Is Mise, given the perverted state of the Catholic Church in Australia I doubt gay people would want to be married by Fr. Fcukemup

@Is Mise

The churches can – and do – refuse to marry people for lots of reasons. Some won’t marry divorcees or people from other denominations. Some won’t marry people who are not active churchgoers, or even in their own congregations. None I know of would marry two people of a different religion, and most expect the happy couple to at least pay lip service to Christian faith.

There is no need to enforce gay marriage in church. Most marriages nowadays are civil ceremonies, anyway.

I hope the churches do decide to marry gay people (each denomination will make its own decision), but I also respect their right to choose not to.

@Josephus

Lots of countries that don’t alow gay marriage nonetheless give protection against discrimination in other spheres, such as employment.

You can assert that the purpose of marriage is “a biological union with the purpose to raise and protect children”, but that doesn’t make it so. Marriage has to different extents been about many things - property rights and inheritance, forging alliances between families and clans, creating a mutually supportive social unit and conforming with social conventions governing sexuality, as well as raising children. of these reasons, the last two have probably diminished most in importance in recent decades. Nowadays a large number of children are born outside of marriage, and a large number of marriages produce no children. A significant proportion of marriages end in divorce, and there are many single parent and blended families

Rhian,

I'm well aware that the churches are at present allowed to discriminate as to who they marry but I'm tipping that SSM activists will push for this to be changed.

@is mise
perhaps, but I'm tipping they won't succeed

Rhian,
Already equal rights for homosexuals to cohabit has been granted to them, but they are not satisfied with that. They want everyone to accept homosexual cohabitation as marriage. Homosexuals already have legal rights to property and inheritance of a lover and equal health care. They selfishly want the rights to children by surrogacy and I.V.F. They have no real concern for the welfare of the child in normal social environment, children need both a mother and father in a healthy environment to develop good relationships. Having lived beside teenage children raised by two lesbian women they had no boundaries in behaviour.

//children need both a mother and father in a healthy environment to develop good relationships//

Is that so? My father's mother died in childbirth - he never knew his biological mother - and his father never remarried. My father is a law-abiding retired engineer who has been married to my mother for over forty years. Given that you believe my father needed his mother to raise him in order to develop good relationships, how can you explain his remarkable success? Let me guess: he's the exception that proves your rule.