Another Lesson Learned

With the Supreme Court's non-decision decision to not hear Wisconsin's appeal of a lower court's ruling overturning the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriages, another lesson is learned about the importance of separating Church and the State.

Much of the problem that led to the years of legal fights, the improper use of our State Constitution to ban someone from doing something and plenty of people saying and doing regrettable things is founded in the early days of the country when the decision was made to use the religious rite of "marriage" as a legal term.  We don't keep state records of baptisms, confessions, communion, confirmation or funerals--but "marriages" have been recognized and regulated since our founding as a nation.

But just think if those early American clerks had said "you know what, a marriage is a really a religious entity--what we are actually permitting is a legal partnership.  Maybe we should use a non-religious term for that."  And we could have had the Government Sanctioned Partnership license issued by counties and states--rather than "marriage licenses".  That way people who performed their nuptials would have been "married" in the eyes of the Church--and "partners" in the eyes of the law.

And then 200-plus years later, when same-sex couples decided they wanted the same legal rights and protections granted to heterosexual Government Sanctioned Partners (as clearly granted by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution) those who view homosexuality as an abomination wouldn't have had the Biblical argument to make that a "GSP is clearly stated as being between one man and one woman".  They could then turn their vitriol toward different churches that were conducting same-sex "marriages" in the kind of battle that Jonathan Swift pilloried with his war between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscuans over how to properly break an egg in Gulliver's Travels.

Oh, and speaking of wars, just wait until the first same-sex couple demands that they be "married" in a Catholic or Evangelical Church--as they have done with Christian bakers and florists--and takes that fight to court.  That will make the Hobby Lobby Case look like a spitball fight.