What I am against, is the arbitrary fees that some churches charge for simply having a wedding.
Hard to see freedom in your opinion. Churches should be free to do whatever they want in how others use their building and facilities and what they charge for that privilege. Why they should be treated any different in that regard than anyone else, is curious to say the least.
Why they should be treated differently????
They are tax exempt non-profit orgs. That's pretty different already. If they are profiting from weddings, that kind of weakens their non-profit status claim, doesn't it?
The freedom in my opinion is obvious. Churches are free to choose whether they are non-profit houses of worship or if they are a business (as in, seeking profit). Some of them like to blur the lines and have been getting away with it for decades. We have traditionally given them a pass on that, but it appears that is going to get harder.
Several things come to mind here. For one thing, I've always been against the
government being in the marriage business. Since they don't test for diseases and such anymore, I don't see the point of a marriage license-other than for taxes.
The tax code is so convoluted and effed up it is unreal. Why should married folk get breaks for being hitched? Why should people get to deduct their kids? None of it is fair and none of it makes sense. Sorry for saying the f word. I know most here are against fairness of any kind and the word itself is an anathema to them.
I don't see why the government gets to define marriage in the first place. It's all about money. I couldn't care less if two guys want to get married. I don't believe in it and neither does my Church. The Church shouldn't be forced to marry people they don't believe in marrying. Neither should an individual minister. It begs the question of what happens if a Catholic Priest decides that a hetero couple hasn't done well enough on the class they have to take before getting hitched and refuses to marry
them? If you have to marry homos, why not make them marry heteros where the marriage is bound to fail?
The whole thing is so effed it's insane. It's obvious that real marriage is between a man and a woman, but at the same time, where is it the government's role to define it as such or in any other way? I've long thought that this is what would result by letting the government be in charge of marriage.
I also think there's a misunderstanding of tax exempt status, but maybe it's by me. From what I understood, Churches are organizations, not Ministers. The Church is exempt from taxes but individual Ministers are not. Therefore the Church itself cannot be told what to do on this because it is marrying nobody. When my wife and I got hitched, we paid the Preacher. The Church got nothing. I might have made a donation, but there was no requirement. I don't have any idea if the Preacher would have done it if it was a situation where he knew he wasn't getting paid. But I assume the Preacher reported the income and paid taxes on it.
