EU-DIGEST

Gay people don't need marriage - by Mark Simpson

Miss California, a practizing Christian, was last week denounced by Miss America gay judge Perez Hilton on his blog as "a dumb bitch" and unworthy of the Miss America crown because she gave the "wrong" answer to his chippy question about gay marriage. Like most Americans – including the current Democratic president of the United States – she believes that marriage is "between a man and a woman". Boo! Hiss! Rip her to shreds! President Obama expressed the exact same view during the Presidential Election: "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union. You know, God's in the mix." Of course, instead of being scorned as a bigot and a dumb bitch, Obama was handed the Mr America crown by liberals and probably most gay voters. But I suppose that being president of the United States is a rather less important title than Miss America. Branding Christians and traditionalists "bigots" for being Christians and traditionalists and thus none too keen to fundamentally revise the definition of marriage is a highly unattractive exercise in liberal self-righteousness that makes Miss America look quite sophisticated.

New ways of living and loving require new institutions. Or in the words of the famously unmarried Galilee carpenter and fisher of men: put new wine into new wineskins. And keep the flippin' Pharisees out of it. Or else you'll end up with a tacky mess.Fully-recognized, open-to-all civil unions are a secular institution that helps to shore up a fragile secular society. And make no mistake, it is secularism on which most of the – historically very, very recent – freedoms enjoyed by lesbians and gays are based, along with those of women. Note EU-Digest: If you are Gay or Lesbian and profess to be a believer in the Christian or Muslim faith you better brush up on your Bible and Koran. The bottom line remains, if you can't make babies together or at least try and make it happen as man and a woman, you might be o.k to the secular world, but you ain't doing what you were created for. Even Darwin would have told you so. So dear Gays and Lesbians, go for the civil union, and be happy ever after.

Labels: Gay and Lesbians Community, Marriage, Religion, US

Marriage and General Health - Heart Hazards of Woeful Wives

Women in strained marriages are more likely to feel depressed and suffer high blood pressure, obesity and other signs of "metabolic syndrome," a group of risk factors for heart disease, stroke and diabetes, University of Utah psychologists found. The same study found men in strained marriages also are more likely to feel depressed, yet - unlike women - do not face an increased risk of metabolic syndrome, which is characterized by five symptoms: hypertension, obesity around the waistline, high blood sugar, high triglycerides and low levels of HDL, which is "good cholesterol.""We found this was true for wives in this study, but not for husbands," says Henry, who was scheduled to present the findings Thursday, March 5 in Chicago during the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting. "The gender difference is important because heart disease is the number-one killer of women as well as men, and we are still learning a lot about how relationship factors and emotional distress are related to heart disease," she says.

Labels: Health, Marriage

Married women's cheating hearts beating faster -- having more affairs than ever before - Joel Hood

A study of infidelity sponsored by the National Science Foundation and based at the University of Chicago indicates that the percentage of women who say they have been unfaithful is growing faster than the percentage of men who admit the same. Data collected since 1972 and due to be presented next month at a behavioral studies conference show that 15 percent of women over 60 confessed to having an affair in their lifetime in 2006, compared with 5 percent in 1991. The rate for men over 60 increased from 20 percent to 28 percent.Some suggest modern innovations such as e-mail, cell phones and instant messaging are opening doors to intimacy that didn't exist in the past.

Labels: Infidelity, Marriage

CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM MARRIAGES

Gé Speelman of Utrecht University in the Netherlands spoke on Christian-Muslim marriages during the Graz European Ecumenical Assembly in 1997. By clicking on the above link you can read a shortened version of her paper. The Muslim partner is often confronted with what most people around him think is natural, obvious, self-evident; he/her is the other, the one who has to prove him/her self. Many Muslim partners find they have to defend their faith against attacks which associate Islam with intolerance, backwardness and irrationality. In reaction, many Muslims become very much aware of their cultural and religious heritage. As one Muslim man said: “I would never have known so much about Islam if I had stayed at home and married an Egyptian girl.”

Another factor is that interfaith partners are seen as representatives of their communities. The Turkish Muslim represents the “terrible Turks” who have shaped the history of so many Eastern European countries. The German wife is the “imperialist European” whose community has been responsible for so much repression and bloodshed. Many problems in an interfaith marriage are exactly the same as those experienced by many other couples. But in their case, family and friends are looking out for problems; when they occur, they are defined as arising from differences in culture. A Dutch woman said she did not want to recognize the serious communication problem in her relationship because she was determined to prove to those who said it would never work that her marriage was fantastically successful. The partners had put off talking about their problems until it was too late.

Loved ones want to be more than merely “that Christian”, or “that Muslim”. Of course, they are also “a Christian” and “a Muslim” – much of what we are ties up with our religious traditions. German theologian Ulrich Dietzfelbinger, who described, in a lecture he gave in 1989, his relationship with his Turkish Muslim wife. He describes his tendency to reduce the differences in their beliefs to minor points, the pull to reduce their faith to the lowest common denominator. “After all, we both believe in Almighty God.” In the end, he recognizes that this way of reducing their differences is a way of denying them, leaving both partners with very little faith at all. What he learns is that one should not try to make the other the same as oneself. With new eyes he looks at the doctrine of incarnation. It is strange that God has community with a human being (and therefore with all human beings) in such a way that God is in his/her utmost being qualified by that humanity, while at the same time human beings are not deified and God remains God. Is there not in this strange incarnation something analogous to his marriage, where only love is the guarantor that he respects his partner as being inalienably other, different, and yet at one with himself? Maybe we should just let this question stand.

Labels: Christian, EU, Marriage, Musllim, Religion

Marriage is on the rocks in Great Britain

"The number of couples marrying in Britain has fallen to a record low, official figures have shown. The annual wedding count dropped by more than a tenth last year - the biggest peacetime decline since records began more than a century ago.

The increasingly marginal importance of marriage to millions means that for the first time married people are set to become a minority. The proportion of married people among the adult population is now only a fraction over half at 50.3 per cent. That compares with 54 per cent in 1997 and more than two thirds in the 1970s. Experts blamed the fall on political indifference to marriage, which means there are no longer tax or benefits advantages to getting married."

Labels: Marriage