[Doctor_Fegg]

I don't get your Church of England reference. I'm a communicant member of a liberal CofE church and these restrictions would be anathema to me and to most of our church's congregation. Indeed, I "play a [rather loud] musical instrument" for the church every week...

[TomGullen]

When you say liberal, do you mean liberal but still will not do gay marriages?

[mattkevan]

Liberal generally means in support of gay marriage. I'm a member of a liberal church and we're very much in support of it.

The beautiful thing about the Church of England is that it includes a wide spectrum of opinion and tradition, from high church (smells'n'bells) to scruffy low church, from liberal to conservative, left and right).

I don't agree with everything, but it's a great space for people with different backgrounds and opinion to mix and learn from each other. It can be very radical in a quiet, British, socks-and-sandals sort of way.

Ha! Didn't think I'd be writing about the CofE on HN!

[Doctor_Fegg]

I don't know: I'm not aware we've ever been asked. My guess is that our church would if we were allowed to, but that the diocese and Lambeth Palace would overrule it.

I do know that [family member], who is gay and married, has said that she feels welcomed in our church and that she wishes she'd had one like it to support her when she came out.

[TomGullen]

One of my good friends is a CoE Vicar, but I do really struggle with the fact the organisation in some aspects is really backwards.

It's one of the only institutions I can think of that seems to be allowed to openly discriminate against homosexuals and until more recently women in some regards as well.

I hope you didn't take my comment as me jumping on you, I'm just curious because I don't think I could call any church in the CoE liberal when the leadership are so conservative.

[alexro]

It doesn't make sense to call gay partnership a marriage. Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.

[dragonwriter]

> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.

This is wrong in so many ways; "marriage" is a concept that exists in many cultures with many different different understandings, and those understandings have historically been fluid over time even within the same culture. Its most consistently a property arrangement between the parties; in the West its been separated from an essential intent for procreation for quite some time, though there are religious subcultures within Western societies for whom that may remain more important than it is in the broader society.

[alexro]

So why didn't people go out, pick up some orphan kid and give him whatever needed to be 'inherited'?

[erispoe]

They did. Ancient Rome and contemporary Japan are two examples relying heavily on adoption to pass on property to the next generation. The biological reality of genitors is only partly relevant to determine family ties.

[vidarh]

Because often the point was to ensure a pooling of the resources of two families.

But adoptions to secure an inheritance chain is historically certainly not that unusual either.

[dragonwriter]

In its historical roots, though often (but far from always) without the "orphan" part, that's exactly what marriage is: the process by which a family chooses some non-family person to share with some member of the family in the inheritance of the family. (Sometimes in a reciprocal, but even when so often not symmetrical, relationship with another family.)

[alexro]

Usually in such a way that when the parents get older their children would care of them, isn't it?

[dspillett]

> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon > ... > with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.

You need to review your history on marriage including, but by no means limited to, what the bible has to say on such matters.

The biblical view of marriage is vastly different to simply "a man and a woman wanting to procreate", itself took on and in places redefined millennia of tradition that pre-dated it, and given how much of that definition the church now ignores (allowing divorce, no longer requiring the stoning non-virgins, to cite two of many examples) I don't think ignoring something that isn't actually stated in the text anyway should be a significant problem.

[alexro]

So you talking about gay rights but at the same time you refuse billions of people who lived and live outside of Biblical views to have their own views on the subject?

[vidarh]

You mean including the many millions who live in cultures where polygamy is normal? And where "female husbands" are well established (there are millions of women living as "female husbands" with wives - sometimes more than one - in Africa).

[TheSpiceIsLife]

The best thing about this comment is: This opinion doesn't matter any more.

Whether officiated by a religious order, the state, or the word of those involved, 'marriage' is just a word, a concept, and has many permutations.

The new Marriage is unbounded by anyone else's beliefs.

The old Marriage is concerned with law, religion, and society. And sometimes we need to drop down a gear and consider these things, but law, religion, and society do not a marriage make.

It is the combination or mixture of elements that gives rise to something new, something neither of the elements alone is capable of, that is a 'marriage'.

[geff82]

Marriage is simply a human need as long as it still takes 20-30 years to raise children. If you do not at least promise your partner to be there until the end of life, there can be no (perceived?) certainity that you are not shooting yourself in the foot by getting children. And because raising kids takes so long, and needs full energy by a couple, society (religion, state, etc) supports being loyal to each other in many ways.

And it is good that way.

[colanderman]

I'm pretty sure "strictly defined cultural phenomenon" is an oxymoron.

[alexro]

Is it a better way to use different terms for when people get together to have kids and continue the family and when they just 'want' each other?

[task_queue]

My aunt never married my uncle, they have been together for over two decades and have produced two pretty awesome children.

Reminder that this poll exists[0].

[0] http://qz.com/262645/people-without-kids-live-better-than-pa...

[colanderman]

Plenty of homosexual couples have children, either through adoption, IVF or surrogates, just like heterosexual couples often do.

[vidarh]

And in fact female-female marriages (though at least in theory not sexual) have a long history in some cultures as a means for infertile women to gain heirs...

It'd be inaccurate to call those gay marriages as some of the cultures they are practised in at the same time have been very oppressive when it comes to homosexuality (though presumably such marriages have been used as a means to hide lesbian relationships), but the fact remains women have been able to marry women with the explicit intent of having shared children for hundreds of years... [1]. And they're not few:

" Kevane (2004) estimates that approximately 5–10 percent of the women in Africa are involved in woman-to-woman marriages. "

[1] http://www.osisa.org/buwa/regional/female-husbands-without-m...

[ascorbic]

So if someone is infertile then their marriage doesn't count in your eyes either?

[alexro]

Exactly right - this will count as a tragedy and there is lots of research aiming to help such people to have kids.

[dghf]

> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.

So are you saying that when people marry in old age, it's not really marriage?

[alexro]

It is an exception and was a source for many jokes and lots of drama in literature, wasn't it?

[function_seven]

You didn't answer the question.

[mathieuh]

Strictly defined by whom? It doesn't have that definition for me anyway.

[alexro]

You can call computer a calculator since it does indeed 'calculate' stuff, but you'll be in a minority. Computer's got so much more than a simple calculator, same with marriages - it is much more for a man and woman in every country in the world.

[vidarh]

> it is much more for a man and woman in every country in the world.

In every country in the world? There are a large number of countries that allow marriages that does not meet your definition. Both polygamy and gay marriages.

[ascorbic]

We're not talking about "every country in the world" though. We're talking about England, where your definition has not applied since 2013.

[alexro]

You confusing legal with cultural. If you go around taking about marriage only few will think about gay relationship.

And in any case there is simply no real value for gays to become 'married' other than getting a sticker.

[ljf]

Are you married to that idea?

Married and marriage have plenty of meanings in English...

[task_queue]

It's a good thing language and society are fluid despite being held back by people who are unchanging in opinion or operate on religious zeal.

The function and intention of marriage has changed through time and locality.

To pick a singular aspect of a complex social construct and use that to base its purpose and definition on is myopic.

[alexro]

So who is picking up one aspect of the complex relationship here? If I get together with an AI in the future you'll call it marriage too?

[task_queue]

> So who is picking up one aspect of the complex relationship here?

Who is making it hard to believe you're arguing in good faith here? You've consistently harped on a reductionist definition of marriage in this thread.

>If I get together with an AI in the future you'll call it marriage too?

Personally, I truly do not care what you call it. If they're able to give consent and you can find a place to have wedding, good for you. If the law wants to respect it, congratulations.

[alexro]

That's the problem - your abstraction is leaking, whereas the man/woman/kids abstraction of the marriage is not.

[Spare_account]

No it isn't. Marriage was adopted by the Church and redefined along the lines you describe - it existed long before that as a legal process to control inheritance. You're welcome to do whatever you think is best within the confines of your own marriage but to say that marriage intrinsically has your preferred attributes is incorrect.

[dragonwriter]

> Marriage was adopted by the Church and redefined along the lines you describe - it existed long before that as a legal process to control inheritance.

For property purpose more generally: controlling inheritance was part of that, but a related part (and perhaps a more significant part in early societies where inheritances were small) was economic support the other direction, up the family tree rather than down. Where children (and grandchildren, and lateral relatives) care for their parents (and grandparents, etc.) in their old age instead of their existing nonfamily social support networks, establishing broader family bonds through formal unions is important to that.

[alexro]

So are you saying that millions (and now billions) of Chinese and Indians who never had Bible and were absolutely poor used marriage to pass inheritance along? Also there were thousands of tribes who never had to worry about inheritance but who have traditions for marriages, no?

[vidarh]

Actually, if you bother to look you'll find that tribal societies often have very rich culture and rules around marriage exactly because "worrying about inheritance" is a critical for their very survival. And "worrying about inheritance" is also a substantial part of the reason there is a rich history of marriage that goes beyond one man marrying one woman in these societies.

E.g. many African tribes have traditions for polygamy that are either explicitly intended to deal with men being likely to die earlier (as fighters or hunters) to safeguard the viability of the house-hold and/or to deal with inheritance in societies where women were often not allowed to inherit (a typical case being a social obligation in some tribes for a man to marry his deceased brothers wives in order to ensure she still has somewhere to live).

[TomGullen]

Source? In the UK I'm pretty confident the definition of marriage isn't exclusive domain to heterosexual couples.

[DanBC]

Same sex marriage is still not legal in NI, so you're not quite right for "UK". And gay people were only allowed to marry in 2014.

The UK does better than most countries for supporting LGBT rights, but it took a long time. The UK discriminated against homosexuals for many years, and we still have some way to go to fully recognising rights of LGBT people.

[foldr]

>And gay people were only allowed to marry in 2014.

This is true, of course, but potentially a little misleading for people not familiar with the UK, since civil partnerships have been available since 2004.

[clort]

civil partnerships were also misleading, since myself and my opposite sex partner are not allowed to get one, even though we are both civilians.

[alexro]

Cultural means that everywhere where there is a similar culture the things will mean the same to people.