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Faster than I predicted

Which special classes would those be? You can't refuse to perform a straight marriage, either.

I believe the Catholic Church has/does...especially in the case of divorced couples.

I know the pastor of a local reformed church refused to marry one of my friends after going through pre-marital counseling with them. It was a good thing too, she was nuts.
 
Your ignorance at the meaning of chapel is secondary to my point.

When I predicted government would force "churches" to perform homosexual "marriages" against their will I wasn't talking about brick and mortar buildings I was talking about clergy...you know the ones with the authority to perform weddings.

You worded that really oddly but I'll run with. You said the chapel is for hire, so in other words you are renting time in a building to have your wedding ceremony.

Clergy perform wedding ceremonies at many different venues, some of which are paid venues. This is all in jeopardy now.

I don't think Christians who fell for all the "equality" hogwash really considered the consequences when they caved in to peer pressure.


PearlWatson said:
They are ordained pastors of their church, so of course they are acting on behalf of their church. This is the reason why the state recognized their authority to perform weddings in the first place.

a chapel is not necessarily associated with a religion - there is no restriction on the use of the term "chapel"

and just because something may call itself a religion or someone may call themselves a "reverend" or "pastor" does not mean that are associated with an IRS recognized religion. A for-profit business, by it's definition, is NOT a religion. If those two "pastors" don't want to preside over homosexual weddings, they don't have to. But the Hitching Post, as a for-profit business, and NOT a religious institution, cannot discriminate in that fashion.

Plenty of people can preside over weddings who are not affiliated in any way, shape or form with religion.

My neighbor got herself "ordained" so she could legally preside over her son's wedding. I'm not sure exactly what was involved but it was recognized by the state, yet had nothing to do with any religion whatsoever. Another neighbor is a judge (in juvenile court, but that doesn't matter) and has presided over a number of weddings. In some cases, the County Clerk can legally officiate a wedding.


I wish I understood why some of those reading these posts keep ignoring the facts.
 
When a couple is getting married, they usually want the ceremony to reflect who they are and to share the moment with very special people in their lives. More than ever, couples are choosing to have close friends and family officiate their weddings, especially if they are not religious. In Illinois, it is legal for virtually anyone to become ordained to marry someone. It is easy to get ordained almost instantly simply by going online and applying with an online ordination service.


Read more : https://www.ehow.com/how_7611563_become-ordained-marry-someone-illinois.html

Pretty sure it's similar in most other states.


Here you are - go for it, Pearl! You can probably even change your screen name to Reverend Pearl. Not quite as catchy as "Reverend Blue Jeans" but it's close :-)

https://www.ministerregistration.org/
 
Your ignorance at the meaning of chapel is secondary to my point.

When I predicted government would force "churches" to perform homosexual "marriages" against their will I wasn't talking about brick and mortar buildings I was talking about clergy...you know the ones with the authority to perform weddings.

You worded that really oddly but I'll run with. You said the chapel is for hire, so in other words you are renting time in a building to have your wedding ceremony.

Clergy perform wedding ceremonies at many different venues, some of which are paid venues. This is all in jeopardy now.

I don't think Christians who fell for all the "equality" hogwash really considered the consequences when they caved in to peer pressure.

When Daniel Webster spent years traveling the backwoods of America compiling a lexicon of words, their usages, and meanings, his standard of judgment was what people thought the words mean.

Lawyers, and Lawmakers, are generally guilty of defining words the way they want them to mean, as well. I don't suppose very many people on the Vegas Strip going to those "wedding chapels" where they can get married today are calling them "churches", and the people performing the ceremonies aren't necessarily calling themselves "pastors", either. It's a business deal, for legal convenience.

It would be my contention that whatever they are is irrelevant to people having equal standing under the law. I think the mentality of "professionalization" gets deranged when it's government determining who can be "licensed" to perform any professional service. It's a form of overlordyism, a caste system, being established by the government. The government has no inherent qualifications to determine what is good engineering, good medicine, or good values for society. Government is always a festering cesspool of sychophants, totally moronic politicians, and bureaucrats whose whole claim to validity is having power to impose nonsense on the rest of us.

"government" ranks right up there with "religion" as a crass despot hell-bent on destroying human liberty. It's always been a tool of suppression and abuse for opportunistic sociopaths.

If we really want to have a good life, we have to take responsibility for ourselves and make it damn clear we will make our own personal decisions, and make sure our government is not permitted to grow oppressive. We only tolerate it because sometimes we can make it serve a need with an acceptable level of ethics, accountability, and efficiency. Where ever we can do better without it, we should.

Certainly it's clear that we can do better in our personal life decisions and relationships without it, unless we are somehow degenerates who don't respect the rights of others which we should normally expect for ourselves.

Christians in the past have been guilty of hijacking government as tool for regulating society; progressives today whatever their claims to the contrary, are clearly doing just as much criminal mischief against the clear rights of individuals. The driving force is fascism. . . . the determination of commercial interests to control government and create an advantaged playing field for their enterprises. . . . and racism following in the tradition of Cecil Rhodes and the Council of Foreign Relations, which is the ultimate "white man's club" world wide. Sure they have vocally and publicly taken all the right rhetorical positions, controlling the public dialogue through their ownership of major media. But they are like lawyers. How do you know when a lawyer is lying? When his lips are moving.

What you do is look at what is actually going on. Africa is being depopulated with malaria and other diseases, by one genocidal war after another across decades getting no real public news coverage, and by western-financed "Islamists" who walk, talk and kill like marxists or any of a dozen other political, western-rooted political brands. Under the UN we run out our planes and troops and decimate the populations of nation after nation. Where ever we can't convince people to adopt their own depopulation programs by birth control and limitation programs, we send the damn troops with the bombs our militarists make millions from.

What we call "liberal" and "progressive" just keeps proving itself fascist, and the political system established by Cecil Rhodes just keeps killing millions of humans year after year.

controlling the rhetoric on the GLBT "movement" along the same lines Karl Marx preached over a century ago, the net result is people are not going to be having children, and people are not going to be controlling their own minds either with long-established and beneficial belief systems that have sustained societies for centuries, or with any original or intelligent solutions to the problems we face. Our lives will progressively be reduced to powerlessness over our own lives and continually degrading financial self-sufficiency.
 
https://allenbwest.com/2014/10/christian-persecution-idaho-city-forces-pastors-marry-gays/

As reported by the Washington Times, “Coeur d‘Alene, Idaho, city officials have laid down the law to Christian pastors within their community, telling them bluntly via an ordinance that if they refuse to marry homosexuals, they will face jail time and fines.

So, let me get this straight. We shouldn't try to provide equal protection under the law to all, because some people might take it too far?

Ok, so let's force them gay people back into the closets where they belong, and once again deny them their equal protection under the law and full slate of civil rights, because some people might overreact. Yep, makes perfect sense to me.

IF and WHEN this becomes a real problem, and not just some isolated anecdotes, then we can deal with it as a serious problem. Discrimination against gays, however, much of it imposed by religious folk, has been a systematic and pervasive problem for millennia.

Fundamental Christianity will survive this just fine and will move on to find new 'out groups' to oppress.

By the way, I would stand with you to defend to the rights of religions and religious folks to practice their religion (provided it does not cross over into abuse, law breaking, etc.).
 
You should think very carefully about whether you really want to live in a world where the Hobby Lobby ruling is applied broadly.

Don't worry.. I have... and I don't want to live in that world. But none the less, it exists and might could be leveraged, so we HAVE to think about it.

In this case, the owners are a for profit attempting to discriminate against one group of the public. In the Hobby Lobby case, the owners were being required to pay, not accept business, and their refusal applied to every one, not just certain employees. Those are significant differences.

This helps, so thank you.
 
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