[Durham INC] marriage is not a civil right

[Reyn Bowman]

Nobody is trying to change your mind.  Only you can open it to new
information and I hope you do that just as many of us have.

You were quick to take offense when there was none intended so I hope you
can see how offensive it seems to others when you seem so dismissive of Gays
and Lesbian rights in return.

While it may not be your intent but I hope you can see that the very words
you use to dismiss granting Gays and Lesbians their full civil rights under
marriage, especially use of terms such as "natural" were the same ones used
for decades and decades by ministers, lay and secular alike to rationalize
the denial of full rights to African-Americans.

As one of the less offensive examples, below is a reference given at the
outbreak of the Civil War, 150 years ago this past March, by Alexander H.
Stephens the Vice President of the Confederate States of America:

“Our new government [The Confederate States of America] is founded upon
exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone
rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man;
that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal
condition.”



On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Christine Chamberlain <
christinebbd at yahoo.com> wrote:

> You already have full civil rights, the same as every other American.  You
> have not been deprived of the law's equal protection, nor of the right to
> marry — only of the right to insist that a single-sex union is a
> "marriage."  You want marriage on entirely new terms. You want it to be
> given a meaning it has never before had, and prefer that it be done
> undemocratically — by judicial fiat, for example, or by mayors flouting the
> law. Whatever else that may be, it isn't civil rights.
>
>  But dare to speak against it, and you are threatened, called names and are
> branded a "racist".
>
>  In one state, when lawmakers prepared to debate a constitutional amendment
> on the meaning of marriage, the state's leading black clergy came out
> strongly in support of the age-old definition: the union of a man and a
> woman. They were promptly tarred as enemies of civil rights. "Martin Luther
> King," one left-wing legislator barked, "is rolling over in his grave at a
> statement like this."
>
>  But if anything has King spinning in his grave, it is the indecency of
> exploiting his name for a cause he never supported. The civil rights
> movement for which he lived and died was grounded in a fundamental truth:
> All of us are created equal. The same-sex marriage movement, by contrast, is
> grounded in the *denial* of a fundamental truth: we are created as equal ,
> male and female. That duality has always been the starting point for
> marriage. The newly fashionable claim that marriage can ignore that duality
> is akin to the claim, back when lunch counters were segregated, that America
> was a land of liberty and justice for all.
>
> Christine Chamberlain
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Durham INC Mailing List
> list at durham-inc.org
> http://www.durham-inc.org/list.html
>
>


-- 
Reyn Bowman
2203 Shoreham St
Durham, NC 27707
919-381-1497
www.bullcitymutterings.com
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