...Church and it's ministry. The government should not have the right to decide who gets married. Marriage is a religious precept, not a legal one. The government constitutionally should not have any authority on religous precepts unless they violate the people's rights. I believe this is part of the whole "separation of church and state" concept.
There is, however, the understanding that two people of any gender that desire to live together in a family format should have the ability to do so with all the legal benefits and abilities any other two people of any gender recieve. In truth, gay couples should have the same legal rights as a traditional married couple. Additionally, non-religious people should have the right to legally join with their preferred partners, gay or straight.
So, if I had the opportunity to do so I would like to propose that marriages would no longer be performed by anybody with the exception of ordained ministers of a recognized faith. (Yes, this would even include satan worshippers and wiccans.) People joined in matrimony by whatever gender would be considered married.
Those not wishing to simply be legally bound with their preferred partner could go through any other means. This would include but not be limited to, Judges, ship's captains at sea and many other select methods previously known as "marriage not by an ordained minister".
Those joined in a religous tense would be "married". Those joined by any other method would be "domestic partners". I don't understand why this is such a hard concept.
No, this is not a talk about God.
This is a talk about the inspirations of my father. His words are basically the reason I'm coming back. My father isn't the prettiest face in politics, but he is rather active. He sees the faces of the RNC that get things done. He's one of the "behind the scenes" guys in Washington State and I'm happy to see him doing it.
So we get to talking about politics and such and we start going over a few of the candidates. We talk about Thompson and some guy named Huckabee from Iowa. I'm kind of up on Thompson but not Huckabee. hen we start talking about the other candidates and I basically said that if one of them gets the nod I'm not voting for them. The truth is I probably wouldn't. I'd have probably voted for Guiliani if he didn't have the equivelency to a massacre worth of dead bones in his closet, but none of them really appeals to me. Of course he's shocked and drops the "help defeat Hillary" card for why I shouldn't vote independent. I return with none of them are going to do a damned thing for us so why should I care? He acnowledges that they're all pretty boys in stuffed shirts (my words, not his) and the real work goes on behind the scenes....and those people read blogs.
Well, him knowing me and me feeling miffed over the lack of people making changes (and my inability to change it) sorta put me back in the right mindset to be blogging again. Hopefully I can get ideas to the right people just by throwing ideas out there. Maybe I'll hear about somebody talking about my blog from my dad. That would be cool. So now I need to buckle down and put some ideas to paper.