Tuesday, March 10, 2009

We'll give you the word marriage if you'll stick around to use it

A petition drive has been launched in Calif. to get the state out of the marriage business. If some 650,000 signatures can be gathered by August there will be a proposal on the ballot that says Calif. recognizes domestic partnerships for everyone regardless of sexual orientation. Then churches could use the word marriage however they want.

Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune believes gays should not have gone back to the Calif. Supremes when voters put the marriage ban in the constitution. He has 3 reasons.

1. The power of the government really does rest with the people. It is better to persuade the people then to enforce a your point of view (yeah, we get annoyed when the other side does it to us).

2. Gays (at least in Calif.) are close to overturning the ban anyway (approval for gay marriage has gone up 9% in 8 years -- another 3 years should do it).

3. It isn't good to get the Supremes to overturn the rule of the people when you may need to turn to the people for a different outcome in a few years.

With the way religion is faring in America, if we leave marriage to the churches might we end up not using the word sometime soon? The American Religious Identification Survey has published its 2008 results, based on 54,000 interviews, and compared it to their 1990 results. In that time America has 50 million more adults yet almost all denominations have lost membership. In terms of percent of population (rather than percent of membership) church affiliation is down drastically. In particular, non-Catholic Christians have lost population percentages in 46 states and gained in only two. Those who describe themselves as having no religion have gained percentage in all states, from 2% in Arkansas to 21% in Vermont. That translates to those declaring no religion now being 15% of the population, up from 8% in 1990.

Putting it another way, Christian denominations are working hard to make themselves irrelevant to today's world. No need to reserve the word marriage for the churches because soon churches won't be around to use it.

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