“This idea of two men getting married is the most bizarre idea in human history,” Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League, told host John Fugelsang, adding that the purpose of marriage is a “duty” to procreate. “The whole purpose of marriage is to have a family,” he said. “It’s not about making people happy. It’s not about love.” (Fugelsang is an actor, TV host and political commentator).
As I understand it the Catholic church introduced the “sacrament of marriage” at the Council of Verona, so that men (in particular) could be assured that their wife’s offspring was theirs, that it wasn’t sired by an unauthorised house painter or itinerant minstrel, and that property ( it had to be about property!) could be legitimately bequeathed to said offspring (a son in particular).
We have enough people in the world. Some people think too many, owing partly to Catholic church objection to birth control. The people who propose marriage as an act of love have it absolutely right. There is nothing so wonderful as a loving marriage. Children can be a bonus, but are not necessary to it. Bill Donohue is well………
The first official declaration that marriage is a sacrament was made at the 1184 Council of Verona as part of a condemnation of the Cathars. In 1208, Pope Innocent III required members of another religious movement, that of the Waldensians, to recognize that marriage is a sacrament as a condition for being received back into the Catholic Church. In 1254, Catholics accused Waldensians of condemning the sacrament of marriage, “saying that married persons sin mortally if they come together without the hope of offspring”.
One of the world’s problems is that as Bill Maher says, its the stupid ultra religious people who feel that it’s their duty to get married and have children. As a result, their birth rate is higher than the more intelligent and secular people. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in Israel, where the ultra Orthodox Jews and Islamists are having far more children than the Jewish atheists and moderate Muslim Arabs. This is polarising Israeli and Palestinian politics, making peace less likely.
But elsewhere in the world, this is also having a damaging effect. In America, Mormons and extreme Catholics have more children than anywhere else. Thus means that although America as a whole is secularising, there are pockets of increasing religious extremism, making society more divided.
It’s a very Eurocentric view to assume that the more modern definition of marriage will prevail worldwide. Although this is the way we’ve come to see it in Europe and much of the New World, the traditional view of marriage prevails in most of the rest of the world, the Middle East and Africa in particular. This has lots of consequences: the continuation of high birth rates in much of the world for years to come, the scant possibility of gay marriage and LGBT equality becoming widespread in the extra European world, the continued patrachical nature of gender relations as women will be expected to raise these children, and the increasing popularity of religious extremism- just to name a few.