Quakers to conduct gay weddings
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Independent Minds
The Quakers have put themselves on a collision course with both the Government and fellow Christians by becoming the first mainstream religious organisation in the country to approve gay marriages.
At a meeting in York yesterday the denomination, which is also known as the Religious Society of Friends, voted to extend their marriage ceremony to same-sex couples and called on the Government to change the law on gay marriage.
British law allows same-sex couples to conduct civil partnerships, which in effect gives them all the rights of a married couple. But the law stops short of labelling the ceremony a marriage to avoid offending religious groups, who believe a marriage can only be conducted between a man and a woman.
The move is significant because, like rabbis and Church of England priests, Quaker registrars are allowed to marry people on behalf of the state. The Religious Society of Friends had long taken a tolerant stand towards homosexuality, unlike many orthodox Christians who believe homosexuality is a sin.
The issue of gay marriages has almost torn the Anglican Communion apart, with the socially liberal and conservative wings of the Church bitterly divided over the issue.
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Comments
I am not a Quaker, though I think I should be. I fall into the category of a "semi-detached Anglican" having the facility of worship in an Anglican chapel rather than the business centre that used to be my parish church. Quaere, has the General Synod considered the fee income generated by the celebration of same-sex unions?
I'd rather have goodness. The scared can be found without adopting righteous intolerance or thinking you know the ultimate truth in fact the sacred is the continued search for truth and recognising that though you get closer you never quite arrive.
- ban remarriage for divorced women (Matthew: 5, 32)
- ban interracial marriage (Deuteronomy 7, 3, Numbers 25, 6-8, etc)
- ban marriage between Christians and non-Christians (2 John, 1: 9-11 and 2 Corinthians 6, 14-27)
- prevent any man from marrying if he has had erotic thoughts about any woman other than the one he intends to marry (Matthew 5: 28)
- prevent any woman from marrying who is not prepared to obey her husband's every whim (Corinthians 11: 3, amongst many others)
- ban any marriage between an aggressive or contentious woman (Proverbs 21: 9, etc) - thereby ending marriage once and for all in Liverpool.
as well as fully enforcing the book of Leviticus, which proscribes women teachers, the consumption of shellfish, clothes of mixed fibres and many other things.
I somehow think that, if God does exist, she is laughing at us.
Says who?
No matter how reasonable the Quakers are being it is still a superstition. Please, gay community, don't adopt this superstition after two millennia of murderous persecution. No community has seen more clearly the abusive consequences of society accepting superstitious interpretations of reality.
The problem is not solved by refinement of religions: the religious method us totally inadequate for the purposes claimed.
The scientific method elucidates reality: the religious method (tuning into your hackles) results in the blowing up schoolgirls, a search for hidden tablets of gold, playing with rattlesnakes and praying through the TV, courses about spacemen tying beings to volcanos, and families committing mass suicide in the Guyanian jungle.
They are all in the business of conning the gullible and the indoctrinated into giving them everything they can get: right up to accumulating vast Empires... and the more they get, the more violent they become.
Be happy with civil partnerships... they are the only civilised way to marry.
I am really happy and proud of the friends for their, I only hope they don't mind weddings with a little more "bling" than they are used to, as I sense a mass conversion coming.