting marriage, that the word marriage holds an emotional connotation for me. I truly can't imagine it ever meaning anything other than a committed relationship between a man and a woman, legally and for many, also spiritually. I realize this is selfish, so no one really has to call me on it- I feel a willful desire to keep the word marriage to mean what it always has-we heterosexuals had it first! And I don't care what the ancient Greeks did or about some obscure practice in another time and country, I am talking

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