But the thing about American Law is that it treats marriage as a form of contract law, which anyone who has been divorced certainly knows. The sacramental and spiritual aspects were always the purview of your preacher and not of the state. And it is way past time that this government stopped trying to have this business both ways.

What credentials does she need? She has all of the degrees and is accepted in the Library of Congress as a scholar to read original source documentation. You knock her because she writes textbooks for homeschoolers? That book I referred to was not targeted to homeschoolers, but that validates not invalidates her. It shows that she is a respected author. Home school texts tend to be a lot more accurate than Houghton-Mifflin texts for instance.

I also have a problem with the fact that if you read the Congressional record from the time (which I have since I care about original intent), you see that laws were stopped or crafted to reflect an understanding of scripture. One example is the education in the territories. The Congress made sure to send Bibles to the schools because they were necessary to a moral education. Another example is the fact that the 500 lashes for mutiny was reduced to 40 because the Bible forbade more than that as excessive. Sodomy laws in the district are another example.

The Founders are the people who formed the First Congress, were at the Constitutional Convention, and members of the Continental Congress. There are about 250 such leaders. They gave us all of our founding documents, the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. They were an interesting lot as you know (I can tell that you have studied some of their lives from Del Libertarian). They are complicated and thoughtful people. It is also no doubt that like America they were as a group religious. They did not found a secular nation. They founded one which respected religious diversity, not religious exclusion. The Capitol Building served as a Church on Sundays for years.

As for your idea of a “credible source”–Catherine Mallard is a non-academic who writes Christian-oriented books for home schoolers ( http://www.barbsbooks.com/pramhist.html#Rewriting%20of%20America%92s%20History ) seeking “The Hand of God in American History”; given that there are literally millions of writings by Founders extant, your reliance on this superficial study of a few cherry-picked documents is telling.

New Gingrich’s book is accurate in an architectural sense, but completely misleading in terms of who the people were who created the buildings and monuments really were, and conflates them with the Founders. In most cases the people who built those edifices did not even belong to the same generation.

The statement that 95% of the founders were religious people is meaningless, because it does not make a bit of difference to your case. I am religious. I believe in the rights of any adult American citizen to the civil rights of marriage with any other consenting adult.

Does my belief now mean that your only recourse is to tell me that I’m not properly religious?

For a more complete historical discussion of why your long-term analysis of the institution of marriage is faulty, please see

http://delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com/2008/05/few-disturbing-historical-facts-about.html

(All links are dead to insure this gets past geek’s span queue.)

Let me point out that oftentimes in colonial history there was but a single book in a house. That book was the bible. It was readily produced and was a certain best seller. As such, it was an excellent shorthand for allegories and such.

Perhaps, some day, we can all talk about things like good and evil, right and wrong, inherent rights and justice using Harry Potter books, as they are currently in most homes.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all muggles are created equally…

I have a dream… That one day muggles and witches can play together in harmony. That one day a person will be judged by the quality of their character, not the pureness of their magical blood.

I already feel like we have Voldemort running the country.

Newt Gingrich did a great survey of our Capitol in his latest non-fiction book. I am most impressed with the original text information. When Washington said Religion and Morality are indespensible, he was right. Read his farewell address. 95% of the founders were religious people.

So what about parents who have gay children? They should be at the top of your list of threats against the nation. If gay people are going to end civilization as we know it by getting married, lets start imprisoning and sterilizing the parents of gay people, maybe even set up camps where we could keep them captive and do some research and tests on them.

David, I’d love to see credible sources for either of these two statements. Ecclesiastical or canon law calved away from secular civil law, even in western Europe, several hundred years ago.

That the founders cited the Bible 5 times more often than the next source depends entirely on

1) Your definition of a Founder and the period in which that person was writing; and

2) Whether such a study has ever been done (not to my knowledge, and this is a field of speciality) or even COULD BE done. The Founder’s papers and correspondence is not something gathered together in one place on the Net or even published.

In point of fact, when discussing political deliberations over civil law and constitutional issues, the primary “founders” of the period, including Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Mason, or John Adams were far more likely to cite English Common Law precedent; the Magna Carta; Black’s Law Dictionary; and various classical Greek/Roman legal treatises.

If anyone needs this verified, the single best source for what the Founders were reading and quoting is Forrest McDonald’s Novus Ordo Seclorum, The Intellectual Orgins of the Constitution.

I don’t have time to critique either your historical arguments (I already did on FSP and you ignored the post) or your Constitutional arguments, which are neither originalist nor particularly persuasive.

history has proven that all types of people are supprewssed and then over time, the “creed”

ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL ends up winning. Get on board with the winners David your kids will or thier kids willat some point.

Wouldn’t it be better to be the wise person that was able understand a minorities plight then the racist that just bashes them and refuses to accept them as equals…

My argument was not based upon scripture, it is merely consistent with it and that of every major religion. Every major religion is not wrong. That is a bridge to far.