cry about what you've so intelligently described about several of our candidate's religious "convictions". 

I am still laughing at your words though!

"That such sentences were originally written by people who believed that thunder was caused by Yahweh rubbing two pieces of gefilte fish together, or that rain was caused by His tears from the horseradish seasoning, matters not a whit."

I for one am offended.  Seriously.  Who are you to spit on my religious beliefs?  Better yet, who are you to spit on the spiritual beliefs of the majority of this country?

Democrats who use "religious beliefs" to discriminate against others violate the very tenets of decency, morality, the Sermon on the Mount, and compassion. 

attack on the belief system of a majority of people in this country, it's time to separate the religious from the civil on the marriage question.  Rather than frame the issue as one of the anti-religious secular humanists versus the hidebound religious tyrants, we should find a middle ground which does not include ridiculing an ancient and complex philosophy of richly varied texture and offending the people whose support is critical if there is ever to be change.  It might be helpful to ponder for a few minutes how much of what you value emanates from that ancient religion, most significant being the concept of the intrinsic worth of human beings, the sanctity of life, and the human dignity of the least among us. 

Now, as to gay marriage, why is it that we continue allowing it to be framed as a religious question?  Even you have succumbed to that temptation, having taken the issue as an excuse to ridicule and demean that which many people hold sacred. 

Marriage is first and foremost a civil issue, a matter of contract.  It's a creature of statute, imbued with rights and penumbras which can only adhere if the statutory requirements have been met.  A religious celebrant may be able to perform a wedding which satisfies the civil requirements for a marriage, but the celebrant must be granted that power by the civil authority in order for it to carry the force and effect of law.  Every state in the union has a process for issuing marriage licenses which may be used by either religious or civil celebrants or even by court clerks or justices of the peace, and no marriage is valid in any state which has not met those statutory requirements.  And the thing is, no statute that I know of requires that the parties love each other, or that they be married in a religious ceremony, or that they hold particular religious beliefs.  Many marriages occur with no reference to God and in the eyes of the law are as valid as any marriage conducted in a church.  So why are we treating marriage as an intrinsically religious concept? 

The secret to increasing support for gay marriage is not to alienate religious believers, but to draw and emphasize this distinction between the religious and the civil.  Granting gays the right to marry does not mean they would have the right to marry within churches which are opposed to gay marriage.  A prime example is the Catholic faith, which deems marriage a sacrament, but ONLY if it is performed in a Catholic ceremony, with a Catholic priest, and for a Catholic couple.  I would ask the conservative who opposes gay marriage if he considers a civil ceremony to be the same as a religious ceremony.  He'll tell you no.  Ask him if a religious marriage performed in accordance with all of his religious traditions is invalid if the celebrant happens not be certified by his state or locality to perform marriages.  He'll tell you no.  Well, then, why shouldn't gays be allowed to enjoy the enormous panoply of rights and responsibilities which come from the marriage contract if that's what they want?  Take it out of the highly charged realm of religion and stick it in the boring world of civil contract.

you have whacked it right on the head!
Thanks

To me, soccerdem is saying that religion has been the major player that has stood in the way of gays being able to marry and obtain the equal rights and benefits that the others of us enjoy in
marriage, a civil union, whatever you want to call it.  You must agree with that.  Even John Edwards testified that his religious beliefs prevent him from accepting gay marriage.  If there hadn't been intense pressure from the homosexual community on political institutions, gays wouldn't even have even the small amount of rights which they've been given and religious institutions would have continued to describe them as "an abomination".

As to soccerdem's demeaning religion, well, I think I understand soccerdem's disgust.  It's sad to say that religious institutions throughout ancient and recent history uses it's powers to separate, isolate, and annihilate people: nazism, the crusades, integration, apartheid, sexism, and on and on.  When people dislike or are afraid of others, they invoke "religion" to sway and control. It's a sad fact but history validates that absolutely. 

So here we are again using religion to keep two individuals who want to live together as a couple from having the same rights that I have in my marriage.

What other powerful institution has stood in the way of civil rights throughout history?  I can only think of religious institutions. Sad but true. 

Sorry - didn't get the reply in the right place

The Virginia Family Foundation was instrumental in heavily supporting the VA Marriage Amendment.  And from their website you will find their definition of marriage:

Marriage, as the union between one man and one woman, is an institution of God and a foundation of civil society.

 
I think it would be better to educate the religious that, like slavery and segregation, homophobia is not Christ-like.

Here's a picture into what "religious folks" in Kentucky are feeling on this current matter in their state.  Where is their spiritual compassion for a fellow human being?  None there.

Far be it for me to spit on your right to believe in any religious writings you prefer.  That is not what I wrote or implied.  What I DID express was that anyone's beliefs based on the writings of basically uneducated primitive peoples should not be used to blackjack or denigrate other persuasions, including athiests and agnostics, gay men and lesbians.

When the tenets of religions coincide with the principles of humanity, that is sheer coincidence, for the Testaments are filled with blood, gore, revenge, war, and all manners of homicide justified in God's name.  The Testaments, undeniably, were and still are used to justify all manners of hatred and unfair treatment, from slavery to Jim Crow, to lynching blacks, Jews and Italians, to interning 140,000 Japanese Americans (though not Christian Germans), and stealing their lands and lives, to "seperate, but equal," and so on.

As for the the majority of the religious beliefs of this country, they didn't stop the country from holding  slaves (ask Thomas Jefferson), or not allowing people the vote, or saying that a black was 3/5 of a human being. 

But, nevertheless, I DO respect your right to believe in what you want.  It's the use of (not you, personally) religion to pass laws keeping stores shuttered on Sunday, thereby stopping me from buying a bottle of Jim Beam, of bottling up the entrances to abortion clinics to terrorize teenage girls who want a LEGAL abortion; it's calling talk radio and having religious leaders appearing on TV to state that athiests and homosexuals caused 9/11.  And when politicians, even our own John Edwards or Hillary, will finesse the question as to us why marriage is only between a man and a woman by stating that's what it always has been, or the Bible says it, or it's God's law, that is when religion gets in my craw.

But I do respect the Jewish tradition of fairness and seeing both sides of an argument (the Talmudic tradition of law) even when it benefits the Right, who will NEVER reciprocate; their enormous assistance in starting the NAACP; and their major role in the creation of the New Deal, Social Security and other social welfare programs we cannot live without.  I also respect the Sermon on the Mount (if only the world followed what Christ said), but recognize that you can get the same teachings outside of religion by reading Kant, for example, or having humanity adhere to the major principle of Self Preservation.  You don't have to be religious to be moral, and the pages of Kant's Critique are easily turned, not being soaked in blood.

Finally, the gefilte fish line was a gag, not a slur.  Who knows what the original Old Testament writers believed was the cause of thunder and rain?  So, Myron Cohen could have said it better?

You should really be careful there.  I'm not even Jewish, and I thought that one was out of line.  That's what I was mostly offended by.  Sure, I didn't appreciate the demeaning of my religious history, but that I can get over.  Remember, Christ teaches us to love even those who clearly have little respect for your own convictions.  No, I found myself mostly offended at a statement that to me appeared to border on anti-semitism, unintentional as it may be.

the Talmudic canon and the Sermon on the Mount or the Kantian Critique?  You can't really separate the works of any Western philosopher from that which informed or influenced the body of works and approach to the world which went before him.  They are all currents in one big sea of philosophy and you can't pretend that Kant somehow sprang fully formed into the world any more than we can pretend that Elvis Presley was not heavily influenced by the music of African American blues artists and the gospel tradition.

I'm not interested in getting into a philosophical round robin over this.  Let's just say that some religious thought is not that at all, but instead a reactionary wish to return to a more halcyon time which never existed, except in believers' present fantasies, and other religious thought struggles to reconcile its ancient traditions and beliefs with a changing world and rapidly expanding body of knowledge.  It's the anchor upon which many people rely to stabilize them and allow them to make sense of the world and the place of humanity within it.  Are there, or have there been, religious people who have been complicit in treating some people as less than human, or have supported repressive and injurious policies or practices on the basis of their religious beliefs?  Of course.  But such a philosophy or set of behaviors is not exclusive to religious people.  You mentioned Kant - what about Sartre and his Being and Nothingness?  What about Hegel and his Superman?  What of the enormous harm done by the atheistic philosophy of Marx and his followers?  The twentieth century was a bloodfest of imperialistic excess, rapacious nationalism, and ideological over-reaching, very little of it having anything to do with religion except for persecution of religious minorities or even just religious believers.  In other words, religious believers don't hold a patent on bad behavior or persecution. 

All though it's interesting to argue about God's existence or whether religion must be the way to morality, the point of my diary had nothing to do with that. 

I'll repeat what I said above: 

In this day and age, for Democratic candidates to use their religious beliefs as a rationale to deny others the right to marry is as laughable as watching their Republican counterparts denounce, in public debate, evolution.  Nothing more.

Keep your religion at home and certainly do not, as a Democrat, use it to deny a fellow American full equality.

Richard Cohen's column today seems to agree with you on this one

For a lawmaker, gay marriage is and ought to be a policy matter: good policy or bad policy, fair to gays or unfair to gays. Once this or any other issue becomes a matter of religious conviction, it's removed from the arena of public debate.

1. A commitment between two people.
2. A public ritual that has great meaning to many, less so to others (think Las Vegas, Britney Spears, etc.).
3. A joining of two families, with all the socio-economic implications that implies.
4. An institution which many believe is a firm foundation for procreation and child-rearing.
5. An important rite in many religious traditions.
6. A state-conferred series of benefits and obligations to those who are married vis-a-vis those who are not.

Basically, government has no business in #1, not much in #2-#4, and none in #5.  The only place government comes in, as far as I can tell, is #6.

As Richard Cohen writes, for lawmakers, marriage policy should be a matter of public debate, not religious decree or other pressure.  Here in the United States, the most important thing is that "all men are created equal" and are treated that way under the law.  Given that, it is very hard to see how we can justifity setting up a system whereby certain classes of citizens receive benefits and obligations different from other classes of citizens.  As Jim Webb says, the government should not be poking its nose in our bedrooms, unless there's an "overriding reason to do so."  What's the "overriding reason" in the case of "gay marriage?"  Given that there's no evidence "gay marriage" harms anybody - in fact, it should help by encouraging gays, just as with marriage for straight people, to settle down in stable, healthy relationships - how can we possibly justify not granting it to an entire class of citizens?  By the way, the fact that they're a minority, whether it's 5% or 10%, is irrelevant.  "Tyranny of the majority" is certainly no excuse for taking away any minority's rights, whether it's gays, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, whoever.  Can this be any simpler?

I appreciate your understanding of what I wrote and that you read and agreed with Richard Cohen, as any decent, fair-minded party should.

Two other things:  1)  Because I am of the same religious background as Richard Cohen, I cannot dig people who consider remarks, such as the ones I wrote, to be anti-semetic.  They were made to explain a point about people who had no discernable knowledge of anything we can closely associate with today.  For our survival, patterns of behavior emerged early on in man, and religion may or may not have had any early influence.  As for God, Golda Meier complained that God led Abraham to the only place in the middle East where there was no oil.  She was joking, Man.

(As for gags and a cynical view of how religion has hurt the world, I suggest reading Charles Erskine Scott Wood's great and hilarious work, Heavenly Discourse.  Look on Google at this remarkable and distinguished fellow's background--It's the most amazing life one could ever lead, and it seems loads of buildings and orgs are named after him, this West Point graduate.  His section of the book, Billy Sunday Goes to Heaven, is by itself worth the E-Bay/Amazon price of this old paperback book.)

Two:  Just because philosophers have had ideas that have led to bloodshed, and wars were fought for reasons other than religion, this does not mean that the history of religion is not a bloodbath in itself.  Christopher Hitchens, in his best selling new book, goes into this better than I could in this limited space.  But he, like me, would not impose his beliefs on you, and the very least we would expect is that the Beatitudes be observed by Christians, non-Christians, and athiests and agnostics.  Barney Frank would agree.  I'd like nothing more than that.