Is the author saying that the Gay Marriage is to be sanctified by the Church?
He does not seem o believe in The Old Testament.
If The Old Testament is to be questioned, The New Testament has no place , as The Old Testament is Primary.
The question of a Religion sanctifying Gay marriage does not arise.
None of the World Religions approve of Gay Relationship.
Gay relationship is not normal human behavior.
There is evidence that animals, like Chimpanzees engage themselves in Homosexual activity.
But to quote this o justify Human Gay activity as normal is incorrect.
If we were to accept this logic, we are none he better than the animals.
Religion, apart from ennobling the soul, is an instrument of Social Order.
Some behaviors in the Society are harmful to the Structure of society.
Therefore Society has called them Taboos.
People can also justify incest, by quoting Oedipus!
How absurd!
If Gay and Lesbian marriages are to be given Religious sanction, these behaviours, which are not normal, become rampant.
In a Society, an order has to be maintained.
(For further reading please read my blog on ‘Gay Marriages Legalised’
Human instinct if followed unchecked by Reason, will create problems at some stage for those who indulge in it and destabilize the Society in the long run.
Gays and Lesbians must realise that they have a problem and learn to live with it.
You can not force others to approve of it.
It is their prerogative.
Note: The Church itself is not beyond reproach, we have Gay priests, Lesbian Nuns and Paedophiles among them.
It is not to be taken as an example, but rather as a warning.
If one were to question the Origin of The Bible, the entire Bible can be discarded as the Bible was compiled by Constantine nearly 300 years after the Death of Jesus Christ.
Faith is something one should accept with heart,.
We know we can not control the Future and Death, this is Logic.
Do we accept it whole-heartedly ?
“Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage? Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredeness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.
Some of my fellow Catholics even think that “true marriage” was instituted by Christ. It wasn’t. Marriage is prescribed in Eden by YHWH (Yahweh) at Genesis 2.24: man and wife shall “become one flesh.” When Jesus is asked about marriage, he simply quotes that passage from Genesis (Mark 10.8). He nowhere claims to be laying a new foundation for a “Christian marriage” to replace the Yahwist institution.
Some try to make the wedding at Cana (John 1.1-11) somehow sacramental because Jesus worked his first miracle there. But that was clearly a Jewish wedding, like any other Jesus might have attended, and the miracle, by its superabundance of wine, is meant to show the disciples that the Messianic time has come. The great Johannine scholar Father Raymond Brown emphasizes this, and concludes of the passage: “Neither the external nor the internal evidence for a symbolic reference to matrimony is strong. The wedding is only the backdrop and occasion for the story, and the joining of the man and woman does not have any direct role in the narrative.”
The early church had no specific rite for marriage. This was left up to the secular authorities of the Roman Empire, since marriage is a legal concern for the legitimacy of heirs. When the Empire became Christian under Constantine, Christian emperors continued the imperial control of marriage, as the Code of Justinian makes clear. When the Empire faltered in the West, church courts took up the role of legal adjudicator of valid marriages. But there was still no special religious meaning to the institution. As the best scholar of sacramental history, Joseph Martos, puts it: “Before the eleventh century there was no such thing as a Christian wedding ceremony in the Latin church, and throughout the Middle Ages there was no single church ritual for solemnizing marriage between Christians.”
Only in the twelfth century was a claim made for some supernatural favor (grace) bestowed on marriage as a sacrament. By the next century marriage had been added to the biblically sacred number of seven sacraments. Since Thomas Aquinas argued that the spouses’ consent is the efficient cause of marriage and the seal of intercourse was the final cause, it is hard to see what a priest’s blessing could add to the reality of the bond. And bad effects followed. This sacralizing of the natural reality led to a demoting of Yahwist marriage, the only kind Jesus recognized, as inferior to “true marriage” in a church.
In the 1930s, my parents had a civil marriage, but my Catholic mother did not think she was truly married if not by a priest. My non-Catholic father went along with a church wedding (but in the sacristy, not the sanctuary) by promising to raise his children as Catholic. My mother thought she had received the sacrament, but had she? Since mutual consent is the essence of marriage, one would think that the sacrament would have to be bestowed on both partners; but my non-Catholic father could not receive the sacrament. Later, when my father left and married another, my mother was told she could not remarry because she was still married to my father in the “true marriage.” When he returned to my mother, and became a Catholic, a priest performed again the sacramental marriage. Since my father’s intervening marriage was “outside the church,” it did not count. What nonsense.
Those who do not want to let gay partners have the sacredness of sacramental marriage are relying on a Scholastic fiction of the thirteenth century to play with people’s lives, as the church has done ever since the time of Aquinas. The myth of the sacrament should not let people deprive gays of the right to natural marriage, whether blessed by Yahweh or not. They surely do not need—since no one does—the blessing of Saint Thomas.”
Garry Wills
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/09/marriage-myth/
Some quoes from The Bible on Marriage.
Genesis 2:23-24 The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man,”
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother,
and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
Genesis 3:16 To the woman he said,
“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
1 Corinthians 13:1-13 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels,
but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have a faith that can move mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames,
but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient,
love is kind.
It does not envy,
it does not boast,
it is not proud.
It is not rude,
it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil
but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects,
always trusts,
always hopes,
always perseveres.
Love never fails.
But where there are prophecies,
they will cease;
where there are tongues,
they will be stilled;
where there is knowledge,
it will pass away.
For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.
When I was a child, I talked like a child,
I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror;
then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully,
even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 7:3 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.
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