Religion
Arguments on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate are still often made on religious grounds and/or formulated in terms of religious doctrine. One source of controversy is whether same-sex marriage affects freedom of religion. Some religious organizations (citing their religious beliefs) refuse to provide employment, public accommodations, adoption services and other benefits to same-sex couples. Some governments have made special provisions for religious protections within the texts of same-sex marriage laws.
Various religious groups who favor or practise same-sex marriage include Quakers, Episcopalians, the Metropolitan Community Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Church of Canada, Reconstructionist, Liberal, Reform and Conservative Jews, Wiccans, Druids, Unitarian Universalists and Native American religions with a two-spirit tradition. Some smaller religious groups practise or favor it, such as Eckankar, Raelians, New Age movements and Neopagans. Among philisophical movements, the most prominent humanists endorse same-sex marriage.
Read more about this topic: Same-sex Marriage
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing.... Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)