Mainers will go to the polls this November to vote on a ballot measure on whether the State should allow same-sex couples to marry. This has renewed the debate here, which includes the opinion pages of our local papers.
This morning I found this LTE in support of equal marriage, by none other than Bill Harnsberger, who you all know as Bill in Portland Maine:
If marriage is a sacred religious institution for the coming together of a man and a woman to make babies, how do you explain the atheist couple in their 80s who go to City Hall and get a marriage license without a single religious word spoken between them or the clerk?
The 80-something couple will never produce children and never recognize God.
Yet they are just as legally married as the couple who goes to church five times a day and produces a dozen kids.
And the couple who goes through a religious ceremony in their church but doesn't secure the necessary non-religious marriage license from the government?
They're as legally married as two rocks in the backyard.
Every day in Maine and across the country, straight couples with no intention of procreating get legally married.
Every day, gay couples with children (or who plan to have them via adoption or artificial insemination) get legally married in the seven states where it's allowed.
Every day, couples for whom religion is the furthest thing from their minds, also get legally married.
The world doesn't stop.
Locusts don't swarm.
And it doesn't interfere with anyone else's religion one little bit.
Religious activities, including marriage rites, will continue as they always have.
And no church will ever have to perform a marriage that doesn't conform with its religious views or doctrine.
But a lot of churches will marry gay couples, by the way, and their ceremonies are just as acceptable as those that won't.
Until those condemning same-sex marriage on religious grounds go after non-procreating opposite-sex atheist couples with the same zeal, they have no case except a case for hypocrisy.
The biggest threat to heterosexual marriage is still what it's always been: heterosexual divorce initiated by heterosexuals and sealed with good heterosexual riddance.
Bill Harnsberger
Portland
There is plenty of work to do before November - those wanting to lend a hand can find out how at
Mainers United for Marriage.