thread: 2006-08-31 : I think my expectations are screwed
On 2006-09-07, ffilz wrote:
Wow, this really exploded... Can't quite take it all in, but one thought...
On marriage - I definitely am in the camp that civil marriage and religious marriage should be two different things (that can be tied together by individuals). Civil marriage is mostly a contract, and most everything should be governable by existing contract law. However, there are a load of shortcut legal agreements that also come along for the ride, redefining civil marriage as purely a contract issue would drop out a lot of useful freebies (things like inheritance, power of attorney). So I would like to see some kind of civil union thing exist that is available to any group of adults (see, some worry about opening up the gates to child marriage, however, contract law already recognizes that minors can't be held to contracts in the same way, in fact, remove the government recognition of marriage the way it's recognized now, and those states that say it's ok to have sex with a minor as long as you're married can't hold that up anymore), that provides all the freebies that civil marriage currently grants (perhaps with a review and trimming of any that really don't apply - for example, I'd almost be in favor of property division upon break-up not being so automatic, but instead be required to be explicitly called out in the contract - it'd make divorce court a lot more streamlined).
I'm also inclined to make pot legal...
So, Vincent, I suspect that the reason Unitarians have never burned anyone at the stake is that they've never been the official religion of a government:
That's close to true... Except, for a handfull of years, there actually was a Unitarian king in Transylvania. And guess what his legacy is - the first proclamation of religious freedom. Of course as soon as the Catholics got into power again (after the king died), the author of that proclamation was quickly tossed in a cell to die (after laws were passed that severely restricted religious innovation).
There's also been another time when Unitarians have actually had some governmental power. If I'm getting my dates right, from 1825 to 1835 in Massachusetts, if the majority of a town's population were Unitarian, the Unitarians got possession of the meeting house (church and town meeting hall) and collected the taxes.
Frank
