Woody Cavenaugh

I do all of my best thinking when I am asleep, in the shower, and driving. I also wake up to NPR on the clock radio. These conditions put fiddlingly small things like the cure for cancer and world peace at my fingertips. ;) This said, I am going to solve the whole "Gay Marriage" fiasco.

In a nutshell it is a role issue and everyone needs to be reminded of their roles.

In order to get married you have to have a marriage liscense. It is a legal document you get from the registrar of deeds office. You fill it out, they put their mark on it. The purpose of the document is to state legally who has the right to your stuff should you die of a disease or get eaten. If you get married in a foreign country the marriage will not be legal in the US without proper legal documentation that is accepted by the US government.

Next step you need an official signature to make it proper. The law states that it can be a justice of the peace, judge, ships captain, etc. It also allows for a liscensed religious leader to do the honors. Thus, even a religious leader must have some sort of legal documentation to be able to do the honors.

On the other side of this running for a time parallel and then crossing at the moment of "official signature" is the religious marriage ceremony that is optional under the law. If you belong to a church you are more or less obligated by your church to get 'er done there. Usually if you are a member of your church in good standing you only have to take a few classes on the sanctity of marriage and not pay an aditional arm and a leg. If you are wanting a ceremony in a church and you are not a member you have to bribe the church for the service. These days it seems only fair, times are hard, and space isn't cheap. But you aren't legally married even then until the legally designated represenitive of the all mighty signs on the dotted line and that gets sent back to the registrar of deeds to be filed.

Church and state are separated except for the brief moment where the optional preacher signs the manditory legal form on the dotted line.

Now the church, should you go that route for a wedding, can make any sort of arbitrary rule they like concerning who they will marry. Some require a bribe for non-members, some in addition require a "fee" for members. Some will require that you use their organist, some will require that you pay extra for their kitchen. Most will require that the bride and groom be of opposing genders. Why not? It's their church and their religious book says something indicating that the almighty might have a problem with Bride and Bride, or Groom and Groom getting together. Overall, the bible (the religious book I am most familiar with) seems to want all sex to further the cause of raising the human population. After all during the hundreds of years when the various books were written there was no such thing as over population. Disease and preditors kept the human population in check.

The law really doesn't care who is legally binding with whom. Its not the laws job to care. The law's job is to have a document that states that person "A" is legally binding with person "B" such that they are sharing equally what is theirs together. A+B=insurance benificaries.

Where all of this uproar over gays getting married came from is that the church forgot that it wasn't the law, and apparently the law has forgotten it isn't beholding to the Pope, the Dali Lama, or Pat Roberson. There is no need for it to. These two separate things have been co-existing very well for a very long time. Oddly enough it seems that whenever there is a war or a revolution in history someone tried to make the two one. This is up to and including the American Revolution. (If our founding fathers were alive today the 700 Club would be attacking them every night on TV for their failure to believe that god has his hands in their everyday lives. Our founding father's remember were deist.)

So to solve the whole gay marriage thing is easy. If you want a church wedding and the church doesn't like the happy couple's plumbing, the happy couple must go find a church that doesn't mind, or more simply, skip the church, get a justice of the peace and rent a hotel ballroom for the reception. It is after all the church's right to refuse service to anyone. But they don't have nor should they have a monoply on the legal documentation.

You're welcome, now go in peace.