The referendum was called by conservative group In the Name of the Family after Croatia's centre-left government drafted a law to let gay couples register as "life partners".
The Catholic church's leaders have urged their followers to vote "yes" in the referendum. Nearly 90% of Croatians are Roman Catholics....
Croatia's liberal president Ivo Josipovic said he would vote against amending the constitution.
"We don't need this kind of a referendum," Josipovic said. "Defining marriage between a man and a woman doesn't belong to the constitution. A nation is judged by its attitude toward minorities."
December 2, 2013
"I will vote against because I think that the referendum is not a festival of democracy, but a festival of oppression against a minority..."
... said one Croation who voted "no" on the question "Do you agree that marriage is matrimony between a man and a woman?" But 65% of Croatians voted yes on the referendum.
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7 comments:
Personally, I think the federal government should get out of the marriage business completely. They should simply recognize/respect valid contracts, whether they come from churches or local governments.
"Let the government certify, and the churches sanctify"
Uh, that's not even close to how a nation is defined. Leftist inanity. When will more people see how silly this stuff is?
The fight is mostly to preserve the word marriage. It's gender specific, loaded with stereotypes and the ways that M/F works and goes wrong.
Nobody cares what you do but we want the word for that.
"We don't need this kind of a referendum," Josipovic said. "Defining marriage between a man and a woman doesn't belong to the constitution. A nation is judged by its attitude toward minorities."
I'm afraid this heuristic needs to be rethought. Who has the authority to judge a nation by its attitude towards minorities? Who picks the minorities who must be treated well? Let me use a grotesque example of a minority whom most people will not treat well. In most societies, pedophiles are a minority of the population? Should we judge a nation by how it respects and caters to its pedophiles? If we do not criticize a nation because it treats pedophiles harshly then the heuristic needs to be modified to state that each minority and its demands on society should be evaluated on a case by case basis, on its own merits and not just because it is a minority?
Democracy is so overrated. Minorities are unrepresentative. That said, the issue is behaviors, and whether they should be normalized, tolerated, or rejected.
Why should homosexual couplets be normalized, while other dysfunctional arrangements be only tolerated or simply rejected? Perhaps a progressive morality will bring enlightenment.
Shouldn't it say, "only between a man and a woman"?
Badly worded referendums are hardly the way to take the pulse of a nation, even of Croatia.
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