Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Ideas have consequences
“If I was a legislator, I would quite simply propose the removal of the word and the concept of marriage from the civil code. ‘Marriage’, an incarnation of religious, sacred and heterosexual values with the accompanying vows of procreation and eternal fidelity, is a concession made by the secular state to the Christian church and in particular its monogamous form which derives neither from Jewish … nor Muslim [traditions]. In suppressing the word and the concept of marriage, this equivocation, this religious hypocrisy which has no place in a secular state, there would be in its place a civil union, something contractual, a sort of generalised civil marriage, improved, refined, flexible and able to be adjusted between partners of whatever sex or number.”
~ Those are the words of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who died recently at the age of 74. It all sounds terribly familiar.
“If I was a legislator, I would quite simply propose the removal of the word and the concept of marriage from the civil code. ‘Marriage’, an incarnation of religious, sacred and heterosexual values with the accompanying vows of procreation and eternal fidelity, is a concession made by the secular state to the Christian church and in particular its monogamous form which derives neither from Jewish … nor Muslim [traditions]. In suppressing the word and the concept of marriage, this equivocation, this religious hypocrisy which has no place in a secular state, there would be in its place a civil union, something contractual, a sort of generalised civil marriage, improved, refined, flexible and able to be adjusted between partners of whatever sex or number.”
~ Those are the words of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who died recently at the age of 74. It all sounds terribly familiar.
