saddened

I know that there are many (maybe even many of you reading this) that disagree with me, but it saddens me to see the marriage bans that were passed in California (presumably...absentee ballots are still being counted), Arizona and Florida during this recent election. It just seems to me that this begins to blur the lines between church and state. For many, it is wrong for gay people to marry because that is what their religions tell them. For that reason, it seems perfectly reasonable for churches to refuse to perform religious marriage ceremonies for people violating the beliefs of that religion. But I just don't understand why the legal relationship should exclude people and why it is necessary to ban people from entering legally committed relationships. As with most things, if your belief systems says that it's wrong, then it makes sense to avoid entering into such a relationship yourself. But it doesn't seem to me like you should have the right to say that it's wrong for someone else. There are so many terrible things that happen in this world, where people are hurt or violated. It seems like attention could be better spent on preventing those things than preventing people from making lifelong commitments of love to each other. In Arkansas, a ban was passed that prevents non-married people from adopting or becoming foster parents. It saddens me to think that children are being deprived of loving parents because the parents don't fit some state ideal. With biological children, anyone can be a parent...there's no screening process. Biological children are often raised by single parents. Biological children can have abusive parents or neglectful parents. Adoptive parents do go through a screening process and adopting a child usually indicates that the parents really want a child, which is more than can be said of some biological parents. Again, I can't wrap my head around the denial of recognizing loving relationships.

So I may have pissed off some of you by my little rant. But hey, we can't all agree on everything, can we?