“If two men can wed, why not three men, or four,
Or a dog, or a sheep, or a pigeon?
The only thing keeping the evil from creeping
Is the holy restraint of religion!”
But casting about for examples, I find
A surprising result in my search—
In polygamy cases, and doggy embraces
What force was behind them? A church!
The news today has polygamist (and polygamist church leader) Warren Jeffs convicted on child sexual assault charges. He could spend the rest of his life behind bars. His defense, such as it was, claimed that this was not sexual assault on a 12 year old girl, but rather church-approved holy matrimony (and as the leader of the church, he should know!).
I have previously written about a marriage between man and dog. In this case, the wedding took place at a Hindu temple.
The “defenders of marriage” often tell us that marriage is religious, not civil, and that this religious aspect is what keeps the barbarians at the gate. If it were not for the church, if we can let men marry men, and women marry women, then the door is open for polygamy, for cross-species marriage, for any manner of misconduct.
But, see, that door is open. It’s just a door to a different church. If you don’t like it, maybe it would be best to recognize marriage as the civil contract it is, independent of interference from any church.
What, is noone commenting here?
Is everyone asleep or something? Or are there comments I’m not seeing?
It gives me the weird (temporary) feeling that Cuttlefish is writing just for me – great, though no doubt an unrepeatable experience.
Marvellously felicitous rhyme, scansion and commentary as usual.
This Jeffs character – who I’d never previously heard of – is a real piece of work. I assume someone must have written of the connection between religion and sexual exploitation. Examples arise often enough.
Zackoz–
Actually, I am writing just for you. And anyone who is reading this, I am writing just for them. You see, this is part of a grand experiment here at FTB.
You think the slow connect times are a server problem? A trained monkey can run a server these days; this is much more complicated than that. The slow times are the result of our new individual custom experience; each reader’s incoming data are read (a proprietary process, but I will tell you, we had to do something with the left over trained monkey) and the perfect experience for that particular person is planned. If your personality profile is sufficiently orthogonal from other readers here, it is entirely possible that you are reading posts that no one else will ever see.
In a day or two, once we “get the new server up and running” (wink, wink), the experiment will be over. A random sample of you will be asked about the experience. If it turns out people like the slower but more personalized version of FTB, that’s what we’ll go with.
We may need a few more monkeys.
Are any church or conservative organizations backing Warren Jeff? Or are they just ignoring it, so as to not be drawn into a debate about several touchy issues like church rights, children’s rights and as Cuttlefish mentioned, marriage.
Leaving the political and religious issues aside, the whole case is really really sad. So much suffering induced
>”…best to recognize marriage as the civil contract it is, independent of interference from any church.”
The way I view it, “marriage” should be a religious ceremony/rite like baptism or Bar Mitzvah. No one expects government to have anything to do with those rituals. The same should be for “marriage”. Then, as you say DC, there should be a civil contract for things like inheritance, property ownership, medical visitation and decision making, tax breaks, debt responsibility, etc. The civil contract would not be called “marriage” and that would allow the uber-religious to have their marriages blessed by their own favorite church totally independent from government interference. And getting married in a church would not involve any governmental license, nor convey any of the governmental benefits. It’s just a churchy thing that some people would do and some not. Enforced only by the church itself… i.e. they might excommunicate you if you misbehave.
I do not believe we should be referring to this crackpot as “Reverend” or even as “polygamist”. Instead we should be referring to him exactly what he is:
paedophile.