A good friend of mine wrote a post on gay marriage that seems to beg for reply. Well, he wanted it, here it is. Before I start in, however, I have to state that I am pro gay-marriage and don’t believe in the arguments presented below. These are presented here for clarification only.

The image of God is both male and female and is reflected in a godly union between male and female where the creative power of God, His life-giving, His self-giving and His moral nature are perfectly expressed. This is only possible in a heterosexual union.

When God created a partner for Adam He created Eve – not another Adam. This means that perfect partnership requires some level of difference as well as a level of similarity so great that Adam could cry out loudly, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”. Heterosexuality is the normal method of human bonding and the one for which our bodies and emotions are designed.

The argument here, clearly, is that if God had intended gay marriage to be a reality, He would have made it that way originally. Now, this is a Christian argument from the Bible, and several people take it literally, but it is only really one stance. From the Koran (Islam):

Whoever of you whose wife behaves in a disagreeable manner and he responds by kindness and patience, God will give him rewards as much as Job will be given for his patience.

The language alone would seem to imply an endorsement of male/female marriage.

In specific response to Sean, who writes:

If you answer my question above (“what’s wrong with…”) and you involve your religious convictions, don’t bother. This country, despite its Christian origins, was founded on the separation of Church and State – and that includes Christianity.

You are correct that it was founded on the separation of Church and State, but the fact is that there are some areas where that distinction blurs — marriage being one of them. The separation of Church and State is really more of a political separation to prevent the Church from influencing or interfering in governmental matters, by my understanding. The Church traditionally performs the marriage ceremony, but is given power by the State to make those marriages legal. Sadly, if the State refuses to recognize marriage (a la California), then the Church, while it can still perform said ceremonies (at least in theory), cannot make them valid in the eyes of the law. It’s the State that grants the rights that comes with marriage, not the Church. Thus, marriage licenses.

I would further add to Sean’s list of grievances the fact that Bush is advocating a possible Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (this may not be an addition, depending on what Sean meant when he said “Federal marriage amendment”). This sort of stuff doesn’t belong in the Bill of Rights, precisely because both that document and the Constitution never interfere with religious matters, and, in fact, guarantee religious freedom via the First Amendment. The Bill of Rights mostly concerns itself with matters of State — the right to vote, ending slavery, and assuring due process, to name a few. Gay marriage is not a matter of State, except that some politicians may choose to use it to get some more votes on their side. It is a matter of religion.

I invite rebuttal and comment on this via blogs — just send a trackback ping to this post when you do so.

New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has begun a program that will issue discounts to protesters of the Republican Convention if they promise to protest peacefully. Interestingly, it offers discounts from a number of places in New York.

Let me tell you why this might not work.

While a protestor, let’s call her Jane, may buy into the mayor’s program for all the discounts, perhaps she unwittingly gets a little drunk that night, and the next morning when she goes out to protest, she’s a little hammered and forgets about the peaceful protest promise she made. Thus, she starts banging heads around, with no regard to some discount program she could care less about.

Okay, a little unrealistic, but you get the point – mob mentalities are such that you cannot predict whether someone who had previously promised to be peaceful will turn violent. It’s a basic element of psychology and well-documented: people tend to follow the actions of a larger group, and if that larger group is being violent, then the possibility is significantly higher that our dear Jane will be violent as well.

This may recall the Seattle WTO riots a few years ago — pretty much the exact same thing.

So, therefore, good effort, Mr. Bloomberg, but it may not stop violence.

It could be said that late night (or early morning, in this case) blog entries are inherently dangerous because you run the risk of being completely noncoherent. In my current state of wakefulness, I don’t seem to consider this a problem.

For some reason — perhaps because I was just now reading a portion of Orwell’s 1984, I began to think about fate. My belief in fate has always been hinged on a single premise: my own experience with recognizing events that couldn’t have occurred before. I call them “snapshots”. From time to time, I have an intuition that what I am seeing at that exact second is something I have seen before; not because it has happened, but because it has been presented to me. I know from past experience that I get images in my sleep from time to time that are predictive of an exact moment in the future. Back in 6th grade, I had at least one occasion where I knew I had seen a particular moment in a dream under a different context; it was a completely conscious recollection of the event. Since then, though, they have become more and more of a shock (or, perhaps more appropriately, a surprise).

It is from this that I believe that some parts of our lives are inherently predetermined. I don’t, however, believe that our path is rigidly defined; instead, I believe that specific points in time are rigidly defined, and that the space between those points is fluid and unpredictable. For me, these snapshots are always minor images, never major — holding a pencil a certain way while writing a specific word, for instance, or writing a particular e-mail regarding an issue that didn’t come up until minutes before I had the recollection. It’s always a little jarring and disorienting for just a second as the memory from my dream state snaps into place as a sort of overlay. For those proficient in graphics editing, it’s as if a hidden layer had just been rendered visible with unpredicted results. I have to wonder why these are always minor and never major events — a death, perhaps, or some life-defining instance. Perhaps it’s simply because life isn’t predominantly made up of life-defining moments in time; rather, it’s a jumble of events that are seemingly minor on the grand scale of things, composited into a life and making small adjustments in the flow of time.

I suppose that this would all depend on your outlook. Someone who is very literal minded (ironically, someone such as me) might think that you cannot see things before they happen, since each event is constructed out of the outcomes of thousands — millions, billions — of other events. Someone a little more creative might completely agree with me. It’s really more a subject for philosophers, but I like to philosophize on my own from time to time.