Dan Dare:

“The civil institution is about merging as property owners, having rights of access to one another and duty of care to each other, having a legally sanctioned guardianship of children that are biological progeny, adopted or fostered.”

If it is so vital then how come millions of couples can live together without it?

Dear Dan,

Freedom requires that any two or more people are never prevented from drawing up and entering whatever contracts they want between them.

Freedom does not require that each and every possible such contract must become a civil institution that is administered, regulated and supported by the state. Further, if the tax-payer is forced to pay for some civil institution then that institution is inconsistent with freedom.

<Quote> "Yes we have witnessed freedom from religion over the last 40-50 years. Freedom for teenagers to sleep with multiple partners, freedom for teenagers them to top themselves, murder the unwanted baby, freedom to inject inhale drugs, freedom to carry on like idiots and not be disciplined, freedom from religion is great! And yet the irreligious still want to send their kids to religious schools. <end Quote>
Posted by runner, Wednesday, 23 December 2015 3:30:40 PM

That is generalist nonsense!

I like the idea of simply having 'set of beliefs' and not singling out those that include a deity. Hopefully that will cut down on the idealogical snobbery.

Also, for Chris C and others like me who consider 'same-sex marriage' to be a contradiction, please visit http://www.got-freedom.biz, we need to team up.

Peter L,

I visited your website. The links in it would not open for me.

In any case, I will not be joining a campaign against the word theft campaign because most of those arguing against the creation of “same-sex marriage” haven’t got a clue. They present irrelevant arguments such as every child is entitled to a mother and a father as if gay people don’t already have children without their relationships being labelled marriages. They act as if the proposed plebiscite was serious when it is just to give the Coalition cover. We could take the Coalition seriously if it proposed a constitutional referendum to restore the meaning of the word “marriage “ to what everybody knew it meant for the first 113 years of federation; i.e., until the High Court amended the Constitution, not by changing any words in it but by changing the meaning of a word in it. The fact that the Coalition is not proposing this tells us all that its claimed opposition to the creation of “same-sex marriage” is not real.

I make comments on the non-issue to puncture the sheer idiocy of the argument and the pretensions of its Johnny-come-lately advocates, not because I think the word theft campaign can be stopped.

The “same-sex marriage” campaign has two lessons: the first is you can convince people of anything if you frame the debate the right way (as long as it does not cost any money); the second is you can never predict what “issue” will be created out of nothing at some future date for people who did not give a toss about it in the previous 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years to suddenly become self-righteously passionate about it and condemnatory of all those poor benighted souls who did not jump aboard the bandwagon the day they themselves joined it.

This subject has been discussed so many times
on this forum. In this country people are free
to practice any religion they wish (providing
it doesn't break any of our laws). They are also
free not to practice any religion.

Emile Durkheim, was the first sociologist to
believe that the origins of religion were social
not supernatural. He pointed out that whatever
their source religion enhanced the solidarity of
the community as well as its faith.

Religious rituals such as Baptism, Bar Mitzvah,
Weddings, Sabbath Services, Christian Mass,
and Funerals serve to bring people together,
to remind them of their group membership,
tore-affirm their traditional values, to
maintain prohibitions and taboos, and to offer
comfort in times of crisis. In general to
transmit the cultural heritage from one
generation to the next.

In fact Durkheim argued that shared religious
beliefs and the rituals that go with them are
so important that every society needs religion
or at least some belief system that serves the
same functions.

The cause of much of the social disorder in modern
societies he blamed on the lack of religious
beliefs.