Another Marriage Petition Cleared For California

SACRAMENTO — The sponsors of a second ballot measure seeking to repeal California's ban on same-sex marriage have been cleared to start collecting signatures.

The secretary of state on Friday gave the group Yes on Equality until Aug. 17 to collect the nearly 700,000 signatures needed to qualify its initiative for the 2010 ballot.

If approved by voters, the group's proposed constitutional amendment would rescind Proposition 8, which passed last November. The California Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on legal challenges to the voter-approved measure.

Earlier this month, two Southern California college students got permission to start circulating petitions for a separate initiative that would end all marriage as a state-sanctioned institution and instead make couples _ gay or straight _ eligible only for domestic partnerships.

Comments

[EEinhorn]

The college students' proposed initiative may be the least popular but makes the most sense legally. A marriage is something defined by each religion, and therefore should be returned to being a purely religious event. A civil union is a union condoned and recognized by a civil government, and therefore should be available to any couple that are fit as defined by law, with equal rights and benefits to all.

[chitown8]

As a married woman to a man(I say that because it will be relevant) that is not religious. Am I marriage or in a civil union?

Please say civil union so I can break this contract ( just kidding)!

[hortonhearsawho2]

lol

[ekoorb]

There is some jurisprudence concerning marriage. What's to be done about that?

[hortonhearsawho2]

check with Spitzer, maybe...

[PlaceboStudman]

Yet another person who believes that history began with the life of Jesus Christ.

Historically speaking, marriage has NOT been a religious institution. It has been a financial institution based on property and hereditary passing down of that property. It has only been since the invent of Christianity that believers have transformed the institution into something with a spiritual meaning that is only intended to produce heirs.

But, of course, history doesn't matter because, as I said, for entirely too many people, the world began with a belief that depends entirely on the worship of an invisible man in the sky who condemned his son to death

[NWBrunette]

Thank you. Nice to have help clearing up the muddled - or nonexistent - thinking.

[hortonhearsawho2]

cool, when did u met meet god, and what did She say exactly...

[easarsfield]

I agree with you, marriage historically had nothing to do with religion. These christian loonies that claim that marriage is a sacrament meant to be between a man and a woman are crazy. Marriage is more a legally bonding contract between to people, and there's absolutely no reason why in this day and age gays should be denied the same rights as straight people.

It wasn't that long ago that interracial marriages were illegal!

[SJBrown]

Are you sure Abraham didn't marry Sarah? That was pre-Christianity.

I don't think Christians believe in an invisible man in the sky who condemned his son to death. Read The Politics of Jesus by Obery Hendricks, or Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman.

[GrahamInCanada]

You are repeating propaganda started by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century. Before the Council, for thousands of years, there was no doubt that marriage was a civil matter, not a religious matter, and the legitimizing authority was more or less held by the family, not the betrothed. Marriage was conducted simply a present tense declaration (I do) in front of two witnesses.

Church courts were inundated with marriage disputes, and to solve this problem, the church decided to grasp at straws, and declare a new, legitimizing authority for the church in marriage. Henceforth, the church would require that all marriages be performed in front of two witnesses and a priest, who would record the marriage in a registry, which was an innovation of the times.

Not content with challenging the civil nature of marriage, they also challenged the families, and decided to marry people against their family's wishes. That decision and dispute, and the inter generational upheaval that followed, is memorialized, for example, in Romeo and Juliette.

For two hundred years, marriage law throughout the civilized world was in upheaval, as the Church duked it out with civil authorities for control of marriage law. Just about the time of the founding of the United States, the Church lost. Marriage law is older than any existing religion, and it is the Church that should end its illegitimate claim on matrimonial law, which it has renewed under guise of the US cultural wars.

[Paul]

Exactly right.

Tax breaks, insurence claims - all that stuff that relates to the legal status of a couple - should be defined by the state and apply to all civil unions.

Marriage? Let each church define that as they will and marry who they will.